Are Thailand's Buddhists more heretical than the heretics?

Without the knowledge of contrasting karma theories in the Buddha's time, many Thais fail to understand how the Buddha revolutionised the concept of karma, turning it from an all-oppressive cosmic force to a power to command one's own life and make spiritual advancement in this life. Failing to grasp the Buddha's emphasis on the here and now, they regress to the pre-Buddha concept of karmic determinism in which everything in life is determined by the past.

This kind of karmic navel-gazing - identical to the heretical view called pubbekatavada attributed to the Niganthas in the Canon - allows Thais to conveniently blame all of today's predicaments on bad deeds committed in previous lives. Instead of making efforts to improve one's conditions according to the Buddha's forward-looking doctrine, they are preoccupied with staring retrospectively into the karmic crystal, as evident in the many popular books on scanning, decoding, tracking and untying karma.

In "Sivaka Sutta", the Buddha clearly rejected this heretical view that "whatever a person experiences, be it pleasure, pain or neither-pain-nor-pleasure, all is caused by previous karma". He gave examples of physical, biological and social factors as additional causes for present experience, concluding that holders of such views "go beyond what they know by themselves and what is accepted as true by the world".

In "Tittha Sutta", the Buddha reasoned that this kind of karmic determinism would also mean that people do good and bad deeds as a result of past karma. Such fatalism would mean nobody is responsible for their acts, and there would be no desire and effort to do what should be done and avoid what shouldn't be done. Obviously such a view doesn't constitute a religion - let alone the Buddha's.

For the Buddha, karma means motivation in the here and now to make spiritual advancement through the destruction of greed, hatred and ignorance. Sadly, most Thai Buddhists would rather pray at famous temples, receive blessings from celebrated monks or pay charlatans to exorcise bad karma out of them.

This deterministic view has done great damage not only to individual effort but also to Thai society as a whole, where we rationalise inequality and justify prejudices. According to this view, the disabled, the poor and women are said to deserve their present predicaments because they made insufficient meritorious deeds or, worse, committed sins in their past lives. This list of second-class humans has extended to cover homosexuals, transgenders, people with HIV, crime victims, sex workers, the frail and even tsunami victims.

This "past karma doctrine" has long been effectively used for social control. In his book, "Money, Sex, War, Karma", David R Loy wrote, "Taken literally, karma justifies the authority of political elites, who therefore must deserve their wealth and power, and the subordination of those who have neither. It provides the perfect theodicy: If there is an infallible cause-and-effect relationship between one's action and one's fate, there is no need to work toward social justice, because it's already built into the moral fabric of the universe."

In such a world of Panglossian complacency, where things are the way they are for the best, there would be no place for public welfare. The underprivileged are told to quietly endure their "self-inflicted" predicaments, while accumulating good deeds in order to be reborn in a better next life. Most of them are locked in a psychological closet of self-pity and self-loathing, and feel no desire to demand better treatment.

In a society revelling in karmic fatalism and cosmic retribution, rigid norms and communal sanctions are enforced to preserve the social - and cosmic - order. It is righteous to maintain prejudice and discrimination against marginalised groups, and empowering measures provided for them are seen as an undue approval and encouragement for those with allegedly undeserving moral characters.

Taken by believers into their own hands and institutionalised by society, karmic determinism, in effect, is turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, much of the ordeal suffered by the vulnerable is ensured by structural violence in the forms of public censure and social sanctions. 

It is quite clear that such a "Buddhist" society would not believe in equality. Human rights standards would be resisted, as they imply human interference with karmic justice. Even the Buddha has been misquoted to justify inequality, with apocryphal sayings such as "People are born unequal, just as the different lengths of the fingers on the same hand."

In fact, in "Vasettha Sutta" the Buddha was the first religious teacher to proclaim the commonness of all humankind in an age when castes, sexism and racism strongly prevailed. In Buddhism, therefore, differences among people should be a cause for kindness and compassion.

If the Buddha had taken his understanding of karma as a reason for inaction, he wouldn't have bothered to share his wisdom and there would be no Buddhism as we know it. Indeed the god Brahma who, according to legend, requested that the Buddha preach to the world, can be no other than the personification of socially-engaged virtues. The conversion of the murderous Angulimala is just one example of the Buddha's compassion.

To use a science metaphor, the Buddha was not only the Newton that transformed our understanding of karmic gravity, but also the Wright brothers who led the way in navigating and even defying it.

There's no doubt that the Buddha would approve of a social system that provides the kind of discrimination-free environment in which everyone, regardless of differences, can make spiritual advances in this life.

Now that Thai society is debating social equality and justice, it's necessary to ask whether the karma discourse widespread among Thai Buddhists is not more heretical than those of the heretics. The Niganthas, in fact, were too busy trying to eliminate their own karma to create more of it by oppressing others with karmic vigilantism.

In order that prejudices unworthy of Buddhism have nowhere to hide, wrong views must be exposed as such, like the Niganthas' pavilion being blown away by the twin miracle. It's time we stop misusing the Buddha's teachings to justify the ugly sides of our society, and allow the dharma - "good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end" - to shine again.

This is part 2 of a two-part series.