The Buddhist teaching on karma

[Willytex]

The Buddhist teaching on karma

The Buddhist teaching on karma is entailed in the Buddha's sermon on the
Second Watch of the Night when the Buddha described his attainment of
enlightenment. In the First Watch of the Night Buddha had attained knowledge
of rebirth, but in the second he attained a different kind of knowledge, the
knowledge of karma, the natural law of cause and effect. According to the
Buddhist scriptures translated by H.W. Schumann in The Historical Buddha,
The Enlightened One is supposed to have said to his disciples:

"With the heavenly eye, purified and beyond the range of human vision, I saw
how beings vanish and come to be again. I saw high and low, brilliant and
insignificant, and how each obtained according to his karma, a favorable or
painful rebirth" (55).

According to Sogyal Rinpoche, author of 'The Tibetan Book of the Living and
Dying', "the word karma literally means action. It is the driving force
behind rebirth. Karma means action, both the power latent within actions,
and the results our actions bring" (97).

By "beyond the range of human vision" the Buddha meant that there is a
Transcendental state of conciousness that is beyond our ordinary range of
perception.
Works cited:

'The Historical Buddha'
By H.W. Shumann
Arkana, 1989

'The Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying'
Chapter Six - Evolution, Karma, and Rebirth
By Sogyal Rinpoche
HarperCollins Books, 2002

[WillyTex]

According to what I've read, in Buddhism, particularly in Mahayana,
rebirth has to do with consciousness which evolves from a stream of consciousness, thus avoiding the pitfall of dualism. At death there
is a dissolution of the aggregates (skandhas).

The new person is not a soul-monad arising from the previous
individual, but the new person's consciousness is simply a causal
continuum from the universal stream.

It's all about an evolving consciousness conditioned by the actions in
a previous life (karma). The whole point of attaining enlightenment
in Buddhism is the elimination of rebirth.

Post by Willytex
The Buddhist teaching on karma
The Buddhist teaching on karma is entailed in the Buddha's sermon on the
Second Watch of the Night when the Buddha described his attainment of
enlightenment. In the First Watch of the Night Buddha had attained knowledge
of rebirth, but in the second he attained a different kind of knowledge, the
knowledge of karma, the natural law of cause and effect. According to the
Buddhist scriptures translated by H.W. Schumann in The Historical Buddha,
"With the heavenly eye, purified and beyond the range of human vision, I saw
how beings vanish and come to be again. I saw high and low, brilliant and
insignificant, and how each obtained according to his karma, a favorable or
painful rebirth" (55).
According to Sogyal Rinpoche, author of 'The Tibetan Book of the Living and
Dying', "the word karma literally means action. It is the driving force
behind rebirth. Karma means action, both the power latent within actions,
and the results our actions bring" (97).
By "beyond the range of human vision" the Buddha meant that there is a
Transcendental state of conciousness that is beyond our ordinary range of
perception.
'The Historical Buddha'
By H.W. Shumann
Arkana, 1989
'The Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying'
Chapter Six - Evolution, Karma, and Rebirth
By Sogyal Rinpoche
HarperCollins Books, 2002