by Harvey Kraft
Hungry Ghosts Those who in past lives either overindulged their appetites with greed and gluttony or stole food from the mouths of hungry people, in their next life became “ghosts of their former selves.” They were depicted as mute apparitions (Skt. Pretas) with grotesquely distended bellies and needle-thin throats, as narrow as a single hair. This bizarre incarnate form perpetuated starvation, as they were unable to consume. The description was a metaphor for the punishment gluttonous beings would experience in the next life—bedeviled by their unrequited or insatiable appetites. In Sumerian mythology the hungry ghosts (Sum. Gidim) were banished to the “House of Dust” below ground. In this afterlife, when the spirits became agitated, they might haunt the living, infect them with disease, or cause famine. In the Vedic version, however, these ravenous ghosts were born on the physical plane, but behind the curtain of an alternate dimension outside the human-animal world. The hungry ghosts would gather at the transparent boundary between worlds where they would be able to watch humans eat. They would make futile pleading motions and beg and moan for food.
Demons Souls rooted in rage, jealousy, and abusive behavior would be transformed into ferocious-looking, wrathful Demons (Skt. Assura). Originally these demons had resided in the Heavens as primordial Titans (Annunaki). But after the Sumerian Gods had banished some of them for a revolt, the fallen Assura descended to live in a watery netherworld. Their presence in the afterlife World of Anger reflected a state of non-subsiding, consternation, and strife plagued by simmering resentments and trigger-ready explosions of fury. Other Assuras (also former Annunaki) occupied residences in the Sixth Heaven where they served the King Devil Mara. As Anger could not be confined by boundaries, they were able to invade the lower realms. They acquired the earliest power of spirits to inhabit various form-beings and objects, especially those who had been abandoned by good-natured spirits. In applying this state of being to the Cycle of Soul Reincarnation, chronically angry human beings may be reborn as Demons, either in the realms below or above.
Animals The World of Animals was the realm of power, instinct, and fear. Its inhabitants formed dominant-submissive relationships with one another. Wild animals (Skt. Tiryagyoni) of land, air, and water, such as the mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, and other creatures suffered constant fear for their life, instinctively preying upon each other, either for the sake of survival or to claim power and territory. In this land the large swallowed the small, the long engulfed the short, and the fierce devoured the meek. Caught in the mindset of fear, humans could display animal natures, such as hunting or fleeing, or both. In this realm the hunter could turn into the hunted and the brute into a coward, or vice versa. Moreover, human beings could behave like animals either by dominating others with threats or intimidation, or kowtowing submissively to the will of a fearful authority. Those who acted in this way were likely candidates for rebirth in animal bodies.
Humans As sentient creatures, human beings (Skt. Manusya) were prone to absorption or confusion. They lived in an ongoing toggle state between fear of the lower four Worlds and the desire for the euphoria or contentment of the higher World. Humans were blessed with a variety of choices as they constantly faced the need to make adaptations and adjust to changing situations. The World of Humans was a purgatory with many examples of beings who had been to the lower worlds of Samsara. Human beings, according to the Vedic commentary Laws of Manu, were descendents of Manu,162 the first man, the king of mankind and savior of mankind from the Great Flood. For better or worse, their survival required them to choose between the high road of evolution toward civility and virtues, or the low road to devolution relying on primitive instincts. Caught up in the pressures of survival or blown about by the restless winds of gain or pain, only a very small number of humans would be able to find their way to Heaven in a future rebirth.
Deities and Spirits Gods were immortal. They were responsible for the setup, continuity, and proliferation of Nature. The beautiful palaces in the upper reaches of the Golden Mountain housed the immortal lords and their retinues, the various spirit-beings representing the forces of nature. All beings, including humans, were subjects of the gods. The gods in the World of Heaven could reward or punish beings and decide their destinies. Displeased gods cast ruin, decay, or death upon mortals, but protective deities fostered success, creativity, bliss, freedom, fertility, or growth.
KARMA
His reputation preceded him. As Sakamuni entered the area, word spread quickly that on this day the Buddha would direct his attention at the centerpiece of Brahmanism, the Doctrine of Soul Reincarnation. Hundreds gathered on the shore of the Ganges to see and hear the World-Honored One.
In the past, when kings and conquerors learned that the souls of their ancestors had joined the gods in Heaven, they coveted the prize of immortality. But not until the liberation scenarios of the Upanisads and the ascetic purifications of the Sramana did the concept and opportunity of soul ascension to the immortal plane become accessible to religious practitioners.
The Brahmanas stated that only their caste was qualified to defeat Samsara, because only a Brahmin’s soul could have evolved to a spiritual state worthy of being born a Brahmin. Because a Brahmin’s soul, Aht-man, was nearly as brilliant as the Creator’s immortal spirit, Brahman, through ritual practices and sacred readings it would take the final steps required before leaving the body in death to merge with the soul of Brahma. Their objective was to merge the Ahtman with the Brahman, the Spirit-Self of God, the Soul of All Souls, and the Divine Essence, thus attaining perfection in a state of immortal bliss.
After the Skeptics challenged the view that birth determined evolutionary superiority, some Brahmin men questioned whether bloodlines were enough to ensure their readiness for God. Some added Rishi ascetic practices to their repertoire, and set aside their senior years to pursue physical self-denial as a means for the purification of their soul.
Brahmins believed that the mortal soul (Skt. Ahtman) was the spirit containing the Self. But they concluded that souls were not all equal in quality, just as people had differing capacities and behaviors. Some souls were wild, while others had become spiritually evolved. For a soul to evolve, a person had to reject immoral acts.
Now facing an audience composed mostly of those who failed to qualify for liberation either by birth or purity, Sakamuni Buddha addressed the underlying fear in their eyes. Ordinary people accepted that their destiny would mean unrelenting hardships. They could not even conceive of a wish to ascend to the Heavens. Doomed to struggle against compelling temptations, they were terrified of the terrible specter of rebirth in the lower worlds. Caught in the unrelenting Cycle of Soul Reincarnation (Skt. Samsara) they could become hellions, hungry ghosts, angry demons, animals, or primitive humans. They had little to no hope for relief until the Buddha shocked them to the core of their being by revolutionizing the meaning of Karma.
The Jaina’s aspiration for liberation from the cycle of rebirth (Skt. Nirvana) focused on the achievement of perfect purification (Skt. Siddhas-ila) allowing for the return of the Eternal Soul (Jiva) to its homeland of Immortal Transcendence (Skt. Moksha) above the Heavens. To Jainas, all souls were utterly pure, but their shells were stained by human failings. To achieve purification of the Eternal Soul they espoused the practices of detachment, non-harm, and compassion. To avert the accumulation of sin, they took extreme care to avoid harming any creature, including insects or microorganisms.
They held that sin produced a spiritual Dark Matter (Skt. Karmans) that would stain and bind to the soul causing it to be trapped in the cycle of rebirth among the Six Worlds. The Jaina practitioners who successfully avoided physical attachments and doing harm were cleansing their souls. For them the achievement of purification would liberate their Eternal Souls to ascend to Moksha, a cosmic space above the Heavens independent of gods or divine involvement.
They conceived of the Dark Matter as microcosmic particulates produced by desires. These Karmans were sticky and coagulated
into a tar-like film (Skt. Bandha Karmans) magnetically attracted to the soul. For Jaina sages Original Sin was “the dark matter of the Soul” carried across lifetimes. As all incarnate physical forms carried Karmans from birth, the stained soul was doomed to a predetermined destiny (Skt. Karma) traveling perpetually through multiple incarnations unless and until the soul’s host could stop and reverse the process.
On this day in the Ganges, the Buddha offered a new interpretation of Karma. He announced to the assembly that neither a perfectly pure nor darkened soul determined one’s destiny. Instead, he introduced the concept of Karma as an “Information Bank” that contained all memories and potentials. He agreed that destiny was self-created, but contested the idea that the information itself was contained within a soul.
Destiny, whether it applied to a person, place, or thing, was free of any container, he said. Karma was neither a spirit, nor a particle; neither was it a stain on a soul. It was unconfined by any form, yet it was indivisible from its subject. Its information did not come into existence at the time of birth, nor did it dissolve in death. It neither came nor departed. Karma was written into the cosmos, although it could only manifest in the living world. Karma was the information underlying every form, condition, action, or relationship across all the Field of Existence at every level of space, time, scale, or dimension.
This definition recalled his time in Babylon, where for hundreds of years stargazers had collected volumes of data relating human destiny to astral configurations seen as writings in the Heavens. They had deduced a cause and effect relationship between past events and future destinies.
Building on that framework, the Buddha offered a momentous revelation incorporating divination, philosophical reasoning, metaphysical and psychological insight, and the orderliness of Universal Law. He would introduce the mechanism that operated at the core of this cosmic database.
The Universal Law of Cause and Effect was the engine that recorded Karma and converted it into manifestations and conditions projected into Existence. The continuous operation of this Law required that Karma be dynamic. Cause and Effect was an ever-changing process that created motion and the perception of progress.
As the Law of Cause and Effect operated seamlessly across the Threefold Field of Form, Formlessness, and Desire, it collected and managed the data that determined the parameters of any manifestation, such as the coordinates of time, place, scale, appearance, circumstances, and qualities at birth. This underlying modus operandi of continuously updated Karma configurations—recording, reading, reconfiguring and rewriting it—produced the circumstances and conditions related to all phenomena whether they related to an individual, groups, or things.
The Brahmin view of the soul was of a moral recorder that in death would decouple from the body and upon divine judgment reconstitute in a new form. The Buddha regarded Karma as the ever-present and ever-changing data that defined existence at any point in space-time and scale. It was the underlying story of everything.
Cause and Effect was at the heart of the Karma of All Existence. Each phenomenon, in turn, was composed of a Karma file. Each Karma file was related to other files. The cosmic database comprising each Karma file was constantly updated in the present, in relation to the past and future. Simultaneously local and non-local, Karma did not need to travel from one realm to another, like the soul.
For example, a Karma file that related to a human being at a specific moment in time encompassed all the information related to that person’s body, mind, environment, and relationships; all physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual expressions; all experiences, memories, and potentials in the past, present and future, intersecting at that one moment.
Karma included a memory state (past), potential state (future), and active state (present). In its active state Karma was the body of one’s existence as well as everything in existence related to it. Karma in its active state equaled existence in the present.
Unlike the soul, Karma was neither a separate entity, nor encapsulated, nor mobile. Just as drops of water could produce a large body of water, Karma was distinct, shared, and relative, but inseparable from the whole.
On a universal scale, the cosmic storehouse of Karma was boundless, inclusive of all information about all phenomena across past, present, and future. The Law of Cause and Effect—the cosmic processor, recorder, and manifestation engine—was impartial. Its implementations reflected only the actions and directions of its user. The Law facilitated the variables and intentions its users put into motion, but it did not determine any outcomes.
The Buddha concluded, “Karma is self-created by each individual and co-created in relation to all others. To aspire for release from the cycle of Samsara, address your Karma with the awareness that you forged it. Here is the good news. By embracing the Law of Cause of Effect, you have the power to rewrite your destiny. The future is yours to create.”
The assembly sat in stunned silence as Sakamuni continued to elucidate.
Among all the laws of nature, he declared, Cause and Effect is supreme. It is the prime mover of continuity. Awareness of this great Law gives mortal beings the opportunity to navigate through present states-of-being and shape the person they can become and create the world they will live in.
As Karma unfolded, past causes and future effects turned into the present, whether the causes had been made minutes ago or inherited from past lives. The conditional states of the Six Worlds were conditions of Karma that can be observed in one’s present physical, emotional, mental, and environmental circumstances. Unlike the classic view of Samsara, wherein one continually experienced a single condition of existence for a lifetime, the Buddha clarified that all the conditions of Samsara existed simultaneously in the here and now in the human realm. Those who seek liberation from the cycle of conditional existence should focus on awakening from its spell.
Understanding the Buddha’s profound revelation, some disciples saw their Karma through this gate of liberation by grasping that the Six Worlds were metaphors for temporary conditions appearing and disappearing in the fleeting moments of life.
DEBATE
Day after day, members of his growing audience were invited to express their views as a grand debate unfolded, which some likened to a contest of cosmological chess.
“Even a sinner intoxicated by jealous rage, filled with unrequited desires, and shaking his fist at the gods, can achieve liberation should he embrace the Buddha Way,” Sakamuni declared. “It is even possible that such a sinner can one day acquire the merits that would transform him into a god in Heaven, just as a god in due course may fall from the loftiness of Heaven and become a sinner. As the arrow of Cosmic Time continues without end, so too the Law of Cause and Effect will never end. Each moment all things are renewed. Whether they are sinners, gods, or Buddhas—whatever their condition—all mortals should strive to evolve.”
A Brahmin community leader stood to ask a question.
“With all due respect, World-Honored One,” the Brahmin said. “It appears the Buddha is saying that sinners can become immortal. Are you proposing that using the Buddha’s gates of liberation such a person can find the way to Heaven?”
“When a Brahmin seer looks into the Heavens, how does he know if he is seeing immortality or long life?” Sakamuni retorted. “While the seer may be able to peer into remote spaces, even into Heaven or the Underworlds, without the ability to view across boundless past, present, and future, how can he discern immortality?”
“On the other hand, in applying the Seven Skills for Achieving Consciousness of Enlightenment,” the Buddha continued, “my noble seekers have been able to interrupt the default mechanism of sequential illusions, the Twelve Link-Chain for Causation of Perpetual Suffering. Having done so these seekers saw their Karma and came to terms with the causes of their own sufferings. Removing obstructions, they forged a new destiny, according to their merits. As they cultivate compassion, they will be able to dedicate a vow to help nurture others. This i
s the role of a god. Even those who are called sinners can choose to progress until they find entry into Heaven. This is the Buddha Way.”
The Heavens of the Golden Mountain had established in people’s minds an abiding awe for the immortal deities. Although Sakamuni acknowledged that Heaven’s deities and spirit-beings possessed much longer lifetimes than humans, in the face of the unquestioned belief in their immortality he proposed the following revolutionary idea never before spoken by any other seer. Ultimately, he declared, even heavenly beings showed the Five Signs of Decay163 indicating that they too must sooner or later return to the cycle of renewal. In other words, given the cyclical nature of Cosmic Time, even the gods could not live forever.
Sakamuni observed that because the Law of Cause and Effect and the Doctrine of Impermanence applied across all Six Worlds, no one could escape forever the “Eight Mortal Sufferings,”164 not even heavenly beings. Herewith he declared that the residents of the Heavens were mortal.
“All beings in the Six Worlds of Existence from the top of the Cosmic Golden Mountain (Skt. Sumeru; Pali Sineru) to the worlds below it are subject to mortality.”
To some in the audience this observation implied the demotion of the gods and caused a disturbance.
Some could not bear to hear it and walked out.
Others were eager for a debate on the subject.
Most listeners were entranced and amazed, wanting the Buddha to explain further.
A Jaina seer rose to his feet to ask a question.
