The “Karmic historiography” essay forum represents a convergence of two vital currents in contemporary humanities scholarship: first, an interest in enabling an intellectual space that has been dominated by Western texts and traditions to be engaged and inhabited by other sources and traditions; second, a desire to demonstrate that the humanities can make important contributions to understanding some of the most pressing issues of our day. The result is a rich, thought-provoking series of reflections on the relevance of notions of karma to historical analysis, with a particular focus on this moment.
With regard to the first current, these essays can be seen as extending the fruits of decades of work in comparative religious ethics. Crucially, they do so without feeling the need to explicitly compare Buddhist texts with Western ones in order to probe what these Buddhist materials have to contribute to a conversation that extends well beyond Buddhist studies. Even when figures such as Vine Deloria, Jr. (Brennan) or the Jesuit Greg Boyle (Moore) are brought into the discussion, they are not invoked for a double-barreled comparison but rather engaged as part of a broader, multivocal conversation. I applaud this development; I take it as an important step toward forging a common conversation in which sources from diverse times and places are productively brought together.
Yet the contribution goes further. Not only are the materials brought into a common conversation; perhaps more importantly, that conversation is framed largely in terms of prominent concepts from Buddhist traditions: karma, dependent origination, suffering, and no-self. The terms of encounter between the reader and the questions at hand are set by those concepts, rather than having those concepts converted into other concepts that might be more familiar to more US readers. This is vital to having a conversation on equal footing.
Pointing to how these concepts structure the conversation foregrounds how the concepts function. In framing the essay forum, Jonathan Gold posits that Buddhist approaches to these concepts “are nothing more or less than practical tools. They are, as Buddhists say, ‘conditioned’ or even ‘empty.’ They may be useful, but only sometimes, not always and only so.” In doing so, Gold simultaneously sets up the value of these concepts as merely heuristic and contends that “that’s the best we can hope for, as long as we’re stuck cycling in samsara”—thereby challenging a juxtaposing of this heuristic value with an ultimate vision of reality.
The contributions themselves, however, implicitly suggest a further binary in how we may conceive of the operation of the concepts. Throughout the collection, we witness repeated shifts between analyses inspired by Buddhist concepts—highlighting their metaphorical power—and efforts to interpret the specific contours, meanings, and applications of these concepts. Of course, these modes rarely exist in pure form. They are perhaps best thought of as ideal types in the Weberian sense. I see value in both of these modes.
Our efforts to learn from materials originating in distant times or places need not be strictly bound by the most faithful readings. To the contrary, much of what can be powerful about bringing novel materials together or engaging them in relation to novel contexts arises from their power to generate fresh insight. David McMahan’s fascinating discussion of living in “digital samsara” is a good example—not because he brings Buddhist concepts to bear on our digital existence but rather because he does so in a manner that does not (in this context) prioritize the interpretation of the sources from which he draws. The value of the work done in this mode of engagement, then, lies in—and must be judged in terms of—the illumination generated (recognizing that the judgment of this raises a host of additional questions).
Yet a number of the pieces at least point toward the value of more painstaking interpretive work. Jessica Zu’s attention to translating dukkha as precarity rather than suffering, for instance, is a small but telling example of the kind of contribution that depends upon higher levels of erudition and that engages in scholarly debates over interpretation. (Wendi Adamek arguably exemplifies both modes at different points in her piece.) More important than the focus on background erudition, however, is the standard by which work done in this mode is judged. Whereas work in the first mode is judged preeminently in terms of the illumination it offers—with an implicit assumption that even misreadings can be productive—work in the second mode is judged to a significant degree in terms of the quality of the interpretation and analysis of the ideas and materials examined.
With regard to the second of the currents with which I began, we can also see these pieces as contributions to what appears as an urgent need for the humanities: to demonstrate that the kinds of learning we associate with the humanities have something vital to contribute to our current moment. Whether engaging with the emergence of generative AI or specifics of our political moment, a number of the contributions seek to demonstrate what a series of Buddhist concepts—as elaborated in specific contexts—can contribute to some of the most urgent questions of our day. I laud this goal. Collectively, they deliver on this promise by implicitly demonstrating that the relevance of notions of karma to understanding our moment involve something very different from what gets touted as “religious literacy.” To the contrary, we only start to see the potential relevance when we hear about specific, contested elaborations of the concept, whether in The Kālāma Sutta (Zu), Kim Iryŏp (Park), or Thich Nhat Hanh (Long). A focus that remains at the level of so-called religious literacy may easily stop at suggestions that the notion of karma intrinsically involves blaming the victim and thereby lead us to think there we’ve already hit a dead end. In showing the insufficiency of such an understanding, these contributions demonstrate the need for and value of the kind of deeper knowledge that many of us seek to develop and cultivate in our students.
Yet, insofar as we seek to demonstrate why the humanities matter, the contributions serve more as teasers and trailers than the feature event. In their necessary brevity, the pieces are unable to develop the points with the nuance and precision required to develop a genuinely powerful argument. The brief treatments are thought-provoking, but they ultimately beg many questions about how we should understand the concepts at hand or how they might illuminate AI. In key respects, then, the pieces remain suggestive; they may provoke a curiosity that leads the audience toward further study precisely to address the outstanding questions. Whether they intend to or not, the pieces highlight the challenge of demonstrating the contributions to be made through the careful study of complex texts and ideas within media that are becoming ever more dominant. Ultimately, it is vital to distinguish this provocation—as important as it is—from a fulsome demonstration of what humanistic learning has to contribute to engaging with complex questions.
In closing, I want to turn briefly to a question about what these pieces have shown about the fruitfulness of a karmic historiography. Jin Park and Joy Brennan both begin by articulating a frequently raised concern about the notion of karma: that in the logic of karma “social injustice is also justified, as those who suffer are presumed to deserve their fate due to karmic debts” (Park). Moreover, as Brennan puts it, “This use of the concept of karma to victim-blame is endemic to Buddhist thought in some places and times. And this idea does have roots in some Buddhist texts and teaching. But is it a good account of karma?” They and the other authors highlight that the concept is far richer than such impressions would suggest. This is one of the things I appreciate about the essays: They avoid letting this concern consume the entire concept of karma.
Insofar as the pieces are intended to explore the fruitfulness of the concept of karma for historiography, however, I would have liked to hear more about how these authors grapple with this aspect of the concept within Buddhist traditions. While Gold’s example of payback for law firms that opted for greed provides immediate gratification, prominent law firms are not the only victims who may get blamed for their own suffering. Brennan, for one, suggests that this interpretation of karma is not simply a Western imposition. As such it would seem relevant to hear more about this vital point—whether it is understood as a misinterpretation, an aberration, or something else—if we want to grasp the promise of karma for historiography.
From my perspective, as a scholar focused on modern Western grapplings with the sociality of the self, I wonder if one path to doing so might entail complementing the account of intentionality with an account of sociality, or even history. That is, after reading these contributions, I am left wondering how construals of karma that focus on intentionality handle sociality and our embeddedness within social and historical structures. Those of us who worry about blaming the victim are frequently concerned not simply with the suffering of those victims but that it is caused by specific, unjust social and historical structures. Accounts, Buddhist or not, that blame the victim frequently seem to lack sufficient understanding of these structures. They may be entirely blind to them and/or offer misleading interpretations. To attribute the suffering to forces and structures beyond the intentions and intentionality of the sufferer suggests the need for more than an account of intentionality: roughly put, for an account of how we are shaped by forces beyond our own intentions.
What resources might the authors of this essay forum—and the sources on which they draw—offer for thinking through these issues? Or would they contend that my framing of the challenge exhibits precisely the presuppositions that need to be challenged? Leah Kalmanson’s concern with “nonlinear currents of time and dialogue” might be taken to suggest that my own concerns are driven by an overly linear conception of time; yet I need more help to grasp how that obviates concerns over unjust suffering caused, for instance, by global structures beyond the individual’s control. Ultimately, I suspect that future cases for the fruitfulness of karmic historiography will require a more developed account of sociality and/or a more robust critique of the assumptions that motivate that request. Ironically, the next step in karmic historiography needs to be adding more history.