MAHENDRA'S MUSINGS - PART 1

WHAT MAKES A PERSON A PERSON? 

I have been thinking a lot lately on how our personalities and “self” is determined and conditioned.

At birth, and as we grow up what you are, is determined by:-

(a)    Genes inherited from your parents over which you have no control at all.

(b)    Your environment. This includes your parental attitudes, family attitudes, the socio-economic conditions you grow up, which in turn depend on where and when you are born (the time period- e.g., Victorian values will be very different from modern values.

(c)    The third factor is not proven and is the Buddhist concept of karma.

(d)    Random occurrences such as an unexpected natural disaster causing physical or psychological damage.

Buddhist philosophy postulates that your current life is a continuing life process where a constantly changing “life force” moves on to another being at the time of death and continues its progress in that life by a process of continual change, and the nature of that change, which could be desirable or undesirable (advantageous or disadvantageous) is governed by a cause-and-effect universal law where “good” actions lead to “good” outcomes and “bad” ones to “bad” outcomes. This process is known as “karma”. If this is true,  the person or “self” which is a continuously changing entity and regarded as “me” or “you” and is not a permanent unique “soul”, will be bear characteristics dependent on his/her past actions. Whether these are just moral determinants or applicable to whatever happens is unclear to me. I came across an apparent Buddhist teaching, written after his passing away but attributed to him that there are 5 causal factors which determine what happens in the World. These are called the 5 niyamas and karma is just one. Not everything that happens is a result of karma, for example Utu Niyama refers to laws that govern natural phenomena such as earthquakes, tsunamis, the climate and the weather, Bija niyama, that which operates on living matter such as seeds, fruits and plant life, karma niyama which is the moral “cause and effect”law, damma niyama,natural spiritual law such as anatta, and citta niyama, which refers to consciousness and reality.  This view is contested by some as interpretative and not actually preached by the Buddha, The attraction to me of this line of thinking is that according to this, not everything that happens in the world is a result of karma. For example, earthquakes happen and if you are caught in one, there is no need to postulate that it was your karma to happen to be there.

Thus it is possible to view a “person’s” nature as determined by three factors:-

(1) your genes

(2) your environment and

(3) your karma. Just to confound this even more, the first 2 factors will also be related to the 3^rd, For example, a person with beneficial or desirable Karma will be more likely to have better genes and be born to a better environment.

What is very unclear and fails to stand up to rational thinking is how this process of “karma” is so to speak put into practice. Do our actions affect our genes? How is the information supposedly coded in some way, transmitted from a person who has just died to a person just born? Is this distance-limited or limitless? Can someone die in New Zealand and be born in Sweden? What is the possible mechanism by which this happens (if you accept that it happens)? Does this transmission of a “life force happen only in human beings or does it apply to all other animals? It is said in Buddhist texts that when the sperm fertilised the ovum, a life is created when the life force (p…) becomes part of the union. This p.. is on the lookout for conditions that satisfy the kind of life that the karmic forces have so far developed. Is this restricted to humans or can the animal form change? For example, can a chimpanzee continue as a cow? Or, even more controversially, can a human being continue as a lower evolutionary animal? Where do you draw the line? Mammal to mammal? Mammal to insect? These questions cannot be answered at the moment even in a mildly plausible way and an underlying mechanism of any sort has not been postulated. The Buddha’s answer has always been, “I shall show you the path but you will only find out the truth by treading the path yourself, no one can do it for you and endless speculation won’t provide you with the answers.”

Does this mean that it would be wholly stupid to even entertain the notion that it could happen? The only point that puzzles me is the apparently robust records in history where a person has claimed to recollect a past birth. Some of these multiple births have occurred in the same country but there are recorded examples of cross country recollections. If we are applying the scientific method of inquiry, we cannot dismiss them just because we cannot prove them or because it seems unlikely. The first step in the analysis is to determine whether these instances are genuine or are hoaxes. If it can be shown beyond all reasonable doubt that it indeed has happened then even it is just one case, this requires an explanation. The concept of Rebirth is one possible explanation although, at present, we have absolutely no possible explanation of the underlying mechanism. But this cannot be taken as “proof” of rebirth. There may be other testable hypotheses to explain what some investigators have named “persistence of a past memory”.

Buddhism also talks of other realms including those inhabited by devas (small gods). But devas are subject to Dukkha and death too. Devas can be reborn as human beings and if this is true,  our entire concept of time and space has to change. A deva in a different world millions of miles away dies and passes on a “life force” to a human on Planet Earth.

Personally speaking, I think that the Theory of Human Evolution is now a proven fact, thanks mainly to fossil evidence. It is, therefore, hard to accept that evolved beings can regress in the Animal Kingdom as implied when it is said that a Man can be reborn as for example a Reptile. Or advance on the evolutionary scale in just one step, e.g, die as a crocodile and be born as a human being.

There is also implied in the theory of karma that there are actions which are “bad” (in that they result in bad outcomes) and actions which are “good” In that they have good outcomes. It is hard to define moral behaviour in just these terms. Killing a person is said to be “bad” with a bad outcome but what if killing was the only option available to a dutiful loving son when his mother’s life was under threat by a killer and inaction would have resulted almost certainly in the death of his mother? One then has to apply the rider that even actions which appear to be immoral have to be judged by taking into account motive. Motive then becomes paramount. Motivation driven by ignorance, aversion or greed leads to bad outcomes.

The Cause and effect law, in general, makes sense. For example, care in what you consume will have beneficial effects on your health, preparing for an examination is likely to produce good results. But these are tangible and obvious. Not so when it is stated for example that uttering a lie is a “bad thing. A lie may save a life, e.g., to lie that the person the killer is seeking is not in the house they are searching could save that life whereas a truthful statement that “yes, he is hiding in that cupboard” will result almost certainly in death.

It appears to me therefore that absolute “good” and “bad” cannot exist unless every action is judged (in the sense of a good or bad outcome) purely by the motive. Even this poses problems. How does this determine the outcome for a suicide bomber who absolutely and totally believed that he was performing a totally valid and ethical action? If it is also accepted that the phenomenon of “action-reaction” is intrinsically part of “Nature”, and not punishment or reward meted out by a Supernatural Force, then the “rules” by which they operate defies a logical explanation, certainly in terms of morality or what is good and bad. A Supernatural Force that decides on rewards is impossible to conceive sensibly in that such a Force must then thought of as “judging” the actions of Billions of people from millisecond to millisecond! It is even harder to conceive such a force as loving, all powerful and benevolent when it seems to pick and choose, turn a blind eye and even punish people.