The presentations in this panel work together to illustrate diverse non-dualistic paradigms of understanding karmic processes. The first paper examines the Bhutanese deployment of "wheel of life" the context of biodiversity, agriculture, and diet, with larger implications for revitalizing worldviews and generating flourishing human and more-than-human futures. The second paper reads Advaita Vedānta alongside Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and reconsiders Indic theorizations of karma as a non-linear field linking individuals, communities, and ecological systems (e.g. the atmospheric modalities of the guṇas). The third presentation examines Joana Macy's notion of the bodhisattva path, one that valorizes boundless perseverance (vīrya), patience (kṣānti), and non-attainment (anupalambha), rather than measurable progress toward the finis ultimus of nirvāṇa, since the actual attainment of the “final cause” of liberation would undermine the constitutively aspirational ethics of the bodhicitta. It further highlights Macy's insights through contemporary complexity theory to articulate bodhisattva ethics as groundless teleology.
In the lived experience of Bhutanese Vajrayana Buddhism, karma is understood as the inescapable law of cause and consequence through which each intentional act leaves a moral residue that affects the prospects for a positive rebirth. As all sentient beings cycle through the six realms of existence depicted on the Wheel of Life, often depicted in the entryways of temples, people have a vested interest in caring for other living beings, any one of which could have been one’s mother. Based on ethnographic work conducted in Bhutan over the past two decades and engaging with concepts from the field of religion and ecology, this paper explores the ecological implications of the Bhutanese doctrine of karma for generating flourishing human and more-than-human futures.
Discussions of karma in both popular and scholarly discourse overwhelmingly interpret it as an individual moral mechanism linking personal action to personal consequence. This paper challenges that assumption by arguing that classical and modern Indic traditions preserve conceptual resources for understanding karma as fundamentally collective, relational, and distributed across shared fields of experience. Drawing on Advaita Vedānta and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, the paper develops a comparative account of karma as relational becoming rather than individualized retribution.
This paper extends Joanna Macy's integration of general systems theory and Buddhist philosophy by incorporating contemporary models from dynamical systems to address a persistent challenge to Buddhist ethics: how can radical emptiness sustain ethical possessiveness without collapsing into relativism or nihilism? Building on Macy's description of 'mutual causality,' I argue that strange attractors—infinite patterns governing complex systems—model a "groundless teleology" where purposiveness emerges naturally from codependent processes that lack fixed ends. This framework illuminates the interdependent, systems-oriented basis for Macy's engaged praxis: Buddhist ethical conduct presupposes no final redemption or end-point with some essential nature (viz., a 'final cause') other than reorienting collective action to further the cultivation of skillful responsiveness suffering. A half-century after her first essay and one year after her passing, I show that Macy's legacy continues to inspire philosophical possibilities for rationally validating ethical practice in a world of radical interdependence.