You still have to naturalize karma

Karin Meyers’s work on the “damned topics” of Buddhist philosophy is most powerful on the topic of rebirth. Because that’s the place where there’s actually some reasonably powerful evidence for the “damned topic”. Where I think she goes too far with that evidence is in the title of her unpublished paper on the topic, which is “Against naturalizing Buddhism”. I think we need to naturalize – that is, to put in non-supernatural terms – one of Buddhism’s most important ideas, namely karma. And I think we need to do that even if the evidence convinces us that rebirth is real.

Let’s talk about that evidence. The University of Virginia medical school’s Division of Perceptual Studies, founded by Ian Stevenson and continued by Jim Tucker, has studied over 2500 cases where children claim to have memories which seem to follow the lives of documented people who lived before them. These cases are at least, as Stevenson noted in his first book title, suggestive that some elements of consciousness, at least memory, can transfer from one human life to another.

Now I haven’t had the time to examine Stevenson’s cases in meaningful detail. Evan Thompson – whose research to date has focused far more than mine on the nature of consciousness – has, and so I have tended to trust him when (in my debate with him) he quoted his Waking, Dreaming, Being on the topic:

Although Stevenson’s presentation of these cases often makes for compelling reading, all the evidence is anecdotal and derived from interviews where there is a large amount of room for false memory and after-the-fact reconstruction. The interviews weren’t conducted directly with the children when they first reported the memory, but only some time later, so there had been plenty of time for the child to assimilate information gotten from family members and to repeat it as if it were his or her experience. And sometimes the children weren’t interviewed at all; only family members were. Finally, it’s hard to know how to assess whether a memory report about a past life exceeds chance probability, and critics have pointed to a number of serious flaws in Stevenson’s statistical reasoning. For these reasons, I don’t find Stevenson’s evidence convincing, though it does seem possible in principle to investigate claims of past life memories using scientific methods (p. 290, with endnote references deleted).

Where Meyers’s “Against” piece is particularly interesting is noting how Tucker’s more recent research (discussed in his article in the volume Consciousness Unbound, published in 2021 after my exchange with Thompson above) attempts to respond to these criticisms. Citing that work, Meyers notes:

As for the charge that the cases are anecdotal, to be sure, the information is derived from interviews, but to deny this as a valid means of investigation is in effect to deny the possibility of investigating the phenomenon at all (as well as many other more conventional phenomena). As early as 2000, efforts were made to code the data and rate the strength of cases (precisely to rule out conventional explanations). As of 2021, 2200 of the cases have been digitized and coded according to 200 variables. In respect to the charge that there is a “large amount of room for false memory and after-the-fact reconstruction,” reinvestigation of cases demonstrated that they grew weaker instead of stronger over time, cases with no written records had the same percentage of accurate statements as those with contemporaneous notes on the child’s statements (though the latter had more statements), and the initial positive attitude of the parents about the case did not correlate to the strength of the case—all of which would be contrary to expectation if the strength of the cases was due to false memory and after the fact reconstruction. Since the advent of the internet and a higher profile for the research, it is easier to collect statements from the children before the previous personality has been identified, and to do controlled tests with photographs once the personality has been identified.

This response was enough to give me pause. So too a point Meyers mentioned to me in person: that many of these cases recall relatively mundane lives, of farmers and the like – as opposed to the far less believable accounts found in adult past-life regression therapies where people recall being something more glamorous like a war hero or a princess. I don’t think this is nearly enough to say with any confidence that rebirth is what’s causing these cases – we still don’t have a mechanism suggested of how that could happen, and how it would square with other evidence that has so far suggested consciousness is always tied to a single body. But I’m also finding it a lot harder to rule rebirth out as an explanation. Colour me at least somewhat agnostic – not a principled agnosticism, just not knowing what exactly to do with the evidence. (I looked online expecting to find refutations of these cases, and found a lot more ignoring of them than refuting.)

But let’s now get to the takeaway that I find most important and interesting in all of this – one entirely compatible with this agnosticism. I have worked a lot on developing a conception of karma that is naturalized. That is: karma – the idea that good actions lead us to better lives – in traditional Buddhist texts depends on rebirth, and perhaps other even more supernatural forms of causality. (This is not what the Sanskrit word “karma(n)” means, but it is what “karma” means when the term is used in English.)The concept of karma is at the heart of the thought of Śāntideva, the Buddhist thinker I’ve learned the most from; it’s very hard to think with Śāntideva and not have some conception of karma. And so I’ve spent a great deal of time on this blog over the years articulating a concept of karma that is understandable in natural-scientific terms, as eudaimonistic and psychological: briefly, that our morally good actions create good psychological habits that generally lead to happier and more satisfying lives than we would otherwise have. (I’ll soon be publishing a refereed chapter on this point in an edited volume on race, caste, and karma.)

And the key point I want to stress is: to think as Buddhists today we would still need a conception of karma that is naturalized in something like this way, even if Stevenson’s and Tucker’s research did prove the existence of rebirth!

Why? In the words of the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, traditional Buddhist rebirth is “ethicized”: a morally good past life leads to a materially better future life, and vice versa for bad. And crucially, the rebirth suggested by Stevenson’s and Tucker’s research is not ethicized! Nothing in their cases suggests that people’s moral conduct in previous lives had anything to do with the material conditions of their current ones. Indeed, Meyers told me, Tucker explicitly denies that there is any such ethicized element in these cases.

That is to say that the kind of rebirth suggested by Stevenson’s and Tucker’s research does not involve karma. Even if they’re right that this shows rebirth is really happening, that does not get you at all closer to the motivating power of karma in classical Buddhist texts – where you have reason to do good actions because they will ripen as better circumstances in a previous life.

And so, even if Stevenson and Tucker are right and rebirth happens the way they suggest it does, you still need a naturalized concept of karma to make an ethics like Śāntideva’s work. Our good and bad actions don’t give us better or worse circumstances in future lives; rather, what they do is form good and bad habits that make our lives better or worse in this one.

Indeed, I note Meyers claims that Stevenson’s and Tucker’s evidence is “strongly suggestive of some kind of transfer of memory and sometimes also phobias, preferences, interests, skills, and body morphology from the deceased to the child”. If psychological traits like “phobias, preferences, interests” do transfer from deceased to child, then that is one way karma could carry on across lives and make future lives better: that is, the good psychological habits that make our lives karmically better in this life, in a naturalized way, might in fact be the one way that karma does work across life to life and birth to birth. Those Aristotelian habits would be exactly what carries over.