Pātañjala Yoga’s Theory of ‘Many-Lives’ through Karma and Rebirth and Its Eccentric ‘Theism’

Abstract

This paper discusses the theory of rebirth as set forth in Classical Samkhya and Yoga and offers a new interpretive perspective.

1. Introduction

Michael Kinsley in his book, Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide, quotes the following blunt question by Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle:

Death has never made any sense to me.

How can a person be there

and then just vanish,

just not be there?1

Kinsley himself responds to Ellison’s question with the following comment:

Actually the question is not whether death makes sense to Larry

Ellison but whether Larry Ellison makes sense to death. And I’m afraid

he does.

For someone born in the United States in 2013, the most recent year for which there are final figures, life expectancy is 78.8 years. That’s 76.4 years for males and 81.2 years for females. But if you’ve made it to 65, your life expectancy is 82.9, if you’re a man, and 85.5 if you’re a woman.2

This is as good a way as any to introduce the “contemporary relevance” issue with respect to the purpose of our special issue on karma and rebirth, since all of of us who are contributing to this issue to some degree find ourselves wrestling intellectually and personally with the matter of death, regardless of how we handle this basic question, whether with Hindu, Christian, agnostic, atheistic or secularist reflections.

Equally blunt is the manner in which Samuel Scheffler raises the matter of death in his book, Death and the Afterlife by presenting two similar but interestingly different thought experiments regarding how we think about “death and the afterlife.”3 He asks us to think about how we would react to two doomsday scenarios, first, a sudden doomsday, and second, a ‘softer’ doomsday. First, says Scheffler,

Suppose you knew that, although you yourself would live a normal life span, the earth would be completely destroyed thirty days after your death in a collision with a giant asteroid. How would this knowledge affect your attitudes during the remainder of your life?4

Or, (secondly) borrowing from a thought experiment from P.D. James novel, The Children of Men, Scheffler presents a ‘softer’ doomsday scenario. Suppose, he suggests, that human beings have become infertile, “with no recorded birth having occurred in more than twenty-five years,” Scheffler continues,

It is entirely compatible [in such a ‘softer’ doomsday scenario] with every living person having a normal life span. So if we imagine ourselves inhabiting [such an infertile world] …it is clear that those reactions would not include any feelings about the premature deaths of our loved ones, for no such deaths would occur (or, at any rate, none would occur as an essential feature of the scenario itself).5

The difference between the two doomsday scenarios, of course, is that the latter is a somewhat ‘softer’ doomsday than the former, since the latter does not involve the death of friends, loved ones and the common world that we all enjoy in our current lifetimes.

Scheffler, it should be stressed, does not himself believe in any sort of personal afterlife or personal immortality. Each of us has but one life, and each of us will personally die. There is, however, says Scheffler, an afterlife that in many ways is much more important than our personal life, and that, of course, is the collective afterlife. Human life and life in general continue to go on for all persons and/or sentient creatures after our particular personal life ends, and Scheffler wants to argue, or attempts to argue, not only that the understanding of the meaning of our personal life depends on the collective afterlife only for those who do not believe in a personal afterlife, but even for those who do believe in a personal afterlife. To oversimplify in the interest of time, Scheffler’s basic thesis is that the meaning of “one life” or our “one personal life” presupposes the collective presence of “many lives” and that personal death is important for making sense of “(our) one life” as well as the “many lives” or, in other words, the “many lives that come after us” as well as “the many lives that have preceded us”. The doomsday scenarios, says Scheffler, make quite clear why this should be the case.

Finally, it should also be noted, that Scheffler is inclined to agree for the most part with the argument of Bernard Williams that “immortality” as a general notion is as equally problematic as a personal after-life, because the reality of death that makes one life exciting and challenging precisely because of its constraints, would lead to an incoherent tedium or boredom with a state of immortality wherein all such constraints are absent.6

2. Karma and Rebirth in Pātañjala Yoga and the Issue of Theism

But turning now to South Asian Hindu notions of karma and rebirth and the implicit notion of theism that operates within the framework of a theodicy of karma and rebirth (at least in the Yoga of Patañjali), especially instructive is the discussion of these issues in the Yogasūtra (hereafter YS) and its accompanying Bhāṣya, and in particular YS II. 13 and YS I. 24. [In an Appendix A to this summary presentation, I am attaching a full translation of YS II. 13 and YS I. 24, with the accompanying oldest Bhāṣya (commentary) for those who would like to see the full textual presentation.7]

These Hindu arguments of Pātañjala Yoga, I am inclined to think, come close to what Scheffler is attempting to argue in his book, Death and the Afterlife.

In II.13, a sequence of four questions is posed as follows, namely,

• (1) Is it the case that one karmic action is the cause of one rebirth?
• Or, (2) Is it rather the case that one karmic action is the cause of many rebirths?
• Or, (3) Is it the case that many karmic actions bring about many rebirths?
• Or, (4) Is it the case that many karmic actions bring about one rebirth?

The first three questions are given a negative answer, the first, because one karmic action causing one rebirth would rule out a proper sequence for the fruition of the many other karmic actions in a single rebirth; the second, because one karmic action causing many rebirths would eliminate the requisite time for accommodating all the karmic actions (that need to be accommodated); the third, because if many karmic actions were causing many rebirths, there would be required a simultaneity of rebirths that is obviously not possible. Only the fourth question, then, can be answered in the affirmative, that is to say, many karmic actions come together at the conclusion of one rebirth to bring about a single subsequent rebirth (ekabhavitka, or one life) that has (ekabhavika, or one life) a distinctive species-identity (jāti), a distinctive length of life (āyus), and a distinctive quality of experience in that rebirth (bhoga) based upon the massive heritage of previous karmic residues, karmic traces and karmic predispositions (āśaya-s, vāsanā-s and saṃskāra-s).

Karmic actions are, thus, (beginninglessly!!) cumulative, with some immediately dominant and/or predictable karmic actions being manifested in the new (or present) rebirth (prārabdha), and others being unpredictable and/or un-fixed, with some being stored (sañcita) for a subsequent manifestation in the present rebirth or for a subsequent rebirth, and some generating new karmic action in the present rebirth (sañcīyamāna) that will have fruition in yet future rebirths. Regarding the unpredictable and/or un-fixed karmic actions, three outcomes are possible. First, some may be set aside completely because they have become overpowered by more powerful karmic actions. Second, some may be easily endured by becoming absorbed in a larger unfolding dominant karmic manifestation. Or third, some may be simply be waiting in abeyance over several rebirths until they can become activated at an appropriately ripe moment (the a-dṛṣṭa or a-pūrva fruitions) that appear to be un-expected or un-forseen. These latter, that is, the adṛṣṭa or apūrva, are obviously variable and impossible to specify, but these unpredictable and/or unexpected karmas are exceptions (apavāda) to the general rule, and, indeed, are mysterious (durjñāna) in the sense that they are exceptions to the general rule that karmic actions heap up at the end of a rebirth (one’s personal death) and then become manifest in a single one life rebirth (ekabhavika) characterized by jāti, āyus, and bhoga.

Thus, there are cumulatively “many lives” over time issuing in single-life personal manifestations (like the personal life we are all experiencing in this present life) that will then transmute into a series of ‘many lives’ in the future. The entire unfolding process is a closed causal system of becoming (satkāryavāda and traiguṇya). One’s personal life in a given rebirth is not negated but, rather, greatly expanded, in the sense that our personal identity is part of a continuing diachronic series of variable rebirths, informed by many lives that have gone before and many other lives that are yet to come.

If one asks, then, what role does God play in such a closed, comprehensive system of synchronic phylogeny (the co-presence of all species) and diachronic ontogeny (the historical or real time becoming of life after life), the philosophy of Yoga (in keeping with the Sāṃkhya dualism) suggests the following in YS I. 24:

“God (Īśvara) is a particular or unique consciousness (puruṣa) (among a variety of manifestations of consciousness) (puruṣa-bahutva) untouched by the afflictions (kleśa-s) [avidyā, asmitā, rāga, dveṣa, abhiniveśa], karmic actions (karman), karmic fruits (vipāka) and long-term karmic pre-dispositions (āśaya-s) (that are characteristic of all other sentient beings associated with manifestations of consciousness).”8

God, in other words, is not part of the karma and rebirth system of becoming, and, hence, cannot be a creator (since God is not associated with the cause and effect system), nor can God be personal (since God is disconnected from the notion of “person” as ahaṃkāra or asmitā in the karma and rebirth scheme of things).9 Most puzzling of all, God is neither a cosmic Ātman nor Brahman or any other Absolute, but only a particular manifestation of consciousness among a variety of manifestations of consciousness. In other words, there is a strange reversal in Pātañjala Yoga (and Sāṃkhya) of the notion of the One and the Many. The realm of embodied becoming is a uniform and rational realm of cosmic, all-pervasive Unity (prakṛti = triguṇa) enveloped on all sides (and, again, all-pervasively) by a pluralized or quantized consciousness, one quantum of which consciousness is designated Īśvara.

Who or what, then, is this unique (viśeṣa) consciousness among the quantized varieties of consciousness, which together make possible the experience of all varieties of karmic becoming? God becomes manifest as the eternal excellence (śāśvatika-utkarṣa) that shows itself when the citta-sattva has been appropriately purified (through the practice of Yoga). The practice of Yoga, however, is not the cause of the manifestation of eternal excellence or the eternal presence of consciousness, since eternal excellence is not part of the causal order. The practice of Yoga only removes the obstacles for the manifestation of what has always been the case, that is, consciousness as the exemplar of complete freedom [“tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe ‘vasthānam,” YS I. 3], or, in other words, consciousness as the radical foundation of freedom.10

3. Conclusions

Let me share a few brief concluding observations. It was Max Weber who first highlighted in an essay entitled, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions” the three classic formulations of “theodicy” [that is, cogent explanations for the suffering and injustice that one finds in the world, including, of course, life and death.] Weber comments,

The metaphysical conception of God and of the world, which the ineradicable demand for a theodicy called forth, could produce only a few systems of ideas on the whole—as we shall see, only three. These three gave rationally satisfactory answers to the questioning for the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit: the Indian doctrine of Karma (and rebirth), Zoroastrian dualism, and the predestination decree of the deus absconditus. These solutions are rationally closed; in pure form, they are found as exceptions.11

The Yoga (and Sāṃkhya) view of karma and rebirth, puts great stress on the responsibility of the individual person to bear the consequences of his or her own becoming but does so by greatly expanding the notion of “person” or sentient being to an extent that it encompasses a great number of “many-lives” giving re-birth to a diachronic series of embodied behaviors for which this broader sense of “person” must bear responsibility. Such a view, therefore, looks upon the notion of “person” solely in terns of one single life as a rather naïve and afflicted (kleśa) view of personal life greatly out of touch with its truly vast identity and significance.

At the same time, the Yoga view, by greatly expanding the reality of the diachronic becoming of the “person” lessens seriously the work of God, who is neither a “person” nor a “creator”, but, rather, is an all-pervasive presence of eternal and immutable consciousness that is always present as the certitude of freedom for those able (through Yoga) to get beyond the constraints or bondage of ordinary awareness (citta).

One need not buy into the archaic metaphysics used in ancient times to explain the process in terms of “transmigration,” “reincarnation,” “subtle bodies floating into new gross bodies,” and so forth. It is perhaps possible simply to accept the idea that my one single life is hardly just an isolated event in time but, rather, that I am in a great company of companions, many of whom are nearly identical to myself, who have made my life possible and that what I do with my life will have profound implications in the lives who come after me in countless generations to come. I must take responsibility for the events that surround me and with which I have been involved in preceding trajectories in which I had a different name and a different behavior pattern. God has not created my life; I have through my deeds.12 God’s grace (anugraha), is the simple presence of the consciousness that illumines my particular life and enables me to have experience. More than that, it is a witnessing presence that reveals to each or any sentient being that it can only be what it has made itself to be, and that authentic spiritual freedom brings with it the terrible destiny that I must take responsibility for myself in the great hierarchy of unfolding life.