the future beyond our personal lives. Personal anxieties about death are a
powerful force in the mind, so strong that they can prevent other impersonal
and trans-individual conceptions from rising to the cultural surface.
The line of thinking that began to develop most explicitly in early Mahayana
texts, which imagined complex interrelations among individuals, recognized
that the consequences of any act in the world could not be easily
localized and isolated, and that effects radiate out from causes in an ultimately
uncontainable fashion, rendering lines of partition between selves
and between all entities in the world significantly more porous and malleable
than we tend to assume. Expanding the image of the Bodhisattva,
Buddhists began to see how lines of influence and outcome co-mingle, along
family lines and among friends, co-workers, and co-citizens, such that the future
for others arises dependent in part upon my acts, and I arise dependent
in part upon the shaping powers of the accumulating culture around me.
This type of thinking, based heavily on the expanding meaning of dependent
origination, was forcefully present in several dimensions of Buddhist
ethics. My suspicion, however, is that we have yet to see the development of
this aspect of Buddhism to the extent of its potential, and that it has been
continually redirected by what must have seemed more pressing questions
about individual destiny.
As an example of a possible pattern of redirection, consider the development
of merit transfer, the idea that one might give the rewards from
one of your own good acts to another person whose karmic status might
be in greater jeopardy. Mahayana Buddhists were, of course, particularly
attracted to this idea; they sought ways to develop an unselfish concern for
the spiritual welfare of all sentient beings, and focused intently on methods
enabling them to get out from under the self-centered implications of a personal
spiritual quest. The idea that they could pursue the good in their own
quest, and then in a compassionate and unselfish meditative gesture, contemplate
giving to others whatever good had resulted from that act, seemed
an excellent middle path between selfish personal quests and compassion for
others. But one effect of this teaching was that it tended to picture the
karma or the goodness of an act as a self-enclosed package that was theirs
alone, and that could be generously given away at some later point if circumstances
warranted. As a meditative device used to prevent individuals
from coveting and hoarding their own spiritual merit, this may on occasion
have been effective. But a problem looms when a skillful meditative device
is taken out of that contemplative setting of mental self-cultivation and
treated as a picture of what really does happen when we do good things.
It is important to remember that many Buddhist moral teachings are not