Action And Reaction In Buddhist Teachings

The whole universe is governed by law, and the unbroken sequence of action and reaction occurs in mental and moral operations just as strictly as in physical processes. In consequence, the Buddha-doctrine emphasizes that morally skilful thought, speech and action bring happiness to the doer at some time or other, while in the same way activities which are morally unskilful give rise to future suffering. That which determines the moral skill of an activity—whether it be in thought, speech or bodily action—is the volition or mental purpose which motivates it. Where it is based on generosity, on goodwill, or on selfless motives, it is morally skilful, whereas when the purpose which motivates it springs from greed, hatred or delusion it is regarded as morally unskilful.

Thus the Buddha-doctrine stresses the need for developing a clear comprehension of the purpose behind every activity at every level, at the levels of thought, of speech and of bodily action. Some of these activities build up forces within the mind which eventually lead to an increase in well-being, while others, being aimless or unskilful, result in sorrow or frustration. Thus, if you take on almost any form of mental culture, one of your most important aims should be to comprehend more clearly the ultimate purpose behind all these activities.

In this scientific and technological age, you are familiar with the idea that physical effects have causes, that these effects also become causes in their turn, and that in the ordinary course of events there is no room for chance or luck. But while you accept this invariable sequence of action and reaction in the material realm, you don’t always recognize it in the moral sphere. The Buddha-doctrine affirms, however, that the law of cause and effect applies just as invariably and just as exactly in the moral sphere as it does in the physical realm. This doctrine emphasizes the fact that everything in the universe acts according to various laws, and that no being in the universe can set aside or invalidate these laws. It defines five systems of laws (pa~nca-niyaama).

The first of these is the law-system which concerns the rise and fall—that is, the growth and decay—of physical phenomena under the action of heat. Second, there is the group of laws relating to the generation or growth of vegetation and of the bodies of living beings. The third law-system relates to mental action and reaction, that is, to the action of the will and its results in terms of happiness and suffering. Fourth, there are the various laws governing the processes of the mind, the laws which are studied and applied by psychologists. Finally, the fifth law-system groups together the multiplicity of laws which relate to physical and mental phenomena in general which are not embraced by the other systems of laws.

Of these five groups, you’ll find that it is the third law-system that interests us in the present context. This, the law-system governing the action of the will and its consequences, is only one of the five groups of laws, but it is the one that is most directly connected with your own happiness and sorrow, your own pains and pleasures.

The original Buddhist terms that are sometimes translated as moral and immoral, or as good and bad, may also be rendered as wholesome and unwholesome. However, the terms skilful and unskilful are often used to convey the meanings of the original terms, for a moral or wholesome action is considered to be skilful because it eventually brings enjoyment as a result; an immoral or unwholesome action, since in time it brings suffering to the doer, is regarded as unskilful.

Any activity—morally good or otherwise—produces, of course, its normal physical result. If you throw a stone through a window it will break the window, whether the motivation behind it be morally skilful or otherwise. The broken window is the normal physical result of the stone-throwing action.

But assuming that the action is motivated by some morally unskilful volition (such as hatred) there will be a mental effect as well. The exercise of hatred will strengthen the hatred which already exists within the mind just as the exercise of a muscle will strengthen its own tissues. In consequence, hatred will become a more dominant factor in your mental make-up.

Now hatred is one of a group of mental factors which lead to suffering. In some way or other, at some time in the near or distant future, this mental factor will bring you suffering of some kind. The basic cause of the suffering is not the action of throwing the stone, but the hatred or ill-will present in the volitional act of throwing the stone.

Now it is conceivable that the action of throwing the stone through the window might be motivated, not by hatred, but by some form of goodwill. You might, for example, use this action as a means of letting air into a smoke-filled room in a burning house in order to rescue someone in the room. In such circumstances, the unselfishness you exercise in your wholesome volitional action would strengthen your existing mental factor of goodwill, and this strengthened mental factor would eventually bring you into circumstances that would yield happiness.

Thus a morally skilful will-action brings enjoyment at some future time, while an unwholesome volition eventuates in suffering. On the other hand, an action which is not volitional (while of course it gives rise to normal physical effects) does not produce any effects in terms of strengthened mind-factors, and no effects in terms of future happiness and suffering. Where there is no volition there is no moral or immoral element.

The personal will or volition in its primal form is the urge to live, the urge to survive as a self and to assert this selfhood. From this fundamental will to live arise various tendencies, which we know as urges, instincts, and desires, and which are accompanied by emotions.

In Buddhist psychology, the instincts and desires are all regarded as manifestations of the fundamental will to live. This will to live, as a rule, is simply called craving: it is the craving or thirst for personal existence, the craving to live and survive as a self for eternity. But the final freedom from unhappiness can be found only by transcending personal existence.

The thirst for personal existence, rooted as it is in ignorance, is said to be a primary condition on which all suffering depends. Thus the ultimate aim of the practising Buddhist is to overcome craving by the attainment of enlightenment.

This means, of course, to overcome desire, but only insofar as desire is personal or self-centred. It has been said:

To start from where we are now and unequivocally let go of every desire would be to die, and to die is not to solve the problem of living.

Houston Smith

The type of desire to be overcome, then, is what may be called ignorant desire or irrational desire. To quote again:

The desires for the basic necessities of life can be satisfied, whereas the selfish desires of the ego can never be allayed. These do not spring from the chemistry of the body but are purely mental constructions—to be more and more, to have more and more: money, possessions, power, prestige, love; to outstrip and outshine all others; to be supreme. It is an impossible dream which, if realized, would not bring in its train either peace or happiness.

The greedy, the jealous, the envious can never be satisfied because their dissatisfaction and unhappiness do not spring from any real deprivation of the essentials of life, but from the defects and distortions within their character.

Mettaa

From all this you’ll see that in Buddhism the first and last enemy is considered to be ignorance—ignorance, not in the sense of lack of education, but in the sense of lack of the capacity for true discernment.

You’ll appreciate, too, that the final victory to be won is the victory of discernment or enlightenment, and that the principal weapon in the battle is the weapon of right mindfulness in its various forms.

The personal will, then, is an aspect of the will to live, the blind thirst for personal existence which, in human life, expresses itself by way of various instinctive and emotional factors. These collectively constitute the dynamic elements in mental life.

Buddhist psychology adopts a system of classifying the dynamic mind-factors which is somewhat different from the classifications you’ll meet in Western psychology. It includes not only instinctive elements but also mental habits developed from the instincts, as well as thought-patterns deliberately cultivated in opposition to the instincts.

This classification generally appears in Buddhist literature as a list of fifty active mental factors (in contrast to the receptive mental factors known as feeling and perception), and together these fifty constitute the dynamic components of the mind. Some of them are directly derived from the fundamental urge towards personal survival, while others are cultivated in opposition to the egotistic tendencies, but all of them help to determine behaviour. For this reason they can be conveniently referred to as the fifty determinants.

There is no need to deal here with the determinants in detail. All that we need to mention in the present context are three which are called the roots of unskilful will-activity and their opposites, the three roots of skilful volition.

The three roots of unskilful volition are greed, hatred and delusion, while the opposite three—generosity, goodwill, and discernment—are the roots of skilful will-activity.

Such activity may take the form of bodily action, it may take the form of speech, or it may take the form of thought; but it is the motive behind the activity, the mental determinant that gives rise to it, that is all-important.

Thus if you think, speak or act from motives of greed, whether in an obvious and intense form or in a subtle and disguised way, you thereby strengthen greed in your mental make-up. On the other hand, when you act from generosity you thereby strengthen this determinant in your own mind.

It is the same with hatred and its opposite factor of goodwill. One who allows himself to become angry or irritable immediately builds up in his own mind the factor of hatred, whereas when he makes an effort to be tolerant and patient with irritating people or annoying things he increases the mental factor of goodwill within his mind.

Again, if you think, speak or act in a self-centred way, you are allowing yourself to be motivated by delusion, for delusion in the present context means primarily the delusion of self, together with the self-deceit and feelings of superiority and inferiority that go along with it. As a result you become more and more governed by this delusion, for it becomes a stronger determinant than before.

When, on the other hand, you endeavour to discern the true nature of the illusory self and to break free from self-deceit, you strengthen the opposite factor of discernment. Thus discernment—or non-delusion, as it is often called—becomes a stronger determinant of your subsequent thought-processes.

Now the morally unskilful determinants that exist as parts of your mental make-up, as you can see, retard your progress towards the final liberation; thus we can speak of them as the "retardants."

In the same way, you can see that the morally skilful mind-factors help you in your progress towards the final liberation; and therefore we can also call them the "progressants."

You’ll see from this that from the exercise of a particular determinant there is an immediate effect within the mind. This immediate effect is a strengthening of that determinant, which of course makes it easier to arouse it in the future.

However, there is more to it than that. Each of the determinants that we have been discussing, each of the active or dynamic factors that help to make up the mind as a whole, can be visualized as an accumulation of energy within the mind. You can regard each particular determinant—generosity, for example, on the one hand, or greed on the other—as an accumulation of a specific sort of force within the mind, and each such force will eventually bring about its own kind of experience at some time in the future.

This future experience is the result of the original will-activity—the reaction to the original action. The volitional action in the first place causes an accumulation of a specific mental force, and this force in its turn brings about its reaction in terms of enjoyment or suffering. The accumulated force, therefore, can be termed a "reaction-force."

An accumulation of the reaction-force of generosity will at some time give rise to enjoyment of some kind, just as the accumulation of energy within an electrical torch battery may at some time give rise to light. The energy within the battery can give rise to light only when the conditions are favourable: there must be an electric-light bulb, and the switch of the torch must be turned on. The current can then flow through the filament, which then glows with light. In the process—unless the current is switched off or unless some replenishment of the battery takes place—the energy will be eventually completely discharged.

In much the same way, the accumulation of the reaction-force of generosity can give rise to enjoyment only when the environment provides suitable conditions; and, until the requisite environmental conditions come about, the reaction-force remains in storage, so to speak. When the suitable conditions do eventually appear, this particular reaction-force will give rise to the enjoyment of happy experiences, and in the process the accumulation will become less and less until completely discharged, unless of course it is replenished by further generosity.

In general, some sort of replenishment may be going on while the discharge is taking place. If, while you’re enjoying happy experiences, you continue to exercise your generosity, then the accumulation of this particular reaction-force will be replenished even while it is being discharged. It is then like a water-tank from which you’re drawing off water but which is being replenished by rain at the same time.

However, if while enjoying the fruits of previous generous actions you become selfish and greedy, then your mind is like a water-tank during a drought: as the water is all drained off and never replenished, so your accumulation of happiness-producing reaction-force is drained off until finally discharged.

As with the mind-factor we know as generosity, so with its opposite determinant, greed. When one gives way to self-desire in any form, the accumulation of the reaction-force of greed is increased in one’s mind. When at some future time the external conditions are suitable, this accumulation will discharge by way of suffering. During suffering, one may give way to further adverse states of mind, such as self-pity, and this will add to the accumulated reaction-force. On the other hand, one may develop patience and other favourable qualities of mind, and thus this particular sorrow-producing accumulation will eventually be fully discharged.

While each type of mind-factor is a particular reaction-force, in general we can group them into two broad classes—first, reaction-forces that lead to happiness, and second those that lead to suffering. Often these are spoken of respectively as merit and demerit, and thus we say that while one person who has a great stock of merit will enjoy great happiness in the future, another who has stored up much demerit will have to endure great suffering at some later time.

The reaction-forces that exist within the mind are stored, so to speak, below the consciously accessible level of the mind. The subconscious aspect of the mind, in Buddhist terminology, is called the life-subcurrent. It is the current of mental energy which exists below the threshold of consciousness, and it is thus the repository of the resultants of all past actions and past experiences.

This life-subcurrent may for convenience be called the storehouse of the residual reaction-forces from all previous will-actions; but you must not take the idea of a storehouse too literally. The experiences in our lives are not in any real sense stored anywhere in the same way that water is stored in a tank, any more than apples are stored in an apple tree.

You don’t believe, of course, that apples are stored in an apple tree. Given the right external conditions of climate, soil, and nutrition, the forces within the apple tree will cause apples to grow on its branches; and in the same way, given the right external conditions, the forces within the life-subcurrent will project or precipitate experiences in accordance with the nature of these forces.

Wind is not stored somewhere in the air, but under the right conditions of heat or cold, the air will expand or contract and give rise to wind. In the same way, fire is not stored in the head of a match, but under the right conditions of friction the match will give rise to fire.

Again, sound is not stored in a record; but given the necessary conditions—when placed on a turn table of a record-player—the formation of the record gives rise to sound.

Thus the experiences of life, together with their corresponding happiness and suffering, are not stored in a literal sense in the life-subcurrent, but under the right conditions these events will develop as the apples develop on the branches of the apple tree.

Thus you can see that no reaction-force can take effect unless there exist suitable conditions for its operation or discharge. As the suitable conditions may not arise within your present lifetime, it follows that you may not reap the enjoyment and suffering resulting from these activities within your present lifetime.

You can see, then, that at the end of your present lifetime there will exist many undischarged reaction-forces, and for many of your actions the appropriate reactions will not have occurred as yet. In other words, when you die there’ll be an unexpended residue of reaction-forces both progressant and retardant which have had no opportunities to discharge during your present lifetime.

What happens to these unexpended or undischarged reaction-forces? When you die, your body will disintegrate, of course; but the Buddha-doctrine teaches that various components of the mind survive in the form of a life-current, a current of mental energy, and that this current of energy consists of undischarged reaction-forces. This is what the life-current actually is, an ever-changing stream of reaction-forces, and at your death this life-current will initiate a new life and thus bring about the birth of a new being.

The new being is you yourself, being an unbroken continuation of the life-current. The new being inherits all the reaction-forces—all the potentialities for happiness, for suffering, and for further volitional activity—from the old being, who is also you yourself. From the point of view of continuity, the new being is the same as the old being (although in another body), for the continuity of the life-current is not broken in any way by the phase of death and rebirth.

You’ve seen that the moral law of action and reaction, as set out in the Buddha-doctrine, states that we each experience happiness and suffering in exact proportion to the moral and immoral qualities of our past activities. You’ve seen also that this same doctrine teaches that moral and immoral activities build up forces within the mind, and these forces—reaction-forces, we have called them—eventually precipitate experiences of happiness and suffering.

This is perhaps an oversimplification of the matter, for in more exact terms the Buddha-doctrine says that every cause has a number of effects, while every effect arises from a number of causes. In other words, nothing arises from only one cause, and nothing gives rise to only one effect: everything is interwoven with many other things. However, the main point is that morally skilful activity brings enjoyment of some kind in its train while morally unskilful activity brings suffering.

The concept of the reaction-force enables us to see how the Buddhist idea of rebirth differs from non-Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation, for what is reborn in Buddhist teachings is a life-current, not a soul in the ordinary sense.

This brings us to the matter of the time at which a particular reaction-force (generated by a specific will-activity) operates. If you rob a bank and bungle your escape, you’ll be caught immediately and soon punished. If you plan your escape well and make a success of it, but nevertheless leave a few clues, you may not be caught for five years, but when you are eventually punished you’ll be able to see the connection between the cause (your immoral action) and the effect in the shape of punishment. However, you may execute the robbery and your escape so well that you will evade suspicion and punishment (a convenient word in the present context but not a very exact one) may not come until several lifetimes afterwards. Then you won’t be able to see the connection between cause and effect.

Here again we are over-simplifying the position by talking as if one cause brings about only one effect, but the question at issue is the time at which a particular reaction-force operates.

As we have already seen, a reaction-force cannot discharge its energy until the conditions appropriate to its operation are suitable; and by conditions we mean both the external or environmental conditions as well as conditions within the mind itself. That means that if you carry out a morally unskilful activity—such as a robbery—during a time when you are reaping the benefits of a past series of morally skilful actions, you may not reap the adverse effects of the immoral act until the opposite kind of reaction-force has run its course. You say you’re enjoying a run of good luck, and this is true enough so long as you realize that good luck is really the fruition of past good activity.

Similarly, if you carry out some act of generosity you can expect the enjoyment of some sort of happiness as a result, but this may not be in the near future or even in your present lifetime. You may perhaps be in the midst of a long period of frustration and failure, the effect of some past phase of morally unskilful activity whose reaction-force must run its course and exhaust its energy.

Thus the Buddha-doctrine teaches that some actions are immediately effective, since their resulting reaction-forces are discharged soon after their inception; but many will-actions are remotely effective, for the reaction-forces they generate may not produce their reactions in terms of happiness or suffering until many lifetimes afterwards.

The effects of weak volitional actions may be neutralized by stronger reaction-forces of an opposite nature. Thus, if a weak retardant reaction-force is opposed by a stronger one of a progressant nature, then the stronger may render the weaker ineffective, losing some of its own energy in the process.

This does not apply, however, to a strong reaction-force generated by a very definite morally skilful or a very definite morally unskilful activity. The reaction-forces built into the mental structure by such activities can never be neutralized, and even though the suitable conditions for their discharge don’t arise until many lifetimes afterwards, they invariably become effective at some time. They are therefore called indefinitely effective reaction-forces, and while dormant they are classed as reserve reaction-forces.

In contrast to indefinitely effective reaction-force, there is a kind called weighty reaction-force, which is generated either by very serious retardant will-activity or else by very exalted states of mind. The operation of weighty reaction-force, the Buddha-doctrine states, takes precedence over all other kinds.

You can see that, however long may be the time-lag between the cause and its effect, the end-result of volitional activity is inevitable.

At first sight you might take this to imply that the present and the future are completely and inflexibly governed by the past, and that you can experience only what your past actions have determined for you.

This fatalistic view, however, is really not a part of the Buddhist doctrine of cause and effect. It is true that you are largely—very largely—influenced by reaction-forces generated by your past volitional activities, but they are not the only forces in the mind: there is also the possibility of present volition. Volition or will exists as a force within the mind, just as attention and one-pointedness exist as forces within the mind. We’re not entering into any discussion on free will, beyond mentioning that everything we do is conditioned by internal and external factors; but we must recognize that volition does exist in the sense that it consists of the force of desire directed towards an objective.

Since volition does exist as desire-force directed towards an objective, we can see that we can use this volition to handle the present results of past activity. By "handling" the present results of past activity I don’t mean that we can cancel these results; I mean that we can utilize our present experiences to help us to make progress, or we can let these same experiences—pleasant as well as unpleasant—retard our progress. But to handle our present experiences—to utilize them as a means of making progress—we must develop the necessary moral skill.

Although the present is conditioned by the past as the future is conditioned by the present, the future is not unalterably fixed by the past, for the future is dependent also on what we do with our present powers of volition. In many circumstances, it is true that there may be little or no scope for a constructive or progressant course of action, for the pressure of reaction-forces from the past may be too great and the present volition too weak. However, in general, even if you have no choice of external action, at least it’s possible to regulate your mental and moral responses to a situation, even to a slight extent. Thus, under a difficult set of conditions that you are unable to alter, you can at least exercise patience and tolerance, facing the situation without allowing it completely to overwhelm you.

In this way, while going through a difficult period of painful reaction-force results, you’re at least building up within your mental structure new progressant reaction-forces, thus using the situation to its best advantage.