first of all prescriptions about how to treat others, but rather prescriptions
for how to treat your own mind in meditation so that you become the kind
of moral person that the tradition envisioned. While it may be very good
for you, having done a good deed, to humble yourself in meditation on it
by picturing yourself giving the merit of that act to others, it is not good
for you to misunderstand the moral enterprise by reifying the terms and
processes operative within it. What kind of magical or supernatural entity
would karma have to be to make such a gift of merit make sense? Focusing
so intently on your own moral merit, it is also inevitable that you come
to realize that donating your merit to another is itself a really good and
generous act, one that can’t help but win you lots of good merit.
What began as a way to drop the meritorious self from consideration,
ends up slipping it in through the back door in such a way that the entire
specter of merit transfer becomes yet another way to picture yourself
as deserving of merit. When seen from the outside, this is doubly problematic,
because the one to whom you are supposedly being generous, in
fact, gets nothing because, after all, this is mental exercise, while you picture
yourself doubling your own merit, thereby cultivating exactly the pride
and self-satisfaction that you wanted to overcome. If the end pursued is
understood in terms of humility and unselfishness, entangling yourself in a
mental economy of merit calculation and exchange is not likely to be effective.
The practices of merit transfer just fit too smoothly into old habits
of self-concern, and all too readily block the development of kinds of selflessness
envisioned in the bodhisattva ideal. The literal and highly reified
conception of karma often presupposed in the practices of merit transfer are
philosophically problematic, as well as counterproductive to the effort to
understand karma as a viable possibility for contemporary ethics.
There are a variety of ways in which an individualized concept of karma
continues to perpetuate itself in spite of a wealth of ideas in the Buddhist
tradition that would mitigate against it. The basic ideas of impermanence,
dependent origination, no self, and later extensions of these ideas such as
emptiness are prominent among them. But all of these ideas run aground on
the concept of rebirth, and it is there that karma is most problematic. All
four critical questions raised in this paper about karma derive their impact
from the association that karma has with rebirth.
The question of rebirth and afterlife is as complicated as it is interesting,
and therefore not one that I’ll take up in this setting. But let me simply
indicate the direction philosophical questioning on this issue might take —
just two points. First, if this really is an open question about what happens
to people after they die, then we would expect that evidence will need to
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