Karma, Intentionality, and Insight in a Buddhist Critical Phenomenology

Historically Buddhist thinkers and practitioners have struggled over the relationship between liberatory insight and the operations of karma. Does the liberatory process of a practitioner at any point result in the transcendence of the need to attend to karma? Many texts warn against the arrogance of believing one is beyond human karma; however, theories like non-regenerative karma, arhatship, and the potential for clearing of seeds from alaya lay open the theoretical possibilities for the sage beyond karmic considerations. Often more relevant to Buddhist practitioners is that cultivating realizations of emptiness, non-self, and higher jhanas can result in an absence of any dualistic self-awareness alongside insights into the constructed nature of the self and mind. As a hardened sense of self abates, one may attach to an ahistorical immediacy of experience that then makes for potentially dangerous views whereby the historical conditioning of the practitioner is considered no longer relevant.

We see something similar in the history of critical theory and phenomenology, whereby social theorists  are critical of Husserlian phenomenology for not taking seriously the socially and historically conditioned person.

In both cases we have a tension between a historically conditioned person and phenomenological insight into basic structures of mind, body, and experience that register that experience as ahistorical. While Buddhism resolves for this in the doctrine of the two truths of relative and absolute whereby the ahistorical suchness of experience and karmic conditioning are together understood as being a nondual expression of human experience and life, western phenomenology and critical theory are accomplishing this same integration in what has come to be known as Critical Phenomenology.

Beyond ways these two traditions of thought and practice parallel one another around attempts to resolve ahistorical observation and social-historical conditioning, they also have something to offer each other in terms of clarifying the social replication of violence.

Where the two traditions most resonate is that Buddhist karmic theory and phenomenology both center a basic structural intentionality of experience. Not only does Buddhist thought make similar claims that all consciousness is object-oriented consciousness, in the Kamma Sutta, the Buddha makes the clear claim that one finds old karma in the sensory consciousnesses of the body. In other words, the very orientations of organ-based consciousnesses are a result of historically sedimented intentionality. However, unlike European phenomenology, karmic theory provides a means by which to understand the reproduction and transformation of sedimented intentionality. In short, there is a spiritual practice that can be engaged for the express purpose of transforming intentionality itself.  

While phenomenology provides a clear description of intentionality, very few thinkers enter into the landscape of transformative practices. Husserlian phenomenology does not expressly theorize any practices for transforming intentionality via phenomenological means. On the other hand, Fanon – who was able to theorize social-historical body schemas – engaged transformation through existential, revolutionary acts, rather than utilizing the same phenomenological method to describe the transformation of the racialized body-schema he discovered via those means.

Buddhism engages this issue of transformation in a twofold way. The practice tradition certainly utilizes what we might consider a phenomenological method to understand the basic causes and conditions of the mind’s relationship to experience. One’s interrogated karmic motivations and actions are then reoriented by the teachings of the dharma and the practice of vows. However, moral behavior is not in and of itself considered sufficient for the full transformation of being; one must also see into the conditioned structures of phenomenal experience broadly, realizing they are empty of any kind of essence or permanent ground – what might be considered an ontological transformation through a phenomenological method.

However, the necessity of action in the transformation of intentionality is baked into the basic practice orientation of Buddhism. For example, the eightfold path allows us to consider the relationship of intention to intentionality in early Buddhism. We have here an injunction to practice upright or wholesome expressions of view, intention, and action. However, we do not see the word cetanā used here; rather the word saṅkappa, which seems to describe a more specific case of intention that is both conscious and moral in that it is aimed at cultivating wholesome behavior. Specifically in this case, they are intentions that counter the three poisons of greed, hate, and delusion, which the Buddha describes in the Kamma Sutta as present-day karma.

These conscious actions lay down into the body and mind what will eventually be the old karma of the future, replacing old sedimentation with new. The wholesome intentions of renunciation, good will, and harmlessness are set to address the three poisons and change what is sedimented. Thus Buddhism engages consciously intentional moral action as the means by which sedimented intentionality is transformed.

While Yogacara Buddhism offers entryways into considering this kind of transformation collectively, until recently scholarship regarding karma in the West has not engaged the histories of collective identity and violence as explicitly as we see in critical theory. By connecting interpretations of karma that include collective interpretations to the work of critical theory, there is a possibility for fleshing out praxes for the transformation of violent social orientations being transmitted by personal identities and institutional orientations. We see examples of this in the work of addressing whiteness and patriarchal masculinity in Buddhist-oriented communities whereby social interpretations of karma, critical theory, and phenomenological insights into non-conditioned experience are all critical to theories of transformation.

In short, what Buddhism may provide critical phenomenology is a means by which to understand a transformative mechanism for the sedimented nature of intentionality. In turn, Buddhism’s own engagement of collective karma would be augmented by the tradition of social critique within Critical Phenomenology that opens Buddhist conceptions to a robust theorization of social and historical reproduction, especially where multi-generational social and cultural violence are concerned. As such, the role of phenomenological insight and historical conditioning –  too often understood antagonistically – meaningfully engage in a compelling theory of social transformation.