effect function on the personal level. This is the domain of ethics or morality,
and the specific domain of karma.
(Payutto 1996:vi)The Buddha taught ‘Four Noble Truths’: suffering exists, has a cause, can cease, and
cessation comes by cultivating awareness:
Buddhism’s great innovation was the ethicisation of the pan-Indian doctrine
of karma, the law of cause and effect, by reinterpreting it in terms of intention...
Buddhist teachings are centrally concerned with the functioning of the mind,
how willing comes about.
(Watson 1999:69)Prior to the Buddha, karma meant just ‘the law of cause and effect’. Traditionally, it
explains how actions in previous lives affect experience in this life. Whether or not
we accept reincarnation, there are in all lives patterns in the mind which become
habitual, that is, ‘unmindful’, unintentional, outside of volition, arising from
unconscious complexes. These patterns arise from conditions in our early
development.
Jung demonstrated their reality with the word association test, described in the
Clark Lectures (1909). Subjects respond with free associations to a list of words. Both
content (words) and form (time delay between stimulus and response) give
information. Time delay results from awareness being given subliminally to repressing
associated painful feelings. Actions without mindfulness give rise to anguish and
suffering, creating negative karma. Understanding karma as intention emphasizes the
concept of human beings as free agents with choices to make.
However, for Yukio, karma meant simply ‘past actions have inevitable present
consequences’. He believed that he deserved his bad karma from previous lives.
Though choice depends on personality (Wood 1977:53), circumstances reinforced
Yukio’s negative belief and entrenched his complex. After giving clinical details, which
we both fictionalized to preserve confidentiality (Tuckett 1993), I’ll use them to
examine the concept of complex.
The boy with no faceYukio was born in rural Japan into a traditional Buddhist extended family. His mother
left him within days of his birth, to live abroad with his father. He was raised by a
nanny. In his early years he had needed many operations, yet the centre of his face
sank inwards, speech was impaired, he looked and felt ugly. Soon his behaviour fitted
his ‘bad’ face. He joined a rough gang of older boys, truanted, stole, and ran away
which drove his uncles to distraction. His escapades often ended with a whipping
and him being locked in his room.
Negative attention reinforced his personal myth that ‘attachment means
abandonment’. Being ‘exiled’, sent to live with his unknown parents at the age of ten,
KARMA AND INDIVIDUATION 205