Just A Little Dust

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In MN 136(1) the Buddha spends a fair amount of time trying to make one thing very clear to us: that when it comes to karma, it is not the action that bears fruit, it is the type of action that bears fruit. This is a very fine distinction, and to me it seems like a bit of circular logic, but it is of enough importance to him that he got quite annoyed at a couple of his disciples for not grasping the point and at one fellow in particular who gave a bad answer to a question on the subject to a wanderer who was misrepresenting the Buddha’s views.

First let’s take a look at the circular logic and why it matters, and then we can look at the sutta.

The Buddha says that when we are speaking of sañcetanikaṃ kammaṃ, “intentional actions”, whether they are performed by body, speech, or mind, they are of three types.

There is:

sañcetanikaṃ kammaṃ sukhavedanīyaṃ sukhaṃvedayati

intentional action to be felt as pleasant that is to be felt as pleasant

There is:

sañcetanikaṃ kammaṃ dukkhavedanīyaṃ dukkhaṃ vedayati

intentional action to be felt as painful that is to be felt as painful

And there is:

sañcetanikaṃ kammaṃ adukkhamasukhavedanīyaṃ adukkhamasukhaṃ vedayatī

intentional action to be felt as neither that is to be felt as neither

You can probably see that defining “intentional action that is of the type that results in X” as “that which results in X” is pretty darned circular, but here’s his point: We can’t, ourselves, tell by looking at an action what type it is. We can’t put actions in set categories and say “All generous acts will result in sukha (pleasure).” Doing that, making sweeping, dogmatic statements that particular acts are in and of themselves the sort of evil that lands one in hell or kindness that gets one to heaven (1) misses the point of suññata “emptiness” (that no category of things or concepts has any inherent, fixed nature) and (2) that such a view of the world (if correct) does not allow for liberation. The Buddha makes this second point many different ways in various suttas, but the way I understand it is: if every act has a fixed outcome then we do live in a totally deterministic universe and there is no way any apparent choice we make can make a difference.

This particular sutta opens with the Buddha’s disciple Samiddhi, about three years into his training, encountering the wanderer Potaliputta, who claims to have heard from the Buddha himself that actions performed with the body or speech don’t have results, only mental actions do. Samiddhi tells him he is mistaken and says that, having done an intentional action in any of those three ways, one will feel suffering. When Samiddhi returns and tells Ananda about his encounter, they go together to the Buddha and describe what happened. The Buddha says Samiddhi is misguided, frames the concept as shown in the Pali and English summaries above, and sets up a sort of mental graph they can use to try to understand what he’s saying. He describes four situations:

1. There’s a fellow who does bad deeds and holds wrong view, and in the end he goes to hell.
2. There’s another fellow who does bad deeds and holds wrong view, and in the end he goes to heaven.
3. A third fellow does good deeds, holds right view, and goes to heaven.
4. The fourth does good deeds, holds right view, and goes to hell.

We can already see, here, that actions and even views (mental actions) do not necessarily give the good or bad results we might assume they should.

Round two of this mental graph has four deep thinkers, one for each of the fellows above. These blokes perceive themselves as good enough to be able to see both the behavior and the results.

1. Sage #1 reasons that bad deeds have bad consequences for Fellow #1, and reasons that this is the case for everyone.
2. Sage #2 reasons that bad deeds have good consequences for Fellow #2, and reasons that this is the case for everyone.
3. Sage #3 reasons that good deeds have good consequences (&c) … for everyone.
4. Sage #4 reasons that good deads have bad consequences (&c) … for everyone.

The Buddha says he will grant these sages this much: That they can see the behavior, and that they can see the results, but he will not grant that they can determine from that some universal rule. He knows this, he says, because he has seen that that is just not the way it is.

In the final section of the sutta, the Buddha sets up the same four fellows he first described, and says four things about each:

1. That they performed their actions as stated.
2. That the results came in, as stated.
3. That the reason they got the results they did — whether they seemed to match what was going on in (1) of this set or not — is because either long ago, or a while ago, they did an action that was of the type that brings about this result; or just at the last moment, their view (which is a mental act) was of that type.
4. And then he says something else, but let’s stop there a moment and recap.

Yes, they did things that we like to categorize and assume we know what results should come about; but, no, those results aren’t always what we get. And why is this? Because the action itself is not directly equated with the results — we can’t know this action equals that result. Even if we’ve seen it happen, we cannot be certain that X action will always get Y result. This should be perfectly clear.

In #3 just above the Buddha reiterates his point: don’t try to classify actions by their surfaces. Please just try to understand that actions that will have painful results result in pain, actions that have pleasant results get pleasant results, and neither-neither. Trying to nail this action to that result is something that the Buddha argued against in many different ways, and here it is as clear as clear can be, I think. What do you think?

The reason I am making a big deal of this is because when we look at the translations of what the Buddha says in #4, they all have him saying, “But because he did bad things or had wrong view, he *will* experience that bad result either now, or later.”

I suspect that some of our translators may have missed the point of the lesson.

Let’s compare the traditional translation with mine. First the traditional, with my numbering (matching the above) inserted for reference:

“[1] Therein, Ananda, as to the person here who kills living beings… and holds wrong view,

[2] and on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappears in a happy destination, even in the heavenly world:

[3] either earlier he did a good action to be felt as pleasant, or later he did a good action to be felt as pleasant, or at the time of death he acquired and undertook right view. Because of that, on the dissolution of the body, after death, he has reappeared in a happy destination, even in the heavenly world.

[4] But since he has here killed living beings…and held wrong view, he will experience the result of that either here and now, or in his next rebirth, or in some subsequent existence.” [translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, p 1064 of The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha]

And mine:

1. There, Ananda, whichever this person [does] here: he is an attacker of living beings . . . is one of wrong view;

2. with the breakup of the body, after death, he rises up in a happy state, or in heaven, or in the world;

3. perhaps earlier he did good acts for which pleasure is to be felt, or afterwards he did good acts for which pleasure is to be felt, or at the time of death he took up right view. Because of one of these, at the breakup of the body, after death he arises in a happy place, in heaven.

4. And that whatever he does here: an attacker of living beings . . . being one of wrong view; with the breakup of the body, after death, he rises up in hell, in a miserable existence, in a place of suffering, in purgatory — it may be that this view of the way one experiences the fruit of one’s actions, itself arises in others’ discourses.

This last #4 is a variant on the phrase I described stumbling on in my last post. Here it reads:

tassa diṭṭheva dhamme vipākaṃ paṭisaṃvedeti upapajja vā apare vā pariyāye

it may be that this view of the way one experiences the fruit of one’s actions, itself arises in others’ discourses.

The lesson the Buddha is teaching in this sutta is all about the ways in which we cannot tell from the actions themselves whether they will result in good feeling or bad or neutral. The traditional interpretation of the sutta subverts the point by saying that, though this time the reason for the results may not be the acts we saw but some other acts, the results of those evil acts will eventually catch up with the perpetrator — but this is the position that the Buddha denied at the outset! He said acts don’t equate to outcomes, the sorts of outcomes acts will have equate to their outcomes and that is as precise as we can be on the matter. It is, as I said, a fine distinction, and circular logic, but it is what we can see if we look around: what we would perceive as “evil acts” don’t always get the payback we think they deserve.

Another reason I am making a big deal about this is because the translation I offer here returns the sutta to consistency of message, and in the process, supports the accuracy of my translation of the phrase “diṭṭheva dhamme upapajja vā apare vā pariyāye” as being about “a view of the way things are that arose in others’ discourses” as the correct way it should have been seen in AN 10.208 as shown in the previous post.

NOTES:

(1) The version of this sutta available on accesstoinsight.org starts out with a fair translation of the types of actions matching their types of results in the opening paragraphs (section 5) but fails to keep up that level of rigor in the ending paragraphs (sections 15-19) where the distinctions being made are equally important — it is this vagueness in translation that contributes to obscuring the message.  Bhikkhus Bodhi and Nanamoli’s translation in their Wisdom Publications edition of the Majjhima Nikaya is more accurate in the assigning of actions to outcome (#3, though not accurate in #4) and so is used in the latter part of this article.

1. This post is actually about diṭṭheva dhamme upapajje vā apare vā pariyāye though it won’t look that way when you head into it because it’s in disguise.[↩]