Right View: Collective Kamma
It's too early to know what will actually happen, but yesterday the news included hints toward the end of the wars in both Ukraine and Gaza. Millions of people have been protesting and voting and speaking out for years, and well-intentioned leaders have leaned on what power they have or are willing to use, to stop these wars, and the balance of momentum seems finally to be shifting.
“Momentum” is a good word for an aspect of kamma, the force that moves through volitional actions and their impacts to create the future. All the combined choices, actions, and reactions of our past pour into our state in the present, with its balance of ease and discontent, agency and victimhood, skillful and unskillful impulses. Then the choices that emerge from this state condition our future, on and on until we figure out how to stop making bad choices.
Last week at Satsang we talked about kamma, emphasizing how it is in some ways the internal aspect of the play of ethics, paralleling sīla and dāna (keeping our ethical commitments and giving in service of others) which guide our actions in relation to others and the world around us. The question arose about “collective kamma,” or choices and their momentum as they arise from an impact families, communities, nations, or species as kinds of individual entities. Each of these types of group—and other others—can have a collective identity, collective experiences, make collective choices, and experience the impact of their choices collectively.
Like individuals, nations—to take a large example of a collective—are born out of the resultant kamma of their ancestors, and the wars in both Ukraine and Gaza have been painful to witness and difficult to understand without being fluent in their long histories. Just like with individuals, knowing a nation's history can give you compassion for their current situation and choices, even when those choices are disastrously harmful. The Buddhist verse on kamma in the Five Recollections reminds us that everyone, from individuals to large collectives, will experience the result of their past choices:
All beings are the owners of their actions (kamma), heir to their actions, dependent on their actions, arise supported by their actions. Whatever action they do, for good or for ill, of that they will be the heir.
As we pray for peace in the world, and do what we can individually and collectively to prevent genocide, stabilize borders, and restore people to safety and cohesive communities, we work also toward the wisdom that understands historical movement for what it is: large-scale momentum of past choices rooted sometimes in greed, hatred, and delusion, and sometimes in generosity, kindness, and wisdom. The Dhamma teaches us to see every entity from the individual all the way up to the species as manifesting an identity—a contingent but impactful self—and that all of those nested entities move energy in the world and then experience the results. Only when an entity understands kamma intuitively and profoundly will it be able to stop causing harm permanently. This is how we might understand awakening as a collective phenomenon.
Until then, the work of those who pray and act for peace is to restrain ourselves and others as best we can from causing harm, and endeavor to learn, practice, and teach the wisdom that can help collectives to want peace more than they want power, security, or even collective identity. Because just as with individuals, identity is inseparable from kamma. You can't give up greed, hatred, and delusion without giving up the constricted identity that needs to be maintained against external threat, and we can't give up war permanently without changing our fixed ideas about borders, security, and the nation state.
We talked tonight about collective kamma and collective identity, continuing the series on Right View.
