In chasing down the suttas in which the phrase upapajja vā apare vā pariyāye appears, I’ve come across a sutta (AN 3.34 The Nidana Sutta) in which the Buddha talks about the results of kamma using a phrase I have not encountered before, “yatthassa attabhāvo nibbattati“:
- yatthassa – reality, true nature
- attabhāvo – personality; individuality (literally self-becoming)
- nibbattati – is born; results; arises
so we find him speaking of the consequences of actions that are inspired by greed, aversion, and delusion coming to fruition where there is the arising of our natural self, that self being “attabhāvo” — the sense-of-self that arises out of the process described in Dependent Arising as “becoming”. It isn’t surprising to hear the Buddha saying that the results of actions are experienced where there is the arising of that sense of a lasting self — since it’s quite clear that the opposite is true, that when we are rid of that sense of a lasting self, we stop doing those sorts of actions, and so there will be no new “results” created — but I have never found it stated more clearly.
This turn of phrase in this context could almost (but I think not quite) be read as saying that the arising of attabhāvo *is* the result of those actions.
The sentence that follows the one with the phrase about our natural tendency to attabhāvoness, is the one containing the upapajja phrase, which is once again being roughly (and incorrectly) translated as saying that one will experience the fruits of an action in this life or later, but this, again, misses the point being made which is that it is not *about* one experiencing the fruits — in a sense there is no one *to* experience the fruits — at least not in the terminology and understanding of the Buddha’s day.
If the questions about “who acts and who experiences” that we encounter in the suttas are obscure and confusing to us, that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction because the problems being posed were framed in a quite different context, and the underlying assumptions in asking the questions were not the same as they are now, so the subtleties of the terms get lost, but in SN 12.46, for example, we can see the question being asked:
“How is it, Master Gotama: is the one who acts the same as the one who experiences [the result]?” [Translation by Bhikkhu Bodhi in the Connected Discourses of the Buddha]
to which the Buddha answers, “That is one extreme” and when asked if the one who experiences is different from the one who acts, he says “That is the second extreme.” He teaches the truth of the middle between these (which is a politically expedient thing to say, but hardly accurate, since the Buddha’s answer is so far out there it can hardly be defined as in the middle): he describes Dependent Arising as the correct answer, because it describes a process, and when that process that creates our sense of self is running — when it’s attabhāvo — that’s when we get the results.
Which brings us back to the mistranslation of the sutta as saying that:
Where that action ripens, there one will experience its fruit, either in this very life that has arisen or further along in the sequence. [translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu]
The Buddha tells us it is not about actions having results that one experiences; remember he teaches the middle between extremes and the above would be one extreme. His answer is Dependent Arising, not that “one experiences”. In this sutta he is saying that actions that arise due to greed, aversion, or delusion will bear fruits where attabhāvo arises. He doesn’t say “actions ripen/have results” (he says actions inspired by certain feelings bear results); he doesn’t say “one experiences” the fruits of those actions (he says that where there is attabhāvo arising, there are the results, period). What the mistranslated portion above actually says is:
That [the view that] wherever action bears fruit, it may be that it bears fruit for the one who experiences it, this view of the way things are arose in others’ discourses.
In this sutta as in the others in which the phrase “upapajja vā apare vā pariyāye” appears, we have the Buddha again pointing out that there are views out there about kamma that are not his.
Oh, I like this blog. You are finding some really interesting subtleties in the language that make a big difference in how we take in the teaching, and what we can observe.
I often wish that if Buddha had meant something other than the common views about meaning of kamma at the time, that he just used a different word. Do you think he didn’t because of how limited the language was at that time? Maybe I’m just so used to English which is so huge.
But your post here really helps in seeing how subtle these misunderstanding in meaning can be, and what huge ramifications they can have, sending one in a wrong direction.
Thanks, Dana. I am constantly astounded by those subtleties of language, and what they reveal about the way the Buddha saw things. Sometimes he gets so down-to-earth honest that it makes me laugh. Check out “The Causes Of Three Kinds of Results of Karma” for an example of his perfectly circular logic.
I think the Buddha wasn’t that clear about kamma because he found it was not useful to be that clear. He has such skill with language — as evidenced by how finely-tuned the words are that have him almost but not quite saying “the individual suffers” in the sutta I looked at here — that I can’t imagine that he would not have come up with a way to be clearer, if he’d felt it was useful to do so.
My current (pet) theory (for which I have no direct evidence, only the sense I have of the numerous factors that he was dealing with) is that at the moment in time when he came onto the scene, the common understanding of kamma was on the cusp of change. During this period and up to this point it had really only referred to ritual actions — we can see that this is so when Brahmins speak of kamma; this is the sense they are using it in, no moral application to it at all. But the Jains had just begun to take it out of that realm, and into wider application as being about not just things that affect the one individual, but many.
The Jains posited that it is how we affect other living beings that give kamma its weighty consequences, which began to take the concept of kamma away from being about “me” and into morality. They were concerned with “ahimsa” — non-harming, of even the tiniest little creatures, unseen organisms, even — and while their ideas seem odd to us*, they represented a significant change for the better in the way people were looking at behavior — giving it ethical meaning.
So if the Buddha saw this change, the absolutely wrong thing to do, to reduce suffering for all beings, would be to say anything that would undermine this change in beliefs about what was important about kamma. The Jains were having a significant effect — we can see it in the many suttas in which the Buddha takes on concerns about ahimsa too, under public pressure — but they still hadn’t got it quite right, as far as the Buddha was concerned: they were still, primarily, tying kamma to one’s own ultimate fate (so it was still a concern with self at its core, though it was taking an outward turn).
His system needed to — did — *does* — make kamma into something more about morality, specifically about how we affect other beings (visible effects on, primarily, visible beings) but it does not say that there is any trick by which we can use up kamma (by self-torture, like the Jains used, or by ritual practices like others used) — there *will* be consequences and as long as we keep doing these things that affect others negatively, we will have to bear up as the consequences come home to roost. (This is true and we can all see it: if we became Perfect Angels right now we would still have to endure all the effects of our past behaviors, wouldn’t we, because few would even notice we had changed.)
So rather than saying, “Kamma is a seriously imperfect model of behavior because it taints its believers with a concern for self” — a statement that could have one of two dire consequences, which I’ll get to — he said, -“Yes, yes, kamma. Just so. How we act has a big impact on our futures.”- and so he supported the change in language and change in meaning, rather than undermining it. If he had been dead-honest, either no one would have listened to him because people generally wouldn’t have understood what he was saying (which seems to be a problem Secular Buddhists and other innovators are having) — and so his dhamma wouldn’t have caught on then, and would have died aborning — or if he had been just as successful as he was, he might have harmed the emerging understanding of a moral system that many would still go on to believe in. As it turned out, his ideas about kamma and the Jains blended back into the Brahmins belief system.
I also think that frank, bare-bones honesty about what he was teaching would just not have gotten him many adherents. People *really* clung to that sense of self; saying there is nothing you can point to that is the self was dangerous enough, difficult enough to convey and hold people’s interest. To say, further, that the consequences of one’s actions don’t fall on the perpetrator of those actions starts reaching dangerous territory when people are so very good at misunderstanding what is being said. The Buddha *does* (sorta) say this, but in very subtle ways, and he talks even more often about how we *do* suffer consequences — when he talks about rebirths in heavens and hells.
So he compromised. He kept “kamma as morality with consequences for the self” because it supported the change in meaning from being *all* about the self to including our impact on others, and because it got the *sense* of what he was saying across in a way people could understand — the great masses of people who weren’t going to understand “not self” and selfless behavior, otherwise.
* The Jains believed that in order to free ourselves from the effects of kamma it might be necessary to hold completely still so as to harm nothing, and to do this to such extremes that we suffer great pain and eventually die of starvation and *that’s okay* because we’re using up kamma that way.
[…] of my recent explorations in Pali (see for example “Where One Becomes One’s Natural Self“) have led me to look at the ways in which the Buddha says that action A does not always lead […]