Introduction :
Sakyong Mipham metaphorically and very aptly explained what many religious leaders and philosophers have been debating about for more than the past two millenia.
“Like gravity, Karma is so basic we often don't even notice it.”
Karma is a Sanskrit word which means ‘Action’ or ‘Deed’. This simple word has been dissected and explained by hundreds of philosophers over millions of pages and billions of words. The most popular proponent of Karma was Lord Krishna. His teaching is more popularly known as :
“Karma karo, phal ki icchaa chod do.”
“Act. Do not be attached to the fruit of your action.”
The text of Lord Krishna, more popularly know as Bhagawad Gita, forms a part of the largest Epic in the world, The Mahabharata. For the curious, this Epic is several times the size of Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey combined. The depth in meaning has been said to be so profound and cryptic that no single interpretation can be agreed upon by scholars even today.
In fact Newton’s laws of motion are also saying exactly the same thing. The commonality with Newton is not the fruit, apple, which led him to discover gravity. What Newton proposed, or rather discovered, was that :
“Every action has a … reaction.”
Although he used many more words in his three laws which were supported by even more formulae (which to a certain extent have needed to be changed), what has been summarised in the five words above is all we need in the present essay.
More recently, Amartya Sen has continued this very discussion in his paper “Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason.”
In this essay, I would like to discuss that portion of Lord Krishna’s, Newton’s and Sen’s thoughts which I feel would be and is relevant to us - the people living an inhuman and barbarious life in the 21st Century.
War and Defeat :
What better way to discuss about Karma, then to speak about the very place where it all started - the battlefield. For the ones not familiar with the Indian Epic, Lord Krishna, believed to be an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, spoke words of guidance to the army general and price Arjuna at the beginning of the epic war. These words of philosophy are now recorded separately as the Bhagawad Gita.
The wisdom in the words of the Bhagawad Gita cannot be doubted but in the context of this essay I prefer to agree more with Sun Tzu who says :
“To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
This is very similar to what the Japanese General said on being commended on his brilliant insight, strategy and implementation after the successful Pear Harbour attack :
“A truly brilliant man would have thought on how NOT to wage a war.”
Unfortunately ‘non-war-waging’ brilliant men are soon forgotten as they do not make history and more importantly they do not add up to any numbers. As Stalin said :
“A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic.”
So the ‘apparently’ brilliant men bring to us Wars and we are sometimes even thankful to them for this. We shall specifically discuss over here the US - Japan equation in WWII. More specifically we shall discuss the bombing of the twin nuclear bombs Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which on impact and in subsequent years killed about 200,000 people.
In earlier times wars were fought by codes. The wars in Indian princely states, including the Mahabharata mentioned above were only fought during day time. Once the sun had set, everyone went off to sleep and attend to the wounded. Wars in most Islamic states were avoided in the holy month of Ramzan. Even school fights have rules like, for instance, no kicking in the nuts. More importantly, wars never targeted civilians. Wars were fought on the battlefield. Technology changed all that. (I always remember to thank God for making me technologically challenged). Now civilians are part of the ‘statistic’.
There was another important change in WWII. This was the use of WMDs - Weapons of Mass destruction. Not like the ones which were not found in Iraq. These were the real things. Nuclear. The ones which first suck the life out of the body and then suck out the body from this world. Fortunately, in most cases it happens together in an instance, before we can realise the pain. For that we need to thank its makers.
The success of these WMDs was so huge that every Government with the means to have them have them. And so many of them. And more powerful than the Little Boy and Fat Man. And since a couple of them may not be enough to end the next war, may be the military ‘thought’ (and I thought they were trained only to fight and not to think) that they needed to have a couple of hundred of these ‘mean things’.
What shall we say is the outcome of WWII? Some would say the Allies won. Some would say the Holocaust ended. Some would say the right people won. Unfortunately, WWII gave to the ‘mean people’ a practical demonstration of a weapon that could wipe out our entire civilization. Reminds me of the old Swahili saying :
When two elephants struggle, it is the grass that suffers.
The outcome of this WW if you ask me is fortunately yet to be seen by us. Or should I say that the outcome is yet to be ‘felt’ by us.
Maybe Newton was correct when he said that “Every action has an … opposite reaction.”
Consequential Evaluation : (Please skip this part if you do not want to stress your mind)
Can we really blame the war strategists? Are we any different? How many times are we really ready to bear the the near term difficulties and act for a longer-term solution and a longer-term good?
Amartya Sen explains very correctly that a ‘good starting point for (any) analysis, is the need to take responsibility for the consequences of one’s choice.’ My philosophy teacher would have called it ‘consequence-based-deontology’. Deontology is that branch of philosophy by which one can avoid the painful root-canals. That is what I too thought at first. But deontology is actually that branch of philosophy that is concerned with ethics, duty, moral obligation and the right action. This is that part of the meeting where most strategists (war or otherwise) tend to doze off.
We are not war strategists (unless we consider marriage to be some kind of war) but most of us are parents. And this is where there is a demand for evaluation. Consider the selection of the baby’s food. Is it harmful for our child? Is a trade-off between what is commonly followed by our peers and what is beneficial to our child such a huge dilemma? And we may really feel that there is no difference between the two, but when we really start to ‘look’ around we can see our ignorance and the consequence it is going to have on our child.
Sen remarks that such theoretical arguments may take us even to the argument of maximization. Whether we have considered every possible alternative before arriving at any decision (since the child cannot remain hungry till we decide on the best possible alternative). But he clarifies here that ‘maximization’ would be better described as ‘optimization’.
Lord Krishna’s Karma Yoga :
In the Bhagawad Gita, Lord Krishna says :
“Your right is to work only and never to the fruit thereof.......nor let your attachment be to inaction.” /2.48/
Several western indologists have translated the Sanskrit text verbatim and hence lost out on either the intended meaning or the context of reference or in some cases both. The message of the Bhagawad Gita is that firstly, any Work (Karma) should not be carried out to achieve any selfish motive. And secondly, it goes on to say there should be no attachment whatsoever with the fruit thereof.
Nowhere does he say or mean that the action should be independent of the consequence. There should be every responsibility attached to one’s action. A ‘selfless act having no expectation of its fruit’ which is the true meaning of Karma Yoga should not be equated to a ‘consequence-independent act’.
Right to do Wrong :
The question we always ‘wrongly’ ask ourselves before taking any action (Karma) is about our Rights. Think about this for a moment. Consciously or not, this is what we have been doing for the past several years.
‘This is my Right.’
‘Ofcourse, I have a Right to do this.’
‘I have the Freedom to do as I please.’
Why are the words ‘responsibility’ and ‘obligation’ never part of the question?
Why does the equation Responsibility > Rights sound so incorrect to us?
Is the equation Obligation > Freedom incorrect?
We have social rights and economic rights and cultural rights and political rights and even the right to go left. But, we find the burden of Responsibilities so huge for our shoulders that our Rights help us shrug it off.
We first fought for Gay Rights. That is not a bad thing. But now people want to fight for a Right to be a Bi-sexual. What is that supposed to mean? Why can’t we select a gender of preference? Isn’t asking the Right to be bi-sexual equivalent to a Straight man asking the right to be polygamous. Which person straight or not (in their right mind) wants to fight for a Right to have two partners? If you ask me I would rather be on the side of Mark Twain who said, “Bigamy means having one wife too many. Monogamy means the same thing”.
I have seen people fight for their Right not to wear a helmet while driving a motor-cycle. It is your life that the Government is trying to protect. Citizens want a Right to Reject all election candidates to show their disapproval for the political nut-bags. Why cannot they get together instead and put forth someone who is good enough?
How can couples who are parents fight for a divorce? Too bad that they cannot get along. Why did they not think about this before screwing (literally and figuratively) up the child’s life? The child is now their responsibility. Before the Right to divorce should comes the Right of the child to see both his/her parents together. Before the Right to divorce comes the Obligation for the parents to raize their child together and compromise on whatever ‘happiness’ and ‘peace’ and ‘space’ they need. The ‘space’ can wait, at least, till the child grows up to be eighteen. To hold off the fight and the unpleasantness and the ‘irreconciliable differences’ till such time should be the real law. Courts of Law should stop granting divorces. Maybe the ‘divorcer’ should be made to do some time behind bars for spoiling a young child’s life. I am nor arguing on behalf of the drunk and the violent parents for whom there are laws anyway; to get them behind bars. I am arguing against those parents (men and women alike) who seem to get motivated with ‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’. (I see these on television for entirely different reasons). The argument is against those parents who wish to live a ‘fulfilled life’ after the divorce. It is Our Action (Karma) for which our child may have to bear the consequences. The situation here is no longer random or chaotic. While both parents may seek to protect their individual rights and freedom, their greater responsibility towards the child which would have a much longer term impact is highly compromised.
Marshall Poe in his book has commented on the so called ‘Right to privacy’. He has mentioned what he refers to as the most disquieting example. ‘In a 2002 decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that virtual child pornography (viewing on the Internet) was protected by the First Amendment.’
Citizens in most developed nations have so many Rights that even the lawyers are sometimes unaware of all of them.
Discussion :
The problem with academic philosophers is that all these questions are interspersed with words such as libertarianism, utilitarianism, welfarism, inclusiveness, prohibitionism and that is why the strategists and us doze off. Any word having more than three syllables and our mind just switches off. The truth is that the problem is in our-own-selves, but what the heck, let us blame philosophers for our ignorance and attention-disorders. Do we even have the awareness to think about the longer-term?
The whole point of this essay, which has swung like a multi-dimensional pendulum from wars to children is to highlight the responsibility for one’s choice and their consequences. As Sen put it that responsibilities ‘provide the motivation behind discipline.’ Let us not look into the limitations of the choices that we have and treat that as an excuse. The words of Bonhoeffer beautifully summarises this :
Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
Otto von Bismarck once declared that, “People never lie as much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.” Maybe the war-strategists feel justified to lie to us. One of the reason is also the amputation of our own thoughts which refuse to see beyond the obvious. We are a failure when it comes to thinking about the longer term consequences.
In the game of chess we are ready to lose a pawn to trap the queen. We are more than ready to kill the few in war in order to win that disputed commodity. But we need to be aware of the real commodity that we are fighting for, the real consequence of our action. American Presidents (who are brilliant at both speeches and waging wars) have correctly identified the problem, but unfortunately have not been able to implement the solution.
“Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” - John F Kennedy
“More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars...an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling differences between governments.” - Franklin Roosevelt
Prelude to the Conclusion :
The antagonist from the movie Agneepath who commits the gravest of sins under the pretext of the teachings of the Bhagawad Gita said :
“Hum kya le kar aaye the, Hum kya le kar jaayenge”
“We have come empty handed and we shall go the same way, so let us not have any attachments and responsibilities”
Whereas, the protagonist from the movie Sarkar rightly said :
“Naazdeeki phayada dekhne se pehle duur ka nuksaan dekhana zaroori hai.”
“Before looking at the near-term benefits we need to look at the harm we are committing for later life”
The former is That (mis)interpretation of Lord Krishna’s words which deal with our Rights and the latter is what will help us deal with our Responsibilities. Pearl Buck again brilliantly summarizes for us :
“We need to restore the full meaning of that word, duty. It is the other side of rights.”
We only believe in Rights. But no responsibilities. The Code Books written by our earlier religious leaders were exactly meant for this purpose. The purpose was to outline our responsibilities. That the religious books may not remain relevant to some extent, and that we refuse to change them in the name of religion and God is another story, again not the subject of this essay (which I need to end before you go off to sleep).
The Courts and Laws of today outline our rights. But who is to teach us our responsibilities. We want the freedom, but we are unable to handle it.
If we are taught to forget the consequence, we are indirectly taught to remain motionless. We are approaching Inertia. And that was the latter part of the message of Lord Krishna written above, “..nor let your attachment be to inaction.”
Conclusion :
Newton’s first law told us that “a body will remain in a constant state unless it is acted upon by an external force”. This constant state is ‘our state of inaction’ and the external force is that of ‘Responsibility’.
Thus, we can now successfully state Newton’s Law of Karma :
“Our body will remain in a state of inaction unless it is acted upon by a sense of Responsibility.”
