"Actions done out of lust or hate or delusion ripen wherever an individual selfhood is generated, and wherever those actions ripen, there their ripening is experienced, whether here and now or on next reappearance or in some life-process beyond that." A. 3:33
"There are four incalculables, which cannot be calculated, an attempt to calculate which would lead to frustration and madness. What four? They are the objective field of the Buddhas, the objective field of one who has acquired the meditations, the ripening of action, and the calculation of the world." A. 4:77
"Now what, monks, is old action? The eye is to be seen as old action, determined and willed, capable of being felt. The ear... The nose... The tongue... The body... The mind is to be seen as old action, determined and willed, capable of being felt. This is called old action. "And what is new action? Whatever action one does now with the body, with speech, or with the mind: This is called new action. SN 35.145
"The world is led by mind." S. 1:72
KAMMA
Verses 651, 652, and 653, of the Suttanipāta are as follows:
651 Kassako kammanā hoti, sippiko hoti kammanā,
vānijo kammanā hoti, pessiko hoti kammanā.
By action is one a farmer, by action a craftsman,
By action is one a merchant, by action a servant,652 Coro pi kammanā hoti, yodhājīvo pi kammanā,
yājako kammanā hoti, rājā pi hoti kammanā.
By action is one a thief, by action a soldier,
By action is one a priest, by action a king.653 Evam etam yathābhūtam kammam passanti panditā
paticcasamuppādadasā kammavipākakovidā.
In this way the wise see action as it really is,
Seeing dependent arising, understanding result of action.
Verse 653 is sometimes
isolated from its context and used to justify the 'three-life'
interpretation of the twelve-factored formulation of paticcasamuppāda as kamma/kammavipāka—kamma/kammavipāka, an interpretation that is wholly inadmissible (see PATICCASAMUPPĀDA and A NOTE ON PATICCASAMUPPĀDA). When the verse is restored to its context the meaning is clear: kammam paticca kassako hoti, sippiko hoti, and so on; in other words, what one is depends on what one does. And the result (vipāka) of acting in a certain way is that one is known accordingly. For vipāka used in this sense see Anguttara VI,vi,9 <A. iii,413>: Vohāravepakkāham
bhikkhave saññā vadāmi; yathā yathā nam sañjānāti tathā tathā voharati,
Evam saññī ahosin ti. Ayam vuccati bhikkhave saññānam vipāko. ('Perceptions,
monks, I say result in description; according as one perceives
such-and-such, so one describes: 'I was perceptive thus'. This, monks,
is called the result of perceptions.') (For the usual meaning of kammavipāka
as the more or less delayed retribution for ethically significant
actions, see e.g. Anguttara III,iv,4 <A.i,134-6> [The P.T.S.
numbering has gone astray here].)
The question of kamma or 'action'—'What should I do?'—is the ethical question;; for all personal action—all action done by me—is either akusala or kusala, unskilful or skilful. Unskilful action is rooted in lobha (rāga), dosa, moha, or lust, hate, and delusion, and (apart from resulting in future dukkha or unpleasure) leads to arising of action, not to cessation of action—tam kammam kammasamudayāya samvattati na tam kammam kammanirodhāya samvattati. ('That
action leads to arising of action, that action does not lead to ceasing
of action.') Skilful action is rooted in non-lust, non-hate, and
non-delusion, and leads to cessation of action, not to arising of
action. (Anguttara III,xi,7&8 <A.i,263>) The puthujjana does not understand this, since he sees neither arising nor cessation of action;[a] the ditthisampanna does understand this, since he sees both arising and cessation of action—Yato
kho āvuso ariyasāvako akusalañ ca pajānāti akusalamūlañ ca pajānāti,
kusalañ ca pajānāti kusalamūlañ ca pajānāti, ettāvatā pi kho āvuso
ariyasāvako sammāditthi hoti ujugatā'ssa ditthi, dhamme aveccappasādena
samannāgato, āgato imam saddhammam ('In so far, friend, as a noble
disciple understands unskill and understands the root of unskill,
understands skill and understands the root of skill, so far too, friend,
the noble disciple has right view, his view is correct, he is endowed
with tried confidence in the Teaching, he has arrived at this Good
Teaching') (Majjhima i,9 <M.i,46>)—; the arahat not only understands this, but also has reached cessation of action, since for him the question 'What should I do?' no more arises. To the extent that there is still intention in the case of the arahat—see CETANĀ [f]—there
is still conscious action, but since it is neither unskilful nor
skilful it is no longer action in the ethical sense. Extinction, nibbāna, is cessation of ethics—Kullūpamam vo bhikkhave ājānantehi dhammā pi vo pahātabbā pageva adhammā ('Comprehending
the parable of the raft, monks, you have to eliminate ethical things
too, let alone unethical things') (Majjhima iii,2 <M.i,135>).[b] See MAMA [a]. Nanavira Thera
For a brief account of action see NĀMA; for a definition see RŪPA [b].
Footnotes:
[a] A puthujjana
may adopt a set of moral values for any of a number of different
reasons—faith in a teacher, acceptance of traditional or established
values, personal philosophical views, and so on—, but in the last
analysis the necessity of moral values, however much he may feel their
need, is not for him a matter of self-evidence. At the end of his book (op. cit., p. 111) Jean Grenier writes: 'En
fait toutes les attitudes que nous avons passées en revue au sujet du
choix ne se résignent à l'absence de vérité que par désespoir de
l'atteindre et par suite des nécessités de l'action. Elles n'aboutissent
toutes qu'à des morales provisoires. Un choix, au sens plein du mot, un
"vrai" choix n'est possible que s'il y a ouverture de l'homme à la
vérité; sinon il n'y a que des compromis de toutes sortes: les plus
nobles sont aussi les plus modestes.' ('In fact all the attitudes
we have passed in review on the subject of choice are resigned to the
absence of truth only out of despair of attaining it and as a
consequence of the necessities of action. They end up, all of them, only
at provisional moralities. A choice, in the full sense of the word, a
"real" choice is possible only if man has access to the truth; if not
there are only compromises of all kinds: the noblest are also the most
modest.') And Sartre, more bleakly, concludes (op. cit., p. 76)
that man is bound by his nature to adopt values of one sort or another,
and that, although he cannot escape this task of choosing, he himself
is totally responsible for his choice (for there is no Divine Dictator
of values), and there is absolutely nothing in his nature that can
justify him in adopting this particular value or set of values rather
than that. The puthujjana sees neither a task to be performed
that can justify his existence—not even, in the last analysis, that of
perpetual reflexion (Heidegger's Entschlossenheit or
'resoluteness', acceptance of the guilt of existing; which does no more
than make the best of a bad job)—nor a way to bring his unjustifiable
existence to an end. The ariyasāvaka, on the other hand, does
see the way to bring his existence to an end, and he sees that it is
this very task that justifies his existence. Ariyam kho aham brāhmana lokuttaram dhammam purisassa sandhanam paññāpemi. ('I, divine, make known the noble world-transcending Teaching as the business of man.') Majjhima x,6 <M.ii,181>
[b] Hegel, it seems, in his Phänomenologie des Geistes,
has said that there can only be an ethical consciousness in so far as
there is disagreement between nature and ethics: if ethical behaviour
became natural, conscience would disappear. And from this it follows
that if ethical action is the absolute aim, the absolute aim must also
be the absence of ethical action. This is quite right; but is ethical action the absolute aim? The difficulty is, precisely, to see
the action that puts an end to action in the ethical sense. Whereas
unskilful action is absolutely blameworthy as leading only to future
unpleasure and to the arising of action, there is action, leading to a
bright future, that yet does not lead to the ending of action. See
Majjhima vi,7 <M.i,387-92>. The generous man, the virtuous man,
the man even who purifies his mind in samādhi, without right view remains a puthujjana, and so does not escape reproach: Yo kho Sāriputta imañ ca kāyam nikkhipati aññañ ca kāyam upādiyati tam aham Sa-upavajjo ti vadāmi. ('One
who lays down this body, Sāriputta, and takes hold of another body, he I
say is blameworthy.') Majjhima xv,2 <M.iii,266>The Foundation of Ethics
The ethical paradox—What should I
do?—is beyond the province of the natural sciences; for the natural
sciences, based as they are upon the principle of public knowledge, are
inherently incapable of comprehending the idea of personal choice. What
about the sciences of man—history, anthropology, sociology—can they help
us? These certainly tell us how man has behaved in the past, and how in
fact he now behaves. And when we ask them whether man ought to
behave in the way he has and does, they are able to point to the
manifest consequences in this world of man's various kinds of behaviour,
and if we press them further to indicate which of these consequences
are good and which bad, they can often tell us which have been most
generally approved by man and which disapproved.
But if we ask them whether the majority of mankind has been right
in approving what in fact it has approved and in disapproving what it
has disapproved, they are silent. The answer of course is simply that if
I, personally, approve what the majority of mankind has approved I
shall say that the majority is right, but if I disapprove I shall say
that it is wrong. But the scientific method eliminates the individual on
principle, and for the humanist sciences man is essentially a
collective or social phenomenon. For them, in consequence, I as an
individual do not exist at all; at best I am conceded a part-share in
the general consensus of opinion. The individual's view as an absolute
ethical choice is systematically swallowed up in the view of mankind as a
whole; and if the ethical question is raised at all, the sciences of
man can only reply that the opinion of the majority represents the
ultimate truth (a view that the defeated candidates in any election, who
are themselves always in the majority, know to be false).
Furthermore, the only consequences of
man's behaviour that these sciences are in a position to consider are
the social consequences; what effects an individual's behaviour has upon
himself or upon some other individual is not a comprehensible question.
This means that a person seeking ethical enlightenment from the
sciences of man is likely to conclude that only social values are moral
values, and that a man can do as he pleases in private. It is hardly
necessary to remark that with the growth of these sciences this view has
already become extremely fashionable, and no great wonder: it puffs up
the politician into an arbiter and legislator of morals—a function
hitherto restricted to Divine Personages or their Representatives—and it
allows the private citizen to enjoy his personal pleasures with a clear
conscience. Eventually, we meet with political systems that have been
raised to the status of religions. It is evident that the question of
ethics, of the personal choice, does not come within the competence of
the sciences either of nature or of man to answer.
It may happen, of course, that a man who
clearly understands this may nevertheless decide that the service of
man is the highest good. But if we press him to say why he has decided
that concern with human society is the aim and purpose of his life, he
will perhaps explain since he himself is a human being his personal
happiness is bound up with human societies, and in promoting the welfare
of mankind in general he is advancing his own welfare.
We may or may not agree with him, but
that is not the point. The point is that, in the last analysis, a man
chooses what he does choose in order to obtain happiness, whether it is
the immediate satisfaction of an urgent desire or a remote future
happiness bought perhaps with present acceptance of suffering. This
means that the questions 'What is the purpose of existence?' and 'How is
happiness to be obtained?' are synonymous; for they are both the
ethical question, 'What should I do?' But there is happiness and
happiness, and the intelligent man will prefer the permanent to the
temporary.
The question, then, is 'How is permanent
happiness, if such a thing exists, to be obtained?' This question in
the West, with its Christian tradition, has always been associated with
that of the existence of God, conceived as the ultimate source of all
values, union with whom (or the admittance to whose presence)
constitutes eternal happiness. The traditional Western Ethic is thus
'Obey the Laws of God'. But with the decline of Christianity before the
triumphal progress of science God was pronounced dead and the question
of the possibility of permanent happiness was thrown open. 'Has existence then any significance at all?...the
question,' Nietzsche declared, 'that will require a couple of centuries
even to be completely heard in all its profundity.' Nanavira Thera
*
At the time I read it—when I was about twenty—I had already suspected (from my reading of Huxley and others) that there is no point in life, but this was still all rather abstract and theoretical. But Ulysses gets down to details, and I found I recognized myself, mutatis mutandis, in the futile occupations that fill the days of Joyce's characters. And so I came to understand that all our actions, from the most deliberate to the most thoughtless, and without exception, are determined by present pleasure and present pain. Even what we pompously call our 'duty' is included in this law—if we do our duty, that is only because we should feel uncomfortable if we neglected it, and we seek to avoid discomfort. Even the wise man, who renounces a present pleasure for the sake of a greater pleasure in the future, obeys this law—he enjoys the presentpleasure of knowing (or believing) that he is providing for his future pleasure, whereas the foolish man, preferring the present pleasure to his future pleasure, is perpetually gnawed with apprehension about his future. And when I had understood this, the Buddha's statement, Pubbe cāham bhikkhave etarahi ca dukkhañ c'eva paññāpemi dukkhassa ca nirodham ('Both now and formerly, monks, it is just suffering that I make known and the ceasing of suffering') (M. 22: i,140), came to seem (when eventually I heard it) the most obvious thing in the world—'What else' I exclaimed 'could the Buddha possibly teach?'
Nanavira Thera
*
At the time I read it—when I was about twenty—I had already suspected (from my reading of Huxley and others) that there is no point in life, but this was still all rather abstract and theoretical. But Ulysses gets down to details, and I found I recognized myself, mutatis mutandis, in the futile occupations that fill the days of Joyce's characters. And so I came to understand that all our actions, from the most deliberate to the most thoughtless, and without exception, are determined by present pleasure and present pain. Even what we pompously call our 'duty' is included in this law—if we do our duty, that is only because we should feel uncomfortable if we neglected it, and we seek to avoid discomfort. Even the wise man, who renounces a present pleasure for the sake of a greater pleasure in the future, obeys this law—he enjoys the presentpleasure of knowing (or believing) that he is providing for his future pleasure, whereas the foolish man, preferring the present pleasure to his future pleasure, is perpetually gnawed with apprehension about his future. And when I had understood this, the Buddha's statement, Pubbe cāham bhikkhave etarahi ca dukkhañ c'eva paññāpemi dukkhassa ca nirodham ('Both now and formerly, monks, it is just suffering that I make known and the ceasing of suffering') (M. 22: i,140), came to seem (when eventually I heard it) the most obvious thing in the world—'What else' I exclaimed 'could the Buddha possibly teach?'
Nanavira Thera
