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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
The Karma doctrine in its Brahmanistic form teaches that every individual in successive existences reaps the fruit of ignorance and desire as these were expressed in action performed in antecedent existences. As a man himself sows, so he himself reaps; no man inherits the good or evil act of another man: nā ’yam parasya sukṛtaṁ duṣkṛtaṁ.cā ’pisevate (Mbh. xii, 291, 22). The fruit is of the same quality with the action, and good or bad there is no destruction of the action:. na tu nāśo
ya vidyate. The result is exactly as when just retribution follows a wrong; there can be no cessation till the account is squared: ubhayaṁ tat samībhūtam. Whether “with eye or thought or voice or deed, whatever kind of act one performs, one receives that kind of act in return”: kurute (v.l. karoti) yādṛsaṁ karma tādṛśam pratipadyate (ib. 16, 22; cf. 139, 24).
page 582 note 1 The doctrine of metempsychosis, without ethical bearing, has no necessary connection with ante-natal action, and this, transmigration pure and simple, was an older belief than that in hell. Karma itself merely implies the fruit of action, and that fruit may be in terms of metempsychosis or in terms of hell or of both. Compare the Aṅguttara Nik., iii, 99, on hell or rebirth, as alternatives.
page 584 note 1 That is, a curse may take effect at once, an injury be thus punished in the present existence; but (usually) a curse changes the next state of existence, as when Sāudāsa, King of Kosala, is changed into a cannibal monster at the curse of a great seer (Mbh. xiii, 6, 32).
page 584 note 1 The commentator understands karmaphalam ‘ the fruit of acts,’ to be meant, and this is supported by the varied reading: bhāryāi ’kā patibhāgyāni bhuṅkte patiparāyaṇā pretya cāi ’ve ’ha, “ here and hereafter the faithful wife enjoys her husband's lot.”
page 585 note 1 Warren, “ Buddhism in Translations,” p. 396 f.
page 590 note 1 Compare, in the continuation of the first selection, the seer's words, which express the punishment to be meted out to the king in this particular instance : tyakṣyāmi tvāṁ sabāndhavam (i, 80, 5).
page 591 note 1 This case is as follows : a bird revenges itself on a prince who has killed its young by picking out the prince's eyes, remarking that an instantaneous punishment comes to evil-doers in the shape of revenge, but that this revenge squares the account. If unavenged at once, the evil fruit will appear in a subsequent sgeneration.
page 591 note 2 In the first passage cited above the sage receives a good world as a gift, or if ashamed to do this may “ buy it for a straw,” but in xiii, 6, 30, it is said, “ Of old, Yayāti, fallen to earth, ascended to heaven again by virtue of his descendants’ good works ” (punar āropitaḥ svargaṁ dāuhitrāiḥ puṇyakarmabhiḥ).
page 592 note 1 Or, v.l., vā.
page 593 note 1 There are other forms of this stanza with slight variations. It occurs several times in the pseudo-epic besides the places here cited.
page 592 note 2 As a kind of modification may also be regarded the quasi personification of Karma, as if it were a shadowy person pursuing a man. In Brahmanism this conception is common. In Buddhism an illustration will be found in the introduction to the Sarabhaṅga Jātaka, No. 522, where the lurking Deed waits long to catch a man, and finally, in his last birth, “ seizes its opportunity,” okāsam labhi (or labhati), and deprives him of magical power. On the barter of Karma as a price, in poetical metaphor, see Professor Rhys Davids on the Questions of Milinda, v, 6. Poetic fancy also suggests that even a manufactured article may suffer because of its demerit (Śak., p. 84).