ABSTRACT
In a classic debate depicted in an early scripture of the Jains, a foundational critique of Buddhist ethics can be found. The Jain mendicant Adda, upon encountering some Buddhist monks, caricatures a normative Buddhist approach to ethical responsibility in which “intention” (cetanā) is the benchmark for karmic culpability: “If someone puts a man or a child on a spit and roasts it on a fire taking it for a lump of oil-cake, it would be fit for Buddhists to end their vow of fasting with” (Bollée 1999, 413). Much modern academic discourse on Buddhist theories of action has contributed to constructing a similar caricature of a Buddhist mentalist or internalist understanding of action and its consequences. But is such an image really justified when it comes to practices and onto-epistemic commitments on the ground in South Asia? In this paper, I interrogate this question by recourse to mainstream Buddhist sources from the early centuries of the Common Era. These sources detail a theory of karma in the context of Buddhist practice (yogācāra). By exploring relationships that a practitioner is encouraged to develop with a variety of nonhuman beings—including worms residing in the body, distinct life forces for animal embodiments, weather-regulating nāgas, and not harming various kinds of spirits—I hope to shed light on a particular Buddhist cosmovision that conceptualizes such beings and their modes of knowing/embodiment within a broader theory of karma. By doing so, I aim to complicate how scholars think about the notion of “intention” and its connection to action within the context of Buddhist thought and practice.
