Abstract
According to Hinduism and Jainism, we can experience the effects of our karma in subsequent lives because there is a self which survives death and bears its karma into the next life. Throughout our discussion we have referred or alluded to the existence of a persistent self and in chapter 4 we considered it as touching on the question of human free agency. It is now time to focus on this crucial presupposition, to say more about its nature, and ask why anyone should believe that it exists.
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Notes
Later interpreters abandoned the imperceptibility thesis, holding that it can be perceived by a person’s internal organs. See Karl Potter, Indian Metaphysics and Epistemology: The Tradition of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika up to Gahgeśa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 96.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy II (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1931), p. 603.
For Vaiśeṣika-Nyāya, the internal organ is termed the manas. It is an atomic substance which is responsible for receiving sensory material and passing it on narrowed down so that the self can attend to it. It transmigrates with the ātman but it cannot function in an out-of-the-body state. Expressing the view of Advaita Vedānta, Śaṅkara writes, The internal organ which constitutes the limiting adjunct of the soul is called in different places by different names, such as manas (mind), buddhi (intelligence), vijhāna (knowledge), citta (thought). This difference of nomenclature is sometimes made dependent on the difference of the modifications of the internal organ which is called manas when it is in the state of doubt, etc., buddhi when it is in the state of determination and the like.’ Śaṅkara, The Vedānta Sūtras of Bādarāyana, with the commentary Śaṅkara, tr. George Thibaut (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), II, 3, 32.
Nathmal Tatia, Studies in Jaina Philosophy (Benares: Jain Cultural Research Society, 1951), pp. 225–6.
J. Bruce Long reports that he has ‘found no passage [in the Mahābhārata] that attempts to account for the exact means by which each soul finds its way into the womb and thence into the family whose moral and social standing is commensurate with the “merital” status of the jīva. Nor is it stated how moral entities such as good and bad acts become attached to and are transported by physical entities such as wind, fire, water, breath, sperm and blood.’ ‘The Concepts of Human Action and Rebirth in the Mahābhārata’, in Wendy D. O’Flaherty, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 59–60.
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© 1990 Bruce R. Reichenbach
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Reichenbach, B.R. (1990). Hinduism and the Enduring Self. In: The Law of Karma. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11899-1_7
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