Attached to Paper Session
Meeting Preference
In urban Vietnam, lay and monastic Buddhists use karma as a tool for social change. Buddhists strive to make merit and transform karmic bonds to manage illnesses, control domestic violence, and promote environmentalism. Minute, daily activities like cultivating compassion and navigating dietary choices are laden with cosmological significance. In this presentation, I introduce three cases of Buddhists who used interventions in karma to manage cancer, Covid, and an abusive marriage. These practitioners understood their suffering as caused by karma, so turned to karmic interventions for resolutions. I analyze these interventions as a form of “Buddhist onto-ethics.” I argue that Buddhist ontoethics may be especially appealing for followers who lack recourse to political and economic resources when seeking to improve their lives. However, such interventions should not be reductively dismissed as unscientific coping mechanisms. Instead, I advocate for appreciation of the ways an ontoethics of karma enables people to imagine and actualize positive social change in their lives and the lives of others.
Buddhism has a longstanding history of cultural, political, and religious influence in Vietnam.[i] Approximately 50 to 80 percent of Vietnamese citizens have some connection to Buddhist practice.[ii] Buddhism has also experienced a popular resurgence as the single-party socialist state has loosened restrictions on religion in the public sphere.[iii] These changes accompanied policy reforms called Dổi Mới that reintroduced elements of privatization to the previously centralized economy. With the creation of a partially privatized market, the state began defunding and down-scaling social services like public clinics. As income gaps widen, spiritual resources are increasingly appealing to low-income communities who struggle to afford access to social services, hospital care, and mental health support.
In contemporary Vietnam, Buddhist teachers, communities, and traditions interpret merit as functioning in diverse ways. For some highly rationalized or “modernist” groups,[iv] merit is a metaphor for the benefits of investing in positive relationships with others. By contrast, for groups with more devotional approaches to Buddhism, merit is an objective semi-magical result created by doing good.[v] Its blessings may manifest in myriad ways during this or future lifetimes. A devotional Buddhist approach suggests that karma has an ontological quality that supersedes the laws of science.
In a Buddhist sense, an ontology encapsulates the whole process by which life, and the material world, come to be perceived.[vi] The “conventional truths”[vii] of our world rely on an unrecognized consensus around a “nominal reality” that is not “intrinsically real.”[viii] Rather, “to be real is not to be independent, foundational, or to have an essence; instead, it is to be dependently originated.”[ix] What we perceive as separate and autonomous objects in the world— including, often, ourselves and our own bodies— are actually part of infinitely larger processes of cause and effect. The things we experience as discrete objects lack existence apart from the universal process of cause-and-effect, which constitutes karma. These basic concepts of “emptiness”[x] and “dependent origination”[xi] indicate the “ultimate truths”[xii] of the universe that underlie our perceived conventional realities. These teachings and their interpretations, altogether, can be called “Buddhist ontologies.”
Among schools of Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Yogacara, physical reality is theorized as a projection of the mind. “Everything in the cosmos depends on the mind in order to appear as phenomenon for us,” as such, “everything in our experiences has no sui generis, immutable core.”[xiii] What we perceive as the objective world comes about through the cumulative actions, desires, cravings, and perceptions of sentient beings. Because all beings are imbricated in cycles of incarnation through karma, the world as we know it can be affected by the actions of any particular being— human, animal, insect, ghost, or otherwise.
Contemporary Buddhists in Vietnam often understand moral actions as affecting the collective or “communal” karma [cộng nghiệp] co-created by interactions among all sentient beings. In this sense, moral actions are significant not only for their own sake, but also for the tangible improvements they create throughout the ontologically interdependent web of life in perceived existence. I adapt the term “ontological ethics,” shortened to “ontoethics,”[xiv] to emphasize how practitioners use ethical actions to render ontological changes in karma, to literally make the world a better place.
[i] See: Taylor, Keith. A History of the Vietnamese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
[ii] Statistics on religion in Vietnam vary wildly by source. In comparison with John Soboslai’s citation that up to 80 percent of Vietnamese citizens have some affiliation with Buddhism (“Vietnam,” Encyclopedia of Global Religion 2 (2012): 1350.), the state Committee on Religious Affairs reports that 14.91 percent of the population is Buddhist, with a total of 26.4 percent of the population classified as “religious believers” (U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Vietnam, “International Religious Freedom Report for 2017 – Vietnam,” Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. 30 May 2018, https://vn.usembassy.gov/international-religious-freedom-report-2017-vie...).
[iii] Taylor, Philip. “Modernity and Re-enchantment in Post-revolutionary Vietnam.” In Modernity and Re-enchantment: Religion in Post-revolutionary Vietnam. Edited by Philip Taylor, 1–56. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.
[iv] C.f. David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.
[v] I use the word “magic” in an anthropological sense as any scientifically inexplicable mechanism, tool, or practice for effecting outcomes in the world.
[vi] See Jessica Xiaomin Zu, “A Spiritual Evolutionism: Lü Cheng, Aesthetic Revolution, and the Rise of a Buddhism-Inflected Social Ontology in Modern China,” Journal of Global Buddhism 22, no. 1 (2021): 49–75.
[vii] Vietnamese: tục đế; Sanskrit: saṁvṛti-satya
[viii] Jay Garfield, “Can’t Find the Time: Temporality in Madhyamaka,” Philosophy East & West 73, no. 4 (2023): 878 (877–897).
[ix] Garfield, “Can’t Find the Time,” 878.
[x] Vietnamese: tính không, Sanskrit: śūnyatā
[xi] Vietnamese: duyên khởi; Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda
[xii] Vietnamese: chân đế; Sanskrit: pāramārtha-satya
[xiii] Jingjing Li, “Through the Mirror: The Account of Other Minds in Chinese Yogācāra Buddhism,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2019): 436 (435-451).
[xiv] Adapted from Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
In this presentation, I introduce three cases of Buddhists who used interventions in karma to manage cancer, Covid, and domestic violence. These practitioners understood their suffering as caused by karma, so turned to karmic interventions for resolutions. I analyze these interventions as a form of “Buddhist ontoethics.” I argue that Buddhist ontoethics may be especially appealing for followers who lack recourse to political and economic resources when seeking to improve their lives. However, such interventions should not be reductively dismissed as purely psychological coping mechanisms. Instead, I advocate for appreciation of the ways an ontoethics of karma enables people to imagine and actualize positive social change in their lives and the lives of others.