Superimposition / Karma

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advaitin, "kamal_kothari_india"

<kamal_kothari_india> wrote:

> Sankara says in his Atmabodha, verse 12 :

>

> "The Gross body, the home for experiencing pleasure and pain, is

> acquired on account of the resultant taints of past actions....."

 

Hi Kamal,

 

Thank you for your response and for the quotes on Karma from

Shankara's Atambodha. In addition to those entries we might add

entries from the Upanishads:

 

[1] "Course and fine, many in number,

The embodied one chooses forms according to his own qualities (Sv Up.

V.11)."

 

[2] "According as one acts, according as one conducts himself,

so does he become. The doer of good becomes good. The doer of evil

becomes evil. One becomes virtuous by virtuous actions, bad by bad

actions (Brad. Up. IV.iv.5)."

 

[3] "The great unborn Self (atman) who is this (person)

consisting of consciousness (vijnana) among the senses . . . He does

not become greater by good works or smaller by evil works (Brad. Up.

IV.v.22)."

 

The first two quotes belong to statements about the relative world

(i.e., apara vidya), while the third is a statement referring to the

highest standpoint (i.e., para vidya). That appears to support the

concept of Shankara from the quotes you gave and is probably from the

perspective of the practical world, otherwise he would be involved in

a contradicting the third passage above.

 

The first two passages, in addition to your quotes from Shankara, is

inconsistent with his claim that the whole notion of causation is

unreal (see Nikhilananda's Mandukya Up. IV.v. p. 228) on which

the workings of karma are believed to be based. But he is probably

speaking from the standpoint of para vidya as pointed out above, so

the apparent inconsistency then is resolved.

>From an epistemic perspective, Karma appears to draw support from the

pramanas (means of valid knowledge) of sabda (testimony, i.e,

Sruti – Vedic scripture) and from arthapatti (postulation). In

our modern world which is fully exposed to world religions and

various philosophies, Sabda is mainly helpful only internally within

a belief system, since it may be contradicted across other systems of

thought.

 

But support from arthapatti also has its problems, and its not clear

if this pramana can be appealed to for support, since it may not

satisfy the requirement that there be no other satisfactory way of

accounting for the otherwise inexplicable. In other words, there are

competing explanations for what karma attempts to explain: for

instance, the good fortune and bad fortune of persons, which can be

explained in a number of ways as shown by accounts of in the

behavioral sciences.

 

I would be interested in knowing from anyone if there is some other

basis for possibly establishing the validity of Karma which is

outside the six pramanas.

 

Thanks.