Collective Karma

From time to time the question of whether there is "collective karma," or not, keeps coming up. Is it possible for groups of people—whole nations or generations-—to share the same karma? Or is karma a strictly individual and personal thing?

The Buddha treated karma, everywhere and always, as a personal inheritance:

Owners of their karma are the beings, heirs of their karma, their karma is the womb from which they are born, their karma is their friend, their refuge. Whatever karma they perform, good or bad, thereof they will be the heirs.

Majjhima Nikaaya, 135

None can suffer from the karma of another, nor profit by the karma of another. But it may happen that large groups of people, through being guilty of the same misdeeds—as for instance racial persecutions, mass killings and tortures, etc.—come to make for themselves almost identical karma. Can this be called "collective karma"?

In a sense it can; yet the term is deceptive. The so-called "collective karma" is made up of individual karmas, each of which must have its individual fruition. No man necessarily shares the karma of others of his national or other group simply by reason of being one of that group. He is responsible only for his own particular share in its deeds. If he does not share them, his own karma will be quite different.

Most of the confusion of thought arises from the misuse of the phrase "the law of karma"; and the spelling of the word betrays the source from which the idea of a "law" of "collective karma" comes. The Pali word is kamma.

Kamma simply means "action"—a deed performed by bodily action, speech or thought. Its result is vipaaka. There is a law of causality, and it is because of this law that kamma, the cause, is invariably followed by vipaaka, the result. "The law of karma" has a mystical sound, and suggests a kind of fatalism. People who say, resignedly, "It is my karma," are using the word wrongly. They should say, "It is my vipaaka." This would remind them that their kamma, the really important thing, is under their control: they are fashioning it from moment to moment. As their kamma is now, so will their vipaaka be in the future. We should avoid confusing the cause with the effect.

Kamma is individual because it is cetanaa—volitional action of an individual mind.

Volition, O bhikkhus, is what I call action; for through volition one performs actions of body, speech and mind.

Anguttara Nikaaya, 6:63

To what extent can one person dominate and direct the volition of another? Sometimes to a very dangerous extent: but only if there is a surrender of the will to the external influence. That itself involves an act of cetanaa, a voluntary submission to another person’s will. Such a submission should only be made to a spiritual guru; and even then the moral sense should not be suspended. The case of Angulimaala is a warning against a too unquestioning submission to the dictates of an unworthy teacher. Angulimaala was fortunate later in encountering the greatest Teacher of all, who saved him. People of today have to protect themselves against spiritual quacks, and it is not always easy to discriminate.

Apart from this, there is the question of indoctrination, a very great problem in the modern world. We have seen the phenomenon, unknown before in history, of whole nations behaving under a compulsion imposed on them from without. We have seen the development of techniques for manufacturing a mass-mind capable of incredible atrocities. Propaganda, brain-washing, mass-suggestion leading to mass-hysteria—all these are features of the new technique of power. Can these produce "collective karma"?

The answer is that they can certainly produce individual kammas that are practically identical; but they still remain personal kammas, even though they are instigated. No matter to what influences a man is subjected, his reaction to them together with its vipaaka remains his own.

But supposing (not, alas, a very far-fetched supposition these days) a man is forced on pain of torture or death to participate in mass atrocities?

To begin with, it must be his past kamma that has placed him in such a terrible position; it is his vipaaka from some previous unwholesome kamma. He has two alternatives before him: either he can submit, and for the sake of preserving his life continue to make more bad kamma for himself—or he can refuse and let his enemies do what they like. If he chooses the latter course he will probably exhaust the bad vipaaka in suffering, in his current life. His act of self-abnegation, his refusal to participate in deeds of violence and cruelty, will be a positive good. He will have perfected his siila, his moral purity.

In either case his kamma, be it wholesome or unwholesome, will be his own.

But what about the sharing of merits? This again depends upon cetanaa, an act of will. When a good deed is performed and the merit is shared with others, there must be the will to share it on their part. By approving the deed they produce a similar good cetanaa in themselves. Their attention must be drawn to the deed, so that they can rejoice in it and generate a good mental impulse connected with daana (liberality), or whatever the meritorious deed may be. Again, the "sharer" makes his own kamma. We cannot share demerit, because nobody would be willing to share it with us!

The troubles we inherit from our parents’ mistakes cannot be said to be sufferings resulting from their kamma. A child that is born in a country devastated by war, if it suffers it is suffering because the situation in which it has been born makes it possible for the child’s own bad kamma to fructify. There must always be more than one cause to produce a given result. Another child, in precisely the same situation, and whose parents were even more directly responsible for the mistakes that led to the country’s ruin, may be materially in a much better position. Its parents may have made a fortune in the war that brought others to destitution. This child, too, is experiencing the results of its own kamma, not that of the parents. They will have to suffer for theirs.

There are different kinds of causes, and different kinds of effects. Kamma is one kind of cause; vipaaka is its corresponding effect. The important thing is to distinguish clearly between the individual cause and effect that carries over from one life to another—the personal kamma and vipaaka—and other chains of cause and effect that operate through circumstances in the external world.