Other famous contemporary philosophers made their reputations by deny-
ing karma. Pakudha Kaccayana, who espoused a cosmology of seven elements,
was disputed by the Buddha over the denial of karma, which the Buddha
excoriated as the denial of morality. Purana Kashyapa was famous for deny-
ing karma and morality; he associated personally with both Mahavira and
Makkhali Gosala (Basham, 1951: 138, 278; Hirakawa, 1990: 16–19).
The great creative generations (ca. 500 or 400 b.c.e.)^19 in which philoso-
phies and religious movements crystallized is also the time in which the karma
doctrine seems to have become the center of attention. What is crucial is that
the intellectual community hit upon a problem in terms of which far-reaching
consequences for lifestyle and for thought could be formulated. It would be
false to assume that karma was a long-standing issue, that Indians suffered for
centuries under a pessimistic belief that they were bound to a wheel of rebirths,
in a suffering world and an oppressive caste system, until the Buddhists and
Jainas seemed to show the way to liberation. The problem and its solution
appeared more or less simultaneously. Karma is a vague concept in the Upan-
ishads, where emerging beliefs about immortality were more likely to be
focused on the afterlife in heaven than on return to the world. No doubt there
were primitive tribal beliefs about reincarnation; but these differ from the
Buddhist-Jaina problem insofar as nothing was assumed to be negative about
life and hence about living again. In addition, the moral dynamics of reincar-
nation, lacking in tribal beliefs, were made the center of causation, especially
in the Buddhist view (Halbfass, 1991: 292–294, 321–325; Obeyesekere, 1980).
It was the Buddhists who formulated the pessimistic idea that life is fun-
damentally suffering; at the same time, they expounded their solution, the path
to overcome karma. The problem and its solution go together; it is their joint
formulation that constitutes one of those long-standing successful moves in
intellectual space—the discovery of what we may call a “deep trouble.” A
variant of this move is found in most great religious doctrines. In moralistic
salvation religions, the concept of hell as a place of punishment is formulated
(sometimes building on previous conceptions of the afterlife as a shadowy land
of death) at the same time that the religion shows the path toward avoiding
punishment; the one is an incentive for the other. The Buddha is the first great
figure in Indian philosophy because he took the concepts emerging in the
networks of his time and created a unifying complex of the key problem
together with its solution.
Monastic Movements and the Ideal of Meditative Mysticism
That there is a crystallization point is apparent from the fact that Buddhism,
Jainism, and the Ajivikas all emerged at the same time and from the same
network (see Figure 5.1). Several factors were involved.
200 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths