Sorting Out Karma

What Do Actions Have to Do with Moral Consequences?

I want to be confident there can be accountability for human actions, particularly those that warrant our attention because they involve the rights of all to live with dignity, in freedom, and with the security that promises more choice and far less fear. Is it cynical to think that the rich and powerful will ever remain beyond the reach of the law or, in truth, any kind of answerability for their actions?

While the American Experiment claims some notion of equality under the law, our history belies with facts to expose our hypocrisies and failures. To those who delegate accountability to the supernatural, I protest. I find this entirely unsatisfactory. I need to see, before my very eyes, consequences and, dare I say, justice.

My call here is to address at least four different matters: actions, outcomes, consequences, and justice. I think the yoga traditions can help us sort these out not because they add all the needed clarity but because they too have been as disconcerted and often as confused as we all have when it comes to sorting out what is karma.

It is not until the period of the early Upanisads (c. 770BCE) that “karma” takes on the quality of a principle, a “law” of the universe that operates autonomously. The simpler meaning, that karma means action of every sort and then ritual action is never wholly forsaken by later interpreters. Karma means that the world that is, does.

[Disclaimer: if this next paragraph gets you all looking up and to the left, feeling slightly bewildered or, worse, disinterested, I implore you to shake it off and carry on. I really do think the rest is worth your time.]

In Sanskrit, it’s said that all nominals originate as verbal roots and that every verbal root has at least three meanings. First, the verbal root will mean whatever it does---to shine, to play, whatever it does---this is elemental and a root may carry more than one meaning. But then, no matter what, the verb also means to do and to go. Doing is Being (sing along here if you like: do be do be do…) and our doing is also always going somewhere, which means some kind of ‘from and to,’ ‘towards or away,’ and therefore implies some difference between where we are and where we will land. That difference can be no difference at all but let’s not lose the point: the world not only acts but is action itself, forming as it goes. Actions entail outcomes (i.e., where the difference lands) and consequences (i.e., how it changes the situation). When you add this up it makes for three kinds of events. Actions have their own integrity. Outcomes are actions on the move. Consequences are the changes or differences that can be noticed. The world is a verb and so are we. Let’s think about that as we get back to our story.

In Vedic worlds, karma refers to actions but principally to actions that can produce repeatable, efficacious results---to wit, recipes with substances, algorithms meant to create specific outcomes, and behaviors that provide leverage over other possibilities not desired. Karma in the Veda means ritual action. That such formulaic actions (i.e., self-conscious “rituals”) may not manifest the stated result led to innovative explanations meant to prove the rituals themselves to be infallible. Ritual actions, as far as the Vedic Ritualist is concerned, can’t fail because they are based on a claim of infallible knowledge (provided by their resource, i.e., the Veda which is beyond any such reproach). It’s important to see this as more than a religious assertion---though it will come down to that, not a belief but instead a theory about truth and their claim of access to truth.

The Vedic Ritualists began with the claim that truth is not a human invention but rather a feature of the universe as it exists: what exists (sat) is the truth (satya). That’s no coincidence in words, satya (truth) is existent (sat) because what exists can be known. Their idea is that “the knowing” (veda) is not a contrivance or convention of human experience or a mere language game, but rather we can know. How the Veda provides and manifests such incontrovertible knowing is a complex matter they mean to explain (and we will not, at least not here and now.)

What may have begun as experiments with truth-making in which results could lead to revisions and reconsiderations gave way to the dogmatic belief that their prescriptions could be neither doubted nor disproven. In effect, what could have been a science experiment was turned into a religious assertion. This became the favored position of the Ritualists (aka Purva Mimamsa school) with whom all others must contend but gratefully few need admit allegiance.

Still, it seems clear that what people want to happen often overtakes their willingness to admit what does (or doesn’t) happen. The Ritualists apparently needed the experience that actions not only have their own integrity but provide outcomes, consequences, and accountability. They saw their rituals as proven, not performed as experiments to discover (or even uncover) truth but as evidence for the truth (satya) that exists (sat).

What we need to gather from this is that our Ritualists were interested principally in the truth as they saw it existing from inside their matrix and not the moral value of the actions or their meaning. Things happen, we can map that process, repeat with efficacy to produce results, and that is what makes them true. What the actions mean is not to be confused with the actions, outcomes, consequences, or accountability.

The reason the Ritualists remained relevant was not for their peculiar explanations but in their determination to distinguish efficacy from meaning. Things matter because they happen, no matter what we think or feel or understand about them. This idea---that actions make for causes, produce effects, and bear consequences with or without our attentions or attributions of meaning---strikes me as worthy of continued reflection. More about this at the conclusion.

In the Ritualist Mimamsaka’s view, the failure to produce a desired ritual outcome is either a matter of poor execution (you botched the recipe) or a misunderstanding of the results which are claimed to have happened though remain unseen (apūrva). If the ritual protagonist (yajamana) goes home, fire pots in hand having been promised heaven (svarga), well, he’ll just have to wait--- ‘cause it’s going to (or has in fact already!) happened. The ritual itself cannot fail because it is not an experiment with truth so much as it is a representation of the truth. In other words, the actions are speaking for themselves and what we experience is another matter altogether. What we make of actions as a matter of feeling or justice or any evaluation is not to be conflated with what the universe has on offer when we act.

It’s fair to say that the majority of other Hindu philosophers did not much countenance this interpretation, preferring instead a more evidenced-based explanation for actions and consequences. As F. Staal once put it, “Hindus resort to the unseen only under duress,” though we must then account for all sorts of beliefs and actions in which the evidence for outcomes is somehow deferred. What the later ‘law of karma’ theorists maintain is that the consequences will have consequences, which is where they step into a moralizing view of actions.

“Good” actions, “bad” actions, all actions are not merely consequential, they will necessarily have ethical purport and eventual valence.

What could have been a description of causes and effects instead became a mode of moral assessment, a way of assigning rewards and punishments to actions that might otherwise been viewed neutrally for being merely true. What the cosmos naturally distributes becomes a paradigm for what culture uses to ascribe meaning: actions are endowed not only with moral implications but are themselves invested with morality.

Our friends the Buddhists are at the forefront of moralizing karma despite the irony in their declarations that actions, like all things, have no innate qualities but exist merely in relationships as such. Nonetheless, the moral consequences of actions are used to charge the world with powerful attributions of meaning. Actions matter not only because of what occurs but because those occurrences possess their own moral accreditation. Things are good and bad because things are morally-vested-actions. This is the new standard of karma.

By the time we get to the Bhagavadgita (let’s call that 2^ndBCE though the dates matter little), Hindus too have made the leap from actions-have-consequences to actions-are- ethically-endowed events. Much of the remaining centuries worth of discussion about karma begins with the notion that actions are for better and for worse, not only because we assess the value of actions but also because actions are values. Some will maintain that there is no further reason to ask why bad things happen to good people since that is the self-evident result of karma being karma. Rather, by understanding karma on its terms our moral responsibility is to accept consequences to move karma forward.

There’s also here a kind of revisionist version of the Ritualist’s apurva doctrine---that consequences yet unseen are present now or will manifest more vividly. However, that promise of future consequences now also comes with threat or dividend. Our actions will bear fruits (phala), some tasty, some rotten. How we regard those results is matter for yoga to sort out further. Accountability needs no further enforcement but karma itself, just as the non-personal actions of the Ritualist procures results as their truth.

That the actions themselves are morally-meaningful is the newer spin---the post-Ritualist interpretation of karma--- and so with this idea must come the significance of intentions and judgments that are not so much rendered as they are to be received. Just how this makes us responsible for past karmas without the empowering capacity to emend them for better is another matter. Karma makes us what we are. We can only pay forward having received the information. That’s the most recognizable ‘law of karma’ that all agree is operative.

There may (or may not) be a god (or some other agency) who can further leverage karmic consequences but there is not much further conversation of an amoral universe in which actions are ethically nonaligned. In other words, what if the universe acts but without any moral value, intention, purpose, or goal. What if the determinations of karma don’t require any such ethical premise regarding their innate value even if we produce ethical evaluations. Does the universe of karma have morality or is that our responsibility?

It is here that my own teacher took issue with the traditional ideas about karma---that actions past, present, and of future consequence possess moral valency. What if the morality of actions and their accountability can’t be outsourced to karma but must be made by human determinations---because karma can only tell us what happens.]

If we humans believe certain actions are right or wrong---and we do and we should---then the responsibility for such actions belongs to us, to the society that must also decide for those values. The values belong to the actions only in ways in which we endow words with meanings (and in a nod to the grammarians above, to their roots).

Karma in the traditionalist sense no longer provides the moral foundation we might wish but instead functions as another bypass. We might want the universe to be morally founded in action but if it is not then it’s going to be entirely up to us. We must be accountable to the meaning of actions, our evaluations, our interpretations, our decisions.

The Ritualists were on to something: actions do not provide meaning but only results. The later traditionalists then can’t seem to help themselves: they insist that karma’s moral value is not a human projection or invention, not a humane choice but a feature of the universe’s own power for moral determination. The traditionalist wants karma to be responsible for accounting and provide a kind of cosmic consolation. If justice does not appear now, well, karma: consequences will come by karma.

But what if that will not do.

If there is to be moral accountability, we might have to reclaim the human responsibility to define our values, make the determinations, and decide for ourselves the meaning of actions. A humanist karma doesn’t mean we aren’t made from the consequences of our actions. Rather, it means we are responsible parties when it comes to acting upon meaning, value, and accountability. The burdens of karma are not only what we receive from our actions, they redound to the necessity that comes when we are willing to bear their responsibility.