In a previous talk, we referred to the teaching “with its dark and bright counterparts.” In this talk, once again we meet with the concepts of dark and bright, this time in relation to the law of moral causality. The Buddha refers to four possible combinations of cause/effects: dark, bright, dark and bright, and neither dark nor bright. Of these, the first three cause more effects. The neither dark nor bright is said to lead “to the destruction of karma.” The destruction of karma is, of course, the goal of the spiritual path. The Buddha further attributes this realization to “direct knowledge,” i.e., gnosis.

Dark causality has dark effects. The Buddha calls these “afflictive.” He identifies them with “hellish states,” or states of intense suffering and pain.

Bright causality has bright effects. The Buddha calls these “non-afflictive.” He identifies them with spiritual states, or states of intense pleasure and bliss.

Dark and bright (or bright and dark) causes are mixed. The Buddha says that these combine afflictive and non-afflictive aspects. He identifies them with human states, as well as lower spiritual and higher animal states, which mix up pleasure and pain.

Finally, the Buddha says that neither dark nor bright causes leads to the destruction of karma. He declares that these are associated with volition or the intention to abandon dark, bright, and mixed causes. In other words, renunciation.

The Buddha says that good causes produce other kinds of effects. Only by giving up negative and positive causes can one go beyond causality itself, and only by going beyond causality is one emancipated. One must transcend good and evil.

The Buddha says that moral causality is not just physical. Moral causality includes verbal and mental actions. But the root factor is not action. Rather, the essential karmic factor is volition or intention, the so-called volitional formations or potentialities. The volitional formations are the second link of the chain of cause and effect, next after ignorance. The Buddha makes this point repeatedly. In fact, the Buddha makes this distinctive contribution to Indian philosophy. Thus, mental actions underlie verbal and physical actions and determine them.

The Buddha describes three kinds of righteous and unrighteous physical actions. He describes four kinds of unrighteous verbal actions. He also describes three kinds of unrighteous mental actions. Altogether, these ten actions produce effects.

The three kinds of physical actions are killing, stealing, and sexual wrongdoing. These ethical principles correspond to the first three of the five precepts. Sexual wrongdoing includes adultery. These forms of abstinence correspond to the positive action of loving-kindness. Right actions became the basis of the Mahayana reinterpretation of Buddhist ethics, in which positive actions transcend abstinence. This relationship is like the distinction between Right Intention and Right Effort, and between the path of the arhant and the path of the bodhisattva.

The four kinds of verbal actions are lying, lying under oath, harmful speech, and gossip. These are variations of wrongful speech. The positive actions that correspond to these are truthful, positive, constructive, and beneficial speech.

The three kinds of mental actions are covetousness, hatred, and wrong view. Wrong view refers to denying the truth of the teaching. Wrong view includes not believing in the law of moral causality, the existence of other worlds, rebirth, and the reality of spiritual knowledge or gnosis. The positive actions are a positive mental attitude and Right View. Right View is the first step of the Eightfold Path. Right View includes belief in moral causality, other worlds, rebirth, and the reality of spiritual knowledge or gnosis.

The fifth precept is drunkenness. Drunkenness is not included in this list. “Drinking fermented grains that cause heedlessness” seems to be a later addition. The Vinaya does not give it a very prominent place at all. Today, this precept includes all alcoholic beverages. Buddhist religious include drugs (other than drugs taken for a legitimate medical purpose, which is of course a matter of opinion). However, one often finds the first four precepts grouped together in the Pali Canon without referring to drinking alcohol at all. In this way, one can see how the precepts expanded over time.

The Buddha affirms the ability of the person to affect their future destiny and rebirth by cultivating positive intentions. This includes rebirth in the spiritual realms. This way also develops “the liberation of mind, liberation by wisdom, that is taintless with the destruction of the taints.” Thus, the Buddha says that one can realize direct knowledge, i.e., gnosis, through intention or volition. The cultivation of wisdom and the destruction of the taints are the positive and negative conditions, respectively.

The Buddha further describes the exact mechanism by which moral causality works. “Unwholesome” causality results in rebirth in non-human, suffering states. “Wholesome” causality results in rebirth in a human state. Human rebirth always results from the fruition of “wholesome” causes. If one is reborn as a human being due to the fruition of positive causes, negative causes may still come about in the human life. In this case, negative effects (experiences) that reflect the quality of the negative cause will undermine the positive rebirth.

The Buddha gives seven examples of good and bad causes and their effects. Killing living beings, injuring living beings, anger and irritability, envy, stinginess, obstinacy and arrogance, and lack of spirituality are associated with shortness of life, sickliness, ugliness, weakness, poverty, low birth, and stupidity, respectively. Not killing living beings; helping living beings; a positive, constructive attitude; good will; generosity; flexibility and humility; and spirituality are associated with long life, health, beauty, influence, wealth, high birth, and wisdom, respectively. The effect corresponds to the good or bad cause.

Negative Kamma	Effect	Positive Kamma	Effect
Killing living beings	Shortness of life	Not killing living beings	Long life
Injuring living beings	Sickliness	Helping living beings	Health
Anger, irritability	Ugliness	Positive, constructive attitude	Beauty
Envy	Lack of influence	Good will	Influence
Stinginess	Poverty	Generosity	Wealth
Obstinacy, arrogance	Low birth	Flexibility, humility	High birth
Non-spirituality	Stupidity	Spirituality	Wisdom

By purging oneself of bad karma by means of abstinence and renunciation on the one hand and cultivating good intentions through the cultivation of merit on the other, one can generate good karma that will yield the effects to which they correspond in the future. But there is no reason one must wait until the next life. If one destroys bad karma and cultivates good intentions, there is no reason one cannot generate good effects in this life too. However, one should not cultivate these causes out of a purely selfish intention (itself a negative cause).

The cultivation of merit is the basis of New Thought, The Secret, and other popular self-help philosophies based on cultivating positive thinking. These ways of thinking are consistent with the teaching if they are undertaken with a good intention and due regard to existing karmic conditions. However, one thing these philosophies ignore is the need to purge bad effects by means of renunciation and abstinence. Ignoring negativity can lead to serious errors, including false expectations. It does not follow that one will experience the effects of these actions in this life either. They may or may not be effective based on the available conditions in the present and other causal factors operating from the past.

One might ask, does this not contradict the Buddha’s view on caste? It seems to follow from the foregoing that one will only be born in a high caste because of good karma. In fact, it is not contradictory. It may be true that only someone with the right karma will be born in a high caste. Moral causality also causes beings born in a low caste. However, anyone can change their karma at any time by exercising volition and intention. On the other hand, the Indian caste system locks one into one’s caste for life. Thus, the Buddha does not reject the idea of inferior and superior births or persons. This is absurd. Rather, the Buddha rejects the concept that one cannot change one’s moral causality – in other words, that causality is fate. In fact, the Buddha associated with everyone and accepted all castes and genders into the order for just this reason.

All the qualities that we have talked about are qualities of the person or conditions established at birth. These are tendencies to experience rather than experiences as such. The expansion of this way of thinking to include experiences raises problems like the rape or murder of a child or mass disasters like a tsunami or the Holocaust. I am not aware that the Pali texts address these issues specifically. There is some evidence that the Buddha did not think that all effects are the result of intention.

However, the answer may also lie in the intricacy and complexity of the web of interconnections that constitutes the doctrine of the universal interconnectedness of things and the literal infinity of the number of past rebirths. Over infinite time, incredibly intricate combinations of circumstances can come together in which all the participants appear to share essentially the same fate.

The Buddha summarizes this view of moral causality in the following: “Beings are owners of their actions, heirs of their actions; they originate from their actions, are bound to their actions, have their actions as their refuge. It is action that distinguishes beings as inferior and superior.” The word “action” here refers to moral causality.

An interesting but often-overlooked implication is the specific relationship between past and future lives. Some Western, popular, New Age, or spiritualist beliefs tend to see the moral causality of one’s present life as a “fulfilment” or positive continuation related to past lives. One is “rewarded” for good behaviour and “punished” for one’s mistakes. Such a moralistic view seems to come out of the theistic tradition based on notions of teleology and judgment. They imply that there is a “development” through a series of lives that makes sense and leads towards a goal. Those who think this way often express the goal as acquiring wisdom or insight or the opportunity to express loving-kindness. Sometimes they express this in the notion that one “chooses” each subsequent rebirth to learn some sort of “lesson.”

While it is true that cause/effects create the conditions for the arising of future cause/effects, the idea of any meaningful development contradicts Buddhist ontology. First, the world has no beginning. Everyone has lived infinite numbers of lives. Either one has lived and done everything, like Nietzsche’s doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” or, if reality differentiates infinitely, human experience is limitless. Either way, there is no “divine plan” or telos. There can be no goal where one has lived countless lives.

There is no teleology here. There is no direction and no goal. Rather, there is a chaotic, seething broth. Sometimes this is ecstatic. More often, it is agonizing. In any case, it is purposeless, senseless, and meaningless. Reality has no goal. There is no redemption in, by, or of experience. It is just what it is. Finite beings arise out of this infinite process because, while it is producing causality, it is also being effective. Each effect automatically negates its cause by exhausting the energy of the underlying potentiality, in an infinitely complex and interactive web of dynamic interrelationships.

Once these causal propensities come to fruition, their energy is exhausted and they effectively vanish. This must be the case; otherwise, there would be infinite numbers of potentialities operating in every moment. In this case, there would be no finite beings. Each moment of experience results from all of those unreified potentialities. Each rebirth is more like a photographic negative of the previous birth than a continuation. For example, a painful human birth may exhaust the negative potentialities, leaving the karmic continuity or mind stream one calls the “self” free to experience the effects of good causes in a very blissful rebirth, perhaps even a birth as a divine being. The reverse may also be true.

The question also arises of what happens to the causal continuity once one achieves fundamental “awakening.” Once one achieves true awakening one ceases to generate both good and bad effects. This is the “neither dark nor bright” causality. Thus, only past causes continue to manifest beyond this point. The Buddha says of those who enter the stream that they may experience enlightenment in as short a time as seven days or in as long a time as seven rebirths. The root factor is any potential causes that still exist upon awakening. This implies that awakening does not destroy all causes. Even the Buddha continued to experience effects for 45 years after his enlightenment.

Perhaps the phenomenon of authentic, highly realized, but unenlightened, practitioners, who suffer themselves or experience other sorts of strong good and bad propensities, are in fact intensely “working out” the effects of their previous potentialities at an accelerated rate. This might explain such “crazy wisdom” teachers as the homosexual Ramakrishna; the alcoholic Chögyam Trungpa, who literally drank himself to death; the alcoholic and womanizer Gendün Chöepal; the sex-crazed and abusive Adi Da; and Aleister Crowley, the self-styled “Great Wild Beast,” who was the disciple of Allan Bennett, Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya, who led the first Buddhist mission to the West in 1908, spiritual teacher of Gerald Yorke, the personal representative to the West of the 13th Dalai Lama. Spiritual philospher Alan Watts, himself an alcoholic who drank himself to death, has a very insightful video on this topic. Of course, I am excluding mere charlatans from this list.

Merit

The Buddha says that he experienced seven eons or world ages in which he was reborn in many spiritual worlds because of practising meritorious deeds and cultivating a mind of loving-kindness in a former life for seven years. He also experienced hundreds of rebirths on earth as a righteous world monarch. The Buddha identifies acts of generosity, self-mastery (also referred to as moral discipline), and abstinence (also referred to as the development of meditation), the fruits of which lead to meritorious rebirths.

The Buddha emphasizes generosity and self-control, leading to favourable rebirths in human or trans-human states characterized by long life, beauty, happiness, fame or good fortune, power and influence, and sublime sensory experiences. The Buddha further declares that confidence in the Buddha, the Eightfold Path, the teaching, and the order are even more meritorious. Gifts of food made to the righteous are especially meritorious. Gifts of food are greater even than gifts of great wealth. They confer long life, beauty, happiness, and strength on the giver. One must give them faithfully, respectfully, at the right time, and with a generous heart, without denigrating oneself or others.

Once again, the Buddha emphasizes that such gifts need not be self-sacrificial or rooted in self-hatred. This is like our discussion of the meditation on loving-kindness. It is ok to love oneself and give oneself good things, if this love is universal and not self-centred. This is only true, however, of those who are morally pure. For those who are morally impure, generosity alone is not sufficient to obtain a superior rebirth. Once again, the Buddha declares that one can achieve a specific kind of rebirth. The quality of the rebirth corresponds to one’s intention. This is especially efficacious at the moment of death.

Ethics

Other actions that produce superior merit include taking refuge in the Buddha, the Teaching, and the Order; not killing or harming; not stealing; abstaining from sexual wrongdoing; abstaining from wrongful speech; and abstaining from drunkenness. In other words, spirituality and ethics are also, like gifts, meritorious causal factors. By these means, one will enjoy freedom from fear, hostility, and oppression.

An even more powerful practice is the observance of the lunar holidays. One may compare observing the new and full moon days to the Judaic practice of Sabbath. Tibetan Buddhists have Tsog offering days, also tied to the cycle of the moon. The phases of the Moon are the basis of the Buddhist practice calendar. Interestingly, the lunar cycle is also central to Islamic spirituality.

The Buddha adapted the Vedic practice of lunar observances for his order. The lunar calendar determines the new and full moon days, especially in the Theravada. It is obvious that this practice is inherently astrological and implies a belief in the spiritual significance of the lunar cycle.

On these days, observers keep the Five Precepts strictly, including celibacy. In addition, the pious eat only a single meal during the waxing of the sun – an Ayurvedic practice believed to bestow good health. They abstain from entertainment and personal adornments and perfumes and avoid the use of high and luxurious beds and seats. These extended ethical practices are the Eight Precepts.

The Buddha says that observing the lunar holidays confers even greater merit on the practitioner than the greatest worldly benefits. These benefits include long life and spiritual happiness.

Many Buddhists spend these days making offerings to the order. They study the teaching or listen to dharma teachings and meditate. Thus, ethical and spiritual observances that emphasize the inner, spiritual life replace the externalities of Vedic ritual. It is not hard to see how these practices, practised by society, would produce a virtual paradise on earth, a so-called “pure land.” This contrasts with what one sees in the world today, where gross selfishness and greed govern human behaviour.

Meditation

The Buddha also discusses meditation, which (he declares) is even more meritorious than ethical observances. We have already discussed the meditation on loving-kindness at some length, so I will not repeat myself here. Concerning this meditation, the Buddha says, “The liberation of mind by loving-kindness surpasses [the ethical practices] and shines forth, bright and brilliant.” The Buddha says that the meditation on loving-kindness frees the mind from limiting and constricting causes. One imbues the four directions with a mind of loving-kindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity.

Finally, greater even than all the foregoing is the merit produced by realizing impermanence, were it but for an instant. This shows how ontological or existential realizations are even more efficacious than ethical realizations.

Summary

In summary, causes are good, bad, and mixed. One can also cultivate the cause of abstinence or renunciation. Only in this way is causality transcended. Upon awakening, it seems that it is still necessary to work out “unfruited” causal potentials inherited from the past. Thus, the Buddha distinguishes between awakening and final enlightenment. Enlightenment results in the complete transcendence of rebirth and represents the end of the Path (at least as far as we know). For all we know, enlightened beings may enter a completely new project upon transcending rebirth. Such a project might be entirely beyond human comprehension. It is certainly not the teaching of the Buddha that enlightened beings cease to exist in any sense; Buddhism is not nihilist.

Fruited causes disappear, but unfruited causal potentials determine the quality of one’s subsequent experiences and the conditions of one’s future rebirths. However, causality is not fate. Because of the Buddha-potential that is one’s true nature, one is an essentially volitional being, free to choose. The primacy of volition is ontological; reality itself is unconditioned, and therefore absolute. Therefore, although one finds oneself immersed in causality, how one chooses to interact with these conditions is entirely free. That one is essentially free in a causal world is also the proof of our essential divinity. Intention is the ultimate cause of causality. It is also possible to infer our causality from our experiences. This meditation can become the basis of self-improvement. By abstaining from negative causes and purifying negative effects, cultivating positive intentions, and practising detachment and loving-kindness, one can ultimately transcend moral causality altogether, and so improve one’s circumstances and ultimately attain emancipation.

To benefit from the accumulation of merit, one must be good intentioned. Bad intentions modify or negate the merit of good actions. One accumulates merit both by performing positive and by avoiding negative actions, offering gifts to the teaching, meditation and other spiritual exercises, and especially by cultivating spiritual realizations and insights. These exercises are not equal. Ethics are the least important. Dharma offerings, spiritual practice, and especially spiritual study and realization produce far greater merit than ethical observances alone. Such actions are extraordinarily efficacious.

[1] It is not clear from the text whether the Buddha means renunciation destroys existing unfruited kamma, or simply prevents the arising of new kamma.