The Background to Buddhism 33The dominance of the karma–rebirth framework in India was
unique in the world, however it also shows an interesting charac-
teristic of socio-religious ideologies: the answers given in religious-
cosmological speculation to the problems of meaning very often
generate further ‘problems’. The concept of karma/rebirth was a solu-
tion to the problem of meaning, a solution that dispensed with the
need for any notion of a creator God or a God intervening in history
or beyond it to punish or reward human effort. ‘Evil’ (papa) and
‘merit’ (punya) had their own payment, however postponed or pro-
longed. This could of course be interpreted in varying ways, depend-
ing on what was called ‘evil’ (the Brahmanic version included
infringement of caste rules; the samana traditions did not). But this
displaced the problem of meaning to another level instead of fully
solving it. The idea of a pleasant rebirth as a reward for merit, a bad
one as punishment, solved the problem of experiential injustice by
postulating some form of cosmic justice, providing in the process a
ground for moral action in the world. But, the chain of karma/rebirth
could lead to an endless cycle; births following births, cause and
effect, actions and consequences, punishments and rewards over and
over. The result is that the ultimate tragedy is not death but being con-
demned to an unimaginably long process in which not even heaven or
pleasurable lives on earth could be secure, and tragedy and sorrow
result from the endlessness of the process. The imagination of the
Indians was now speculating in terms of aeons and ages; the cycles
themselves, even the ‘rewards’ of heavens and pleasures, could be seen
as oppressive. How would the cycle end? How did it begin? Could it
end? What was the meaning of it all? How did the ‘causal’ chain of
one birth to another work, and what were its moral characteristics?
Could the whole round be transcended so that the individual soul
could approach another beyond-the-beyond level of being?
Thus new questions were posed which affected both the groups
that debated publicly: the wandering samanas, and the householder
and secretive Brahmanic philosophers. Different trends emerged in
response to them. The knowledge about these varied philosophies
is limited; both Sanskrit literature and the Buddhist Pali literature
describe them from their own point of view, and only minimally,
in a spirit of refuting them. The Pali texts are more concrete in
depicting dialogues and naming teachers who were undoubtedly
actually existing at the time of Gotama. The most extensive text isnot ascetics and according to the values of the ‘renouncers’ had less
status (they were also identified, as we shall see later, with the
Ayurvedic medical tradition). But most of those who lived in the
forests were indeed ascetics, some practicing extreme austerities.
There were also some aspects of Vedic tradition that encouraged
austerities, and as Brahmanism developed, tapascarya usually
meant practicing austerities in order to gain magical power
(shakti). However a major source of the practice was indigenous
and non-Vedic, and for the purpose, as the samanas used it, of
gaining liberation from the round of rebirths (Bronkhorst 1998).
The notion of karma/rebirth link was the main framework that
guided the philosophising and austerities of the samanas. In the
tumultuous society of the first millennium BCE, with old tribal sol-
idarities and certainties broken up, individuals were emerging with
new questions: what happened to the personality after death? Was
there any survival at all and what would its nature be? What was
the point of it all? These questions were not of much concern to the
Vedic peoples, who saw this worldly rewards as pre-eminent; there
were gods and tentative heavens, but these were often themselves
transient. At some point in the process of questioning and specula-
tion, the notion of being born again took hold, and this began to
be linked with the efficacy of action, or karma. Future rebirth,
whether in heavens or hells or in particular positions on earth,
began to be seen in ‘causal’ terms, a result of actions performed in
one life.
The first millennium BCE saw in many societies the rise of
consciousness about the individual. In India, the prevalence of the
karma/rebirth ideational framework meant that this individual was
conceived of as a being subjected to many births, going from
reward to punishment, heavens to hells and round again, as a result
of action in the causal chain. The problematic is the opposite of
that posed in the Greco-Roman tradition, which saw the individual
doomed to mortality, liable to death, the subject of tragedy. It also
differs from the Semitic/Egyptian religions which saw the individ-
ual as related to a supreme Creator-God who presided over death,
judgement and some form of immortality. In India, in contrast, the
individual was seen, in the absence of a supreme God, as liable to
endless rounds of birth and death, jatimarana. The actions and
events of one life could be linked causally to those of another.
32 Buddhism in India