Collective kamma
Adapted from a blog posting and other articles by Ven. Dhammika:
In recent decades something referred to as collective kamma or group kamma has been posited and discussed amongst Buddhists. According to this theory, groups of people or even a whole nation, can supposedly suffer the results of evil they have done (positive collective kamma never seems to be discussed, it’s always negative kamma). The revered Tibetan master Lati Rimpoche recently claimed that the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust was the result of great wickedness they had all committed in previous lives. Others have claimed that the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge was likewise kammic retribution for past evil done by the Cambodian people. Nothing explicitly mentioning the idea of collective kamma is found in the Buddha’s teachings and there is no Pāḷi or Sanskrit terms for collective kamma in the traditional lexicons. The idea also seems to be absent from later Buddhist texts. However, in his Abhidharmakośabhāsya, Vasubandhu has a comment that could be, and has been, interpreted as suggesting collective kamma. He said:
“When many persons are united with the intention to kill, either in war, or in the hunt, or in banditry, who is guilty of murder, if only one of them kills? As soldiers, etc., concur in the realization of the same effect, all are as guilty as is the one who kills. Having a common goal, all are guilty just as he who among them kills, for all mutually incite one another, not through speech, but by the very fact that they are united together in order to kill. But is the person who has been constrained through force to join the army also guilty? Evidently so, unless he has formed the resolution: ‘Even in order to save my life, I shall not kill a living being’.” A word for word breakdown of the crucial part of this passage is: (senādiṣu, loc.pl.): in armies et cetera (eka-kārya-tvāt, abl. sg.): because of the one-task-ness (sarve, nom. pl. m.): all (katṛvad-anvitāḥ, nom.pl. m.): gone along with the one who did it (kṛtavat, (perf.p.p.√kṛ) one who has done or made anything (anv-ita): gone along with, possessed of. This could be better translated as; “In armies et cetera, because of all being in it together, all have gone along with the one who did it.”
If Vasabandhu was positing collective kamma, the example he gave for it is not a very convincing one. Let us consider it carefully. All the persons mentioned in this example would have come together with a common negative purpose and thus would have all committed some negative kamma, as Vasubandhu correctly says. However, the nature and intensity of their individual intentions may well have varied. Some might have been enthusiastic about what was planned, others less so, one or two may have had serious reservations. Further, the kammic background of each person would have been different. One could have been a hardened criminal who had committed many crimes before, another might have been a novice in crime, while a third might have been basically good but weak, and easily led by his friends. With such a variety of motives and backgrounds how each member of the gang would have felt and acted subsequent to their crime is likely to have been just as diverse, ranging all the way from cruel satisfaction, to cold indifference, to hesitation, to regret. Taking all these quite plausible and even quite likely differences into consideration, it is only realistic to imagine that the vipāka of each person in the group would be of very different strength and that it would manifest at different times and in very different ways. Thus a second look at this passage will show that it is not a convincing argument for collective kamma, if indeed that is what it is meant to be.
One incident from the Buddhist tradition that could be suggesting something like collective kamma is a story about the Sakyans, the Buddha’s kinsmen. Viḍūḍabha, the king of Kosala, massacred “all the Sakyans” including even “the suckling babes”, and they suffered this fate supposedly because “the Sakyans” had sometime previously poisoned a river in a dispute over its water. In reality, only a few Sakyans would have committed this evil deed, and although the Sakyan chiefs probably authorized it and a number of others may have approved of it, the majority, particularly the women, children and babies, would have had nothing at to do with it. Thus the idea of collective kamma idea is implicit in this story. How are we to explain this? Firstly, the story is not in the Tipiṭaka but comes from the of the Jātaka commentary, a text of uncertain but very late date (Ja.IV,152). Some scholars consider it to have been composed in Sri Lankan rather than India. But whoever the author was, it seems likely that he was just storytelling, rather than positing the idea of collective kamma as a specific doctrine. The fact that no later commentators took the story as a cue to develop the idea of collective kamma strengthens this assumption. Also, another version of the story, from the Mahāvaṁsa Ṭīkā, says that there were survivors of the massacre, thus undermining that claim that “all Sakyans” suffered the negative vipāka of the kamma created by others.
The version of collective kamma which maintains that the consequences of deeds done by some within a group can be experienced by others within the same group, contradicts one of the most basic and fundamental Buddhist concepts; that each individual is responsible for themselves.
The earliest unambiguous mention of collective kamma that I have been able to find anywhere is in the writings of the 19th century occultist Helena Blavatsky. In her The Key to Theosophy, 1889, p.202, Blavatsky made reference to what she called “National Karma” or sometimes “Distributive Karma”. The idea seems to have subsequently been taken up by various believers in the occult, then absorbed into New Age thinking, from where it has spread to Buddhism. In 1916 the dilettante exponent of Buddhism and so-called “perennial philosophy”, Ananda Coomaraswamy, wrote that he was unable to understand how kamma could be transmitted through a series of lives without a soul and so he read into Buddhism a kind of universal heredity kamma.
“No man lives alone, but we may regard the whole creation…as one life and therefore as sharing a common karma, to which every individual contributes for good or ill… [T]he great difficulty of imagining a particular karma passing from individual to individual, without the persistence of even a subtle body, is avoided by the conception of human beings, or indeed of the whole universe, as constituting one life or self. Thus it is from our ancestors that we receive our karma, and not merely from ‘our own’ past experience; and whatsoever karma we create will be inherited by humanity for ever.”
Some decades later the English monk Sīlācāra theorized that there might be something he called an ‘kammic overflow’. By this, he meant that the potent kamma of an exceptionally virtuous or exceptionally immoral leader – a king, an officer in charge of a platoon, an employer, the head of an extended family, etc., might ‘overflow’ from them to their underlings. Sīlācāra knew the Tipitaka well enough to know that this contradicted the idea of individual responsibility and he was only suggesting this as a possibly. Nonetheless, his comments represent the slow contamination of Buddhism by the idea of collective kamma in one or another of its forms. More recently the Buddhist scholar Garma C. C. Chang had this to say about collective kamma.
“The evidence of collective karma is not lacking in our own world. For instance, the history and fate of the American Indians, of Aztecs, of Mayans, and to a certain extent, of Negroes and Jews and all those other sufferers of mankind's inhumanity cannot be regarded as having been planned or caused even indirectly by God…With the doctrine of karma, however, the problem of evil or moral justice seems to be comparatively easier to explain in the Buddhist tradition.”
Evidence for collective kamma may not be lacking in the world but it is lacking in the Buddhist scriptures, and Chang was unable to marshal a single quotation from them to corroborate his other highly dubious “evidence” for it. Charles Luk’s The Śūraṅgama Sūtra published in 1966 and several times since, purports to be a translation of this discourse from the Chinese Tipitaka. Pages 49 to 51 discuss what Luk calls individual and collective karma and explains the differences between them. But the term he translates as individual karma is 別業妄見, which the authoritative Foguang Dictionary defines as: “Refers to beings being confused about the true nature [of dharmas], giving rise to deluded views, perceiving all states of delusion, be they painful or pleasurable…” What Luk calls collective karma is 同分妄見, the same dictionary defines as: “Refers to all beings confused about the true nature, together perceiving all states of delusion, together experiencing pain and pleasure, together prompted [to arise] by karma. It is like the people of one country together seeing noxious vapours and inauspicious things.” It would seem therefore that the original text makes no mention of collective karma and that Luk has read the idea into it.
The Tibetan teacher Anam Thubten recently came up with yet another version of this notion – that everyone shares everyone else’s kamma.
“From the point of view of collective karma, everything that is happening in the world is no longer someone else’s karma. It’s our karma. In the end your karma is my karma, and my karma is your karma. We all share the same fate.” It is surprising how many Buddhist teachers, learned and otherwise, speak of collective kamma as if it were a part of authentic Dhamma, despite its recent origin and it having no precedence in traditional Buddhism. Nonetheless, it could be argued that just because collective kamma is not mentioned in any Buddhist scriptures does not mean that it is false. After all, Buddhism does not have an exclusive claim to all truth. Perhaps Madam Blavatsky and others had insights that the Buddha or later Buddhist masters lacked, although I seriously doubt it. So it will be worthwhile to examine the idea of collective kamma more carefully to see if it has any validity. There are various versions of the collective kamma idea. One maintains that large numbers of people can be reborn into a particular group which then suffers together because of their shared negative kamma. Another version maintains that a small number of innocent individuals belonging to a group can suffer the negative vipāka made by a larger number of individuals within that group. In these two versions the suffering supposedly comes in the form of war, famine, plague, earthquakes or other natural disasters. Another version of this second theory is that individuals can suffer for evil they have done by having something horrible happen to someone related to them; for example, my whole family is killed in a car accident because of some evil I did and my grief at the loss of my loved ones is the vipāka for that evil.
The most recent mass tragedy to be dubbed an example of collective kamma was the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. In the days immediately after this disaster a prominent Singaporean monk was reported in the local newspaper as saying that most of the tsunami victims were fishermen suffering the kammic consequences of decades of killing fish.
There are numerous doctrinal, logical, evidential, moral and even common sense problems with the collective kamma idea in any of its forms. Let us examine some of them. Proponents of collective kamma are long on generalizations but noticeably short on details. How, for example, does kamma organize all its mass causes and effects? How and in what form does it store and process all the data needed so that one individual in their next life experiences this kammic consequence and another one experiences that? How do the logistics work that would be needed to guarantee that a large number of individuals are reborn at this time, within that group and at a certain location so as to experience the required suffering? And what is the force or energy by which kamma makes all these extraordinarily complex arrangements? As usual, no explanations are forthcoming.
If we explore specific examples of what is claimed to be collective kamma we will see just how problematic the idea is. Let us look at the monstrous crimes the Nazis committed against European Jewry during the Second World War. If some form of collective kamma really operates something like this would have be necessary. Kamma would have had to somehow construct things so that six million evil-doers were reborn in what was to become Nazi occupied Europe and be living there between 1939 and 1945. It would have had to pre-plan decades ahead to arrange the social and political situation in Germany so that a fanatical anti-Semite came to power. Concordant to this, it would have been necessary to select millions of other people to be reborn in Germany with attitudes and outlooks that either supported Nazism, or were too apathetic or too timid to oppose it. Then it would have nurtured Adolf Hitler go grow up and mature with anti-Semitic ideas, arrange for him to come to power so that he could be an instrument of kamma and punish all the evil doers. Further, when the required six million evildoers had suffered sufficiently for their past deeds by either being murdered, tortured, starved, or traumatized (kammic parallelism is of course operating), kamma would then have had to arrange and manipulate innumerable complex causes and effects in such ways that the war ended when everyone had got their just deserts.
Now let us examine the 2004 tsunami, another event often cited as an example of collective kamma. The tsunami killed some 200,000 people, injured another million and left hundreds of thousands of others homeless. Even the most ill-informed person knows that the directly observable cause of the tsunami was an earthquake that shifted the tectonic plates on the floor of the ocean off the coast of Sumatra. This released a vast amount of energy which in turn caused huge waves to form. For the tsunami to be collective kamma it would require several things. As with the Holocaust, kamma would have had to pre-plan things so that vast numbers of people were in the affected area, either because they had been reborn there, lived there, relocated there or were visiting the area at the required time, i.e. in the late morning of the 26th December. Extraordinarily, amidst the chaos of the deluge, the panic, the collapsing buildings and the debris being swept along, kamma would have had to arrange things so that the thousands of victims involved got their exact kammic retribution, no more and no less; so that those whose kamma required them to be killed were killed, that those whose kamma required them to be seriously injured were so injured, that those who only had to sustain minor injuries did so, and those whose kamma required only that their houses be destroyed suffered only that loss, and so on. But even more extraordinary, for the tsunami to be an example of collective kamma would require accepting that kamma is able to influence, not just humans, but even the Earth’s tectonic plates, making them move to just the right extent and at just the right time so that the resulting waves were able to play out on thousands of people’s vipāka. There seems to be no end to the extraordinary abilities that speculation is able to attribute to kamma. And of course all this may well be true. Just let it be known that nothing even remotely like collective kamma was taught by the Buddha.