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Buddhist Causality and Compassion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Wendell C. Beane
Wendell C. Beane
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Religion, Rutgers University
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Extract

Karma and Saṁsāra are ideas common to both Hinduism and Buddhism. They cannot be properly applied to the latter, however, without a critical modification of their significance. For at the heart of Buddhism lies an apparent ethico–metaphysical accountability which implies an ‘agent’ who is accountable; yet the personal existence of such an agent has not been held as philosophically admissible. While a familiar moral emphasis and relative freedom are integral to the faith's dukkha motif, one scarcely exaggerates in saying that ‘perhaps one of the hardest of the Buddhist doctrines is that of Karma’.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , December 1974 , pp. 441 - 456
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

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page 450 note 2 Hudson, H. (‘Buddhist Teaching About Illusion’, Religious Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1971, pp. 147, 148) reminds us that, apart from the elusiveness of the Buddhist dialectic, ‘we are not concerned with a species of metaphysical theology but with a kind of psycho–therapeutical theology’; here, however, not only are we less concerned about our use of the word ‘metaphysics’ than the term ‘theology’, but we are most doubtful about the feasibility of the Buddhist logicians’ attempt to harmonise both a basic ‘theory of elements’ and a ‘psycho–therapeutical’ process which includes an almost universally traditional, personal experience (= com–pathos) into a coherent religious philosophy. Whether those logicians accept it or not, even a view of transpersonal consciousness that purports to use a dialectical mirage in order to explode the traditional reasoning–categories of other religious systems as a precondition for Nirvāna, ultimately subjects itself to the ‘burden’ of an implicit, however non-traditional (world-) view (i.e., a Buddhist darśana).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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