Entangled Agencies: Karmic Worldviews and Worldbuilding

This paper examines the Abhidharma Buddhist debates, preserved within the translation corpus of Xuanzang 玄奘 (602?-664 C.E.), the Sinitic scholar-monk of the Tang Dynasty, regarding whether the “intermediate being” (Skt.: antarābhava) has the capacity to generate new karma. Furthermore, if an intermediate being, the “extremely subtle” (Skt.: accha) embodied form that persists throughout the “intermediate state” (Skt.: antarābhava), the interstitial space and time between the biological death and the gross corporeal rebirth of an “individual sentient being” (Skt.: ātmabhāva; Chi: ziti自體), has the capacity to generate new karma, when and how are its consequences realized? 

How does Buddhism conceptualize human agency and subjecthood? Buddhist ontology critiques the notion of a permanent self (ātman), advocating instead the doctrine of non-self (anātman). It upholds karma as the governing force behind human actions and conventional phenomena. This raises a critical question: How can anātman be reconciled with the soteriological goal of liberating all sentient beings—a task requiring a volitional, compassionate agent? A metaphor in Buddhist sūtra—mechanical wooden figure (jiguanmuren 機關木人, Skt. vetāla-yantra)—symbolizes the constructed nature of human existence and dependent origination in a karmic reality. By analyzing this metaphor in Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra and Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra, alongside Chinese commentaries, this paper argues that its interpretive diversity reflects ongoing efforts to reconcile the deterministic nature of karma with the conditions necessary for a subjecthood for compassion. This discourse gained prominence during the late imperial period as Buddhists increasingly engaged with the phenomenological aspects of reality and the intersubjective nature of mind.

The “karmic” worldview stands at once larger and smaller than a “Buddhist” or “religious” worldview. This study demonstrates how the idea of collective karma came to the fore in an array of Buddhist discourses on nation building in late Qing China. It features three case studies: (1) Yan Fu’s invention of the term, zhongye, literally “seeds-karma,” in Tianyan lun, the Chinese translation of British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and the single most influential book in initiating Chinese readers into social Darwinism; (2) Liang Qichao’s postulation of an undying “karmic totality” as the essence of the Chinese national “spirit”; (3) Zhang Taiyan’s critique of evolutionism based on Yogācāra teachings of karmic seeds. As these cases show, at a time when “karma” assumed the other name of “heredity,” discourses of collective karma played a critical role in the conceptualization of nationhood at the inception of the modern Chinese revolution.

The Tzu Chi Foundation, established by Dharma Master Cheng Yen證嚴 in 1966, is the world’s largest Buddhist charity. From its headquarters in Taiwan, Tzu Chi oversees a vast global volunteer network that provides disaster and poverty relief, medical assistance, educational resources and more. For volunteers of the foundation, a doctrinal emphasis on karmic connections serves to orient their everyday practice toward the need to establish positive relationships in the human realm. Volunteers draw on their affective experiences of karmic entanglements to help them form new affinities or transform negative relationships. This paper analyzes narratives volunteers have offered from their own life experiences of how they interpret their actions through a karmic worldview.