To speak of “systemic” injustice is to acknowledge that large-scale practices and policies may generate inequitable outcomes regardless of the intentions of individuals. This is one rationale behind a structuralist approach to history. A possible “karmic historiography” invites us to consider the linearity of time itself through such structural analysis. For this, we need to enter the Buddhist multiverse.
To begin, one could argue that Buddhism analyzes all injustice solely at the systemic level. That is, actions arise due to prevailing causes and conditions, while the individual agents of actions are ultimately insubstantial. When presented with this so-called doctrine of no-self, the skeptical King Menander, a Greek military leader based in present-day Pakistan in the second century BCE, retorts: “[then] were a man to kill you there would be no murder.” In other words, if “I” do not exist, then “I” cannot be killed, and, moreover, no person can be arrested for the alleged “crime.” Where, asks Menander, is the moral accountability?
In response to the king, the clever monk Nāgasena uses analogies to explain how causal lines connect us to past iterations of ourselves. He likens a person to a flickering candle flame, constantly changing yet constantly renewing itself simultaneously. The flame when the candle is first lit is not identical to the flame remaining when the candle is almost burned away, yet neither are the two entirely unrelated. So, too, the person who took action yesterday and the person who reaps the consequences today are connected to each other, and these causal connections bear weight—in a word, karma. I remain accountable for my deeds, even though “I” am an aftereffect of my own past iterations within a larger web of interrelated causal factors. Such causal logic is at the core of Buddhism. The central message of the Four Noble Truths is that conditioned phenomena—i.e., situations arising from prior causes, which is to say, all situations—can be revised, reversed, or remade. Suffering can be alleviated when its causes are eliminated.
I find it telling that China’s oldest book problematizes not causality but chance. The Yijing or Book of Changes assumes a cosmos of resonant energies whose interactions produce both predictable and unpredictable results. In historical usage, the term ganying 感應 or “resonance-response” explains the activities of ghosts and spirits, the charismatic power of sages, and even the efficacy of medical treatments. In contemporary Mandarin, the same characters translate terms related to inductive effects in chemistry and physics. In the case of Buddhism, ganying is invoked as the explanatory framework for karma itself. Within the resonant cosmos of Chinese thought, karma functions not only as a causal link but also as a kind of energy exchange by which liberated beings accomplish the so-called merit transfer that allows us to share in their wisdom and compassion. I want to situate the notion of “karmic historiography” alongside these aspects of Buddhism most prominent in the lineages deriving from China.
Our guide is the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom attributed to the philosopher Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd century) although possibly an original Chinese composition penned by its supposed translator Kumārajīva (344–409). As one of the earliest translators of Sanskrit into Chinese, Kumārajīva is a crucial figure in the reception of Buddhism in China, and the Treatise, whether translated by him or written by him, is widely influential on subsequent Chinese schools. It provides a comprehensive introduction to Madhyamaka or “middle way” philosophy. Although perhaps better known for discourses on emptiness and ultimate reality, Madhyamaka is also the source of some of the most detailed visions of the multiverse in Buddhist literature.
The key word is the impressively lengthy “trisāhasramahāsāhasralokadhātu” meaning “three-thousandfold great-thousandfold world system” or, simply, “trichiliocosm.” A Buddhist trichiliocosm contains thousands of world systems, each with similar geographies and similar sets of realms where beings can incarnate, including infernal, celestial, and terrestrial planes. The Treatise mentions not one trichiliocosm but innumerable trichiliocosms—the multiverse. Buddhism’s attention to system-level analysis is also its talent for worldbuilding on a vast scale.
Each universe within the multiverse is the realm of a single buddha, which is due in part to a technicality. A buddha, by definition, is an awakened being who attains liberation without recourse to previously established teachings. Because all other subsequent awakened beings attain liberation thanks to the dharma established by the earlier buddha, only one buddha at a time is possible within a given universe.
The Treatise digs into such technicalities, as do other writings influential in Chinese lineages. We learn of liberated beings called bodhisattvas with supernormal powers of control over karmic conditions, capable of seeing their past lives and choosing the circumstances of future incarnations. These beings can teleport across vast distances in the multiverse instantaneously. Some specialized teachers transgress karmic boundaries to enter hell realms and preach the dharma. Advanced practitioners purify the areas around themselves to create paradisical lands outside the karmically conditioned realms of rebirth. All these buddhas and bodhisattvas of the past, present, and future mutually contemplate each other via their interdimensional powers.
Perhaps the most important transdimensional buddha is Amitābha, one of many prior buddhas in our universe’s distant past. According to a set of texts dating to perhaps the first or second century, Amitābha was once a monk named Dharmākara who studied the purified lands of countless other buddhas to determine the purest aspects of each. He then vowed to establish his own land with only such superlative features, a feat that he accomplished upon attaining buddhahood. According to the vow, Amitābha’s realm contains no hells, all beings born there have subtle bodies the color of gold, and all possess the power to travel instantaneously across the multiverse. Moreover, by his vow, anyone who calls on Amitābha’s name is guaranteed rebirth in his Pure Land.
Today, Buddhists worldwide chant his name in diverse languages: Amituofo (in China), Amida Butsu (in Japan), A Di Đà Phật (in Vietnam), and so on. Via mutual resonance, he hears and responds to our suffering. And via a karmic energy exchange, we share in his liberation. This buddha of the distant past is simultaneously the beating heart of Buddhism’s present.
Can we imagine a “karmic historiography” that is likewise transtemporal? By thirteenth-century Japan, we find Zen Master Dōgen explaining that time flows in multiple directions. “Today flows into tomorrow,” he says, but “today flows into yesterday,” too. Those causal relations that link yesterday’s self to today’s self are, like all causal relations in Buddhist analysis, mutually interdependent. Cause and effect, before and after, are meaningfully distinguished only in light of Buddhism’s liberatory aims. “Only suffering arises,” says Sister Vajirā in the Pāli canon, “and only suffering ceases.” Ultimately, this is the sole trajectory that Buddhism is concerned with tracking.
However, unlike those early practitioners in the Pāli texts, Zen Master Dōgen entertains the simultaneity of such arising and ceasing. For Sister Vajirā, Buddhist practice unfolds over multiple lifetimes, maybe thousands, driven by the karmic forces that keep us tied to cycles of reincarnation. For Dōgen, practice simply is enlightenment, right here and now. He coins the neologism “practice-enlightenment” (shushō 修證) to get his point across. For Dōgen’s thirteenth-century contemporary Shinran, the moment of chanting Amida Butsu’s name is the moment of future rebirth in the Pure Land. The simultaneity, says Shinran, is our guarantee of the chant’s efficacy.
In a 2022 book, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, Reverend Zenju Earthlyn Manuel situates her Buddhist practice in light of her ancestral connections to Black Christianity and Yorùbá divination. In doing so, she seeks to reclaim the intertwining bonds linking Japanese Zen to the ghosts, gods, and ancestors of local traditions across Asia. How does historiography chart these nonlinear currents of time and dialogue? The philosopher Kyle Whyte of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation describes engagement with ancestors who exist simultaneously in the past and the present—a “living Indigenous science (fiction)” marked by “counterfactual philosophizing” and a sense of “spiraling temporality.” Buddhism’s transtemporal historiography and multiversal worldbuilding recognizes nonlinear connections. Gaze reverently at images of the past buddhas, says Dōgen, and those “buddha ancestors” (busso 佛祖) will “actualize” (genjō 現成) here and now.
That said, in seeking to actualize the past, to connect to the ancestors, we must heed the obvious fact that not all ancestors are our own. As Whyte warns, “living Indigenous science (fiction)” is not unmoored fantasizing. We who are immigrants, who are settler-colonists, who are displaced and have displaced others, live amidst ghosts, gods, spirits, and ancestors who are not our kin. The language of resonance and energy exchange in a karmic historiography reminds us that spiritual connections involve mutual participation—not all lines of communication are open to all of us equally. Systemic analysis requires attention to the nuanced details of specific contexts. Perhaps, then, the language of “universality” and “transcendence” common in religious discourse does not serve us well here. Buddhism’s preference for the multiversal and transdimensional, however, points us toward an encounter with history in emphatically liberational terms.