The agent who performed an act of kamma and the person experiencing the result: the same person, someone else, both or neither?
"In his effort to master kamma in such a way as to bring kamma to an
end, the Buddha discovered that he had to abandon the contexts of
personal narrative and cosmology in which the issue of kamma first
presented itself. Both these forms of understanding deal in categories
of being and non-being, self and others, but the Buddha found that it
was impossible to bring kamma to an end if one thought in such terms.
For example, narrative and cosmological modes of thinking would lead one
to ask whether the agent who performed an act of kamma was the same as
the person experiencing the result, someone else, both, or neither. If
one answered that it was the same person, then the person experiencing
the result would have to identify not only with the actor, but also with
the mode of action, and thus would not be able to gain release from it.
If one answered that it was another person, both oneself and another,
or neither, then the person experiencing the result would see no need to
heighten the skill or understanding of his/her own kamma in the
present, for the experience of pleasure and pain was not his or her own
full responsibility. In either case, the development of the fourth type
of kamma would be aborted [SN12:67, Ud6:6].
To avoid the
drawbacks of the narrative and cosmological mind-sets, the Buddha
pursued an entirely different tack — what he called “entry into
emptiness,” and what modern philosophy calls radical phenomenology: a
focus on the events of present consciousness, in and of themselves,
without reference to questions of whether there are any entities
underlying those events. In the Buddha’s case, he focused simply on the
process of kammic cause and result as it played itself out in the
immediate present, in the process of developing the skillfulness of the
mind, without reference to who or what lay behind those processes. On
the most basic level of this mode of awareness, there was no sense even
of “existence” or “non-existence” [SN12:15], but simply the events of
stress, its origination, its cessation, and the path to its cessation,
arising and passing away. Through this mode he was able to pursue the
fourth type of kamma to its end, at the same time gaining heightened
insight into the nature of action itself and its many implications,
including questions of rebirth, the relationship of mental to physical
events, and the way kamma constructs all experience of the cosmos."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Wings to Awakening"
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