Book Review Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation

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Book Review Imagining Karma： Ethical Transformation

by Gananath Obeyesekere

Reviewed by Nick Allen

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University， H-Buddhism

H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online

October, 2003

Copyright 2003 by H-Net

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Reincarnation

Although the word does not appear in the title, this is a book about reincarnation. The approach is explicitly likened to that of early Levi-Strauss: a model or ideal type is set up analogous to an elementary structure of kinship, and empirical materials from a good
number of cultures are presented as transformations of the model. Since the approach is primarily structuralist, the transformations are seen more as typological than historical although, as in Levi-Strauss, questions of origin and world history cannot be altogether eliminated. Thus in the small-scale societies the tendency is for a deceased individual to reincarnate as a new-born member of the same kin group, while in the larger-scale archaic literate civilizations one's next birth tends to be a function of moral behavior in the present life. The central instance of this is the doctrine of karma, familiar to the author not only from his own cultural roots in Sri Lankan Buddhism but also from his previous studies of that religion.

Among the small-scale societies, attention is focused on several from West Africa and Northwest America, on the Inuit and on the Trobrianders. In the south Asian tradition we read not only about Theravada Buddhists but also about the Vedic/Upanishadic Hindu background from which Buddhism emerged, and about other reincarnation doctrines, notably Jain, Ajivika, and Balinese. From the Greek world, with admirable intrepidity, the author explores the fragmentary texts that survive from a number of sources:
Empedocles, Pythagoras, Pindar, Plato, and the Orphics, then Plotinus the neo-Platonist, with his curious offshoots on the fringes of Islam--the Druze and related Ismaili groups.

A useful conceptual tool is the distinction between two modes of "ethicization" (the author's word). In stage 1 it is the other world that is split or polarized so that in the simplest case one's good or bad behavior sends one at death to heaven or hell. In stage 2 it is the locus of rebirth that is affected: the fruits of behavior in a previous life carry one to a more desirable or less desirable reincarnation. Using the basic scheme and these two transformations, humanity has devised innumerable variations. These can bear, for instance, on the nature of the other world, the process of reaching it, the soul or whatever it is that cycles to and fro between the worlds, the mechanisms or divinities that govern the process, the possibility of escaping from it (to nirvana or the like), and methods of gaining knowledge about past or future reincarnations. One important variation concerns the range of beings into which one can reincarnate--the kin group, the society, animals (including insects), and even plants. Considerable attention is given to the relation between reincarnation in animals and vegetarianism (ahimsa in India)--as well as to "endoanthropophagy" (i.e., endocannibalism).

Like any study, this one has its limitations. More attention might have been given to the history of reincarnation studies. Thus Marcel Mauss commented in 1906: "There exists an enormous group of societies, Negro, Malayo-Polynesian, Amerindian (Sioux, Algonquin, Iroquois, Pueblo, North-Western), Eskimo, Australian, where the system of reincarnation of the deceased and inheritance of the individual name within the family or clan is the rule."[1] Obeyesekere makes it clear that he is not aiming for a thorough sampling of societies with reincarnation beliefs, but the passage (cited by Levy-Bruhl in his best-known book, as well as in recent Anglophone work on Mauss),[2] shows that the phenomenon is even more widely distributed, and hence more important, than is here made apparent (moreover the list should certainly include South American Amerindians). Similarly as regards ethicisation: brief references are made to Axial Age theory, but the idea can be traced back at least to Tylor, and Hocart talks in the same vein of "spiritualizing."[3]

Since he disavows interest in origins, the author naturally avoids questions about the link between reincarnation and tribal kinship systems. However, it can be argued that the simplest logically possible kinship systems make ego the successor not of a parent but of a grandparent, real or classificatory, and it is interesting how often ethnographers mention that ego reincarnates a member of the grandparental generation. A more contentious issue is how to explain the similarities between ancient Greece and India. The usual answer is by a combination of independent parallel invention and influences of the East on the West. However, evidence is beginning to accumulate from comparative studies on Greek and Indian epic that some similarities are due to common origin--the negative evidence from the early Vedas does not rule this out. If so, it is possible that the history of reincarnation beliefs in the Indo-European world is longer than has been supposed. It is certainly an open question how far one can go in understanding early Indian and Greek world views without taking account of the light that can be shed on them by Indo-European cultural comparativism (mentioned here only obliquely, in a quotation from Nietzsche).

Another line of thought comes from Obeyesekere's basic model, whose essence has not changed since 1980.[4] The path of the soul is shown in the model as a circle bisected by a horizontal line separating this world from the other world; the circle is traced anticlockwise, passing from birth on the left to death on the right, so that the other world forms the upper half of the diagram. This choice of orientation is not discussed, but it could perhaps introduce bias or close off useful insights. For instance, it would be just as logical to draw the circle clockwise, thereby putting this world above the horizontal line and the other world below (i.e., showing it as Hades rather than Heaven). The diagram could then serve to show not only the path of the soul but also that of the sun: the soul's invisible passage through the other world from death to rebirth would correspond to the sun's invisible nocturnal passage behind or under the world, from its setting in the west to its rising in the east. Such macrocosm-microcosm thinking, which would correlate or put in parallel the sun's course from day to day and the soul's course from life to life, seems to me the sort of phenomenon one might well look for in India, especially given that Vedic Vivasvat, the Sun, last-born of the goddess Aditi, is father of Yama, the first mortal. But my main point (familiar to kinship theorists) is that the choices embodied in a diagram may be far from trivial.

So there is plenty here that can be built on. This is a serious and useful comparative study of just the sort that anthropology needs to undertake in order to fulfil its vocation and justify its grander claims.

Notes

[1]. Marcel Mauss, "Review of A. Dieterich, Mutter Erde," reprinted in Mauss's _Oeuvres_, vol. 2 (Paris: Minuit, 1969), pp. 135-139.
[2]. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, _How Natives Think_, trans. Lilian A. Clare (Princeton and Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1985; orig. 1910), pp. 338-339; and N. J. Allen, _Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social_ (Oxford:
Berghahn, 2000), p. 26.
[3]. Edward Burnett Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, vol. 2 (London: Murray, 1873), p. 187; and A. M. Hocart, _Kings and Councillors_
(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1970; orig. 1936), p. 78.
[4]. Gananath Obeyesekere, "The Rebirth Eschatology and Its Transformations: A Contribution to the Sociology of Early Buddhism," in _Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions_, ed. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 144. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
elf
by Gereon Kopf， Reviewed by Steven Heine
Florida International University， H-Buddhism
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online

December, 2003
Copyright 2003 by H-Net

Beyond Personal Identity_ is in many ways a brilliant work of comparative philosophy that does an outstanding job in taking on the challenge of relating the complex thought of Japanese giants Dougen and Nishida to various Western conceptions of the person. Kopf succeeds in developing his own philosophical approach to the main issues of nonduality and present-oriented self-awareness, while staying true to the respective thinkers involved in the examination. He is clearly bucking recent trends in the field of Buddhist studies that have emphasized increasingly social-historical methods, but has pulled off a major coup by adhering to his vision of the role of scholarship.

Along with Dan Lusthaus's _Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch'eng Wei-Shih Lun_ (Curzon, 2003), which deconstructs the issue of idealism, this work goes a long way toward rehabilitating philosophical approaches to Buddhist doctrine by analyzing text as text rather than trying to relate--and in some cases reduce--text to a reflection or expression of its reconstructed context. At the same time, Kopf's work, understandably as it is his first book, has some basic limitations which I will address with constructive criticism.

The main value of this book is that it takes the reader on a fascinating journey through a wide variety of Western and Buddhist notions of what constitutes the person and their relation to the world.

Kopf's "theory of personal identity investigates three central questions: How is it possible to identify a person (myself and others) as an individual human being? How is it possible to distinguish between two individual persons? What guarantees the constancy and identity of an individual person over time?" (p. 7). Chapter 1 is primarily dedicated to critiquing Western notions that have substantialist implications, either deliberately and directly or indirectly in an embedded fashion by favoring an essentialist view that personal identity persists over time. Here Kopf demonstrates a mastery of contemporary philosophical materials and of how to examine them critically.

The four chapters in part 2 of the book simultaneously unveil Kopf's theory of the tri-partite structure of the person--selfhood, otherness, and continuity--and the reasons why he considers that Dougen and Nishida do overcome the flaws and lacunae in Western views of a false sense of constancy. The reason for the fourth chapter (chapter 5) is that Kopf goes into more depth on the third part of the structure, that is, the matter of how the person seems to maintain its identity over a prolonged period, by

dividing this into the issues of "continuity of experience" and temporality." In each chapter, he makes it clear how Dougen and Nishida appropriate the basic Buddhist doctrines of no-self, dependent origination, and impermanence in formulating their unique perspectives. He convincingly shows that Dougen's notion of the dharma-stage (_juu-houi_) as articulated in "Genjoukouan" and Nishida's notion of the discontinuity of continuity stake out the distinctive Zen view. According to Kopf, "the Zen Buddhist notion of immediate now and non-relative present should not be mistaken for a merely atemporal oneness, which melts all individual time-moments into an undifferentiated oneness, but rather as the dialectic of linear temporality and mystical atemporality" (p. 198).

In part 3 Kopf fleshes out the meaning of the Zen phenomenology of temporal existence as the central component of a philosophy of personal identity--or, rather, of trans-personal non-essentialist experience--by providing a highly original interpretation of Dougen's doctrines of the "presencing" (_genjou_) of "total-working" (_zenki_) in light of Nishida's paradox or self-contradictory identity of "walking eastward by walking westward." He concludes with a fascinating comparison of Derek Parfit's survivalist philosophy, which represents a Western approach to present-oriented experience, with the Zen view that "the experiential 'I' discovers in its process of self-awakening that it does not emerge as an isolated existence but that it is existentially embedded in the trans-subjective infrastructure of the cosmos, which is expressed in the present event" (p. 260).

The accomplishments of _Beyond Personal Identity_ are considerable, but the limitations of Kopf's writing and method are also apparent in two main areas. I offer these comments not to diminish an overall appraisal of the work but to point out directions that I feel would enhance his future publications.

The first area of criticism is that Kopf's style is often wordy, repetitive, and jargon-laden to the point that the reader cannot help but be distracted from trying to follow the main argument. For example, I found table 1 (p. 81) very helpful in providing a summary of seven items dealing with the topic of selfhood, but when I first read table 2 (p. 122) dealing with otherness and table 3 (p. 201) dealing with time, I thought there must have been a misprint because they all looked identical. Then I realized that in the second and third tables exactly one new item was added (though not highlighted) on each occasion, and this called to my attention an overall frustration with the book.

Furthermore, while the exploration of diverse philosophical perspectives is admirable, Kopf trots out so many different conceptual templates that they end up piling on top of each other. The author tends not to break free of them and does not quite manage to formulate a meta-language that is used consistently and effectively throughout the book. I am reminded of a review of a novel by 2003 Nobel laureate for literature J. M. Coetzee, of which it is said, "[an] imaginary 17th-century writer is protesting against scientific abstractions, and asking what place there is for poetry in a world of cience. He argues that there is a need for a new language, closer to nature. As yet he can find no language for the revelations he gets from ordinary things."[1]

The second area of criticism has to do with the treatment of the writings of Dougen and Nishida. For the most part, Kopf's analysis is limited to a relative handful of already well-known passages from both thinkers. One exception is that he engages a relatively obscure passage from Dougen's "Sansuikyou," which makes a distinction between "people outside the ountains" (which Kopf equates with delusion) and "people inside the mountains" (which is equated with realization). However, I am not convinced that the source sufficiently upholds what Kopf makes out of this or that Kopf clarifies the passage in relation to the otherwise insightful distinction he suggests between habitual and genuinely realizational self-awareness. In addition, I understand that in doing philosophy, Kopf is probably not interested in the intellectual historical venture of exploring ways in which Nishida was influenced by Dougen by looking at his journal entries, for example. Yet, it seems that he could have done more to examine critically the relation between the philosophical implications of the two thinkers, who otherwise blur and blend too easily into oneness.

Nevertheless, Kopf's book will stand as one of the most original attempts to find the intersections between medieval and modern Japanese thought as well as between East Asian and Western philosophies of selfhood.

Note

[1]. Hermione Lee, review of J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello , The Guardian (August 30, 2003). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.