jsp In It Together Theorizing Collective Karma through Transformative Justice Jessica Locke loyola university maryland abstract: This article offers an exploratory exegesis of the Buddhist concept of collective karma. My aim is to provide a thicker philosophical account of what this important but rather tricky concept entails. In Buddhist philosophy, karma is a complex topic that is central to Buddhist moral psychology and soteriology. The most common unit of analysis to which karma applies is the individual, however, and it is not altogether clear in what respect karma can be applied to the scale of a community. As collective karma has been taken up in recent years by theorists of engaged Buddhism, clarifying what exactly collective karma is and entails stands to fortify the theoretical basis that underwrites its application to contemporary social and political problems. The main work of this article is, first, to provide a brief exegesis of karma simplicter, and then to analyze two appearances of collective karma in traditional Buddhist literature. To illustrate the practical ramifications of collective karma, I advance the example of the abolitionist theory of transformative justice as a practice of collective karmic self-fashioning. keywords: karma, collective karma, engaged Buddhism, transformative justice, Buddhist ethics DOI: 10.5325/jspecphil.35.4.0305 journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 35, no. 4, 2021 Copyright © 2021 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 306 jessica locke Introduction Karma is a rather forbidding concept within Buddhist philosophy—often misunderstood and immensely complex in its treatments across Buddhist traditions. Theorizing collective karma is equally challenging, but for different reasons. Although it is not addressed in traditional literature with the same depth as karma, collective karma does play a role in Buddhist value theory that is worth clarifying. This is particularly relevant today, as the concept is getting picked up by contemporary Buddhist theorists within the subdiscipline of socially engaged Buddhism. For example, Larry Ward’s 2020 text, America’s Racial Karma, executes a compelling historical exegesis of the development of the collective karma of the United States vis-à-vis race.1 Similarly, the prolific engaged Buddhist author David Loy has long referred to collective karma throughout his body of work on Buddhist responses to ecological crisis, war, and other social justice issues.2 The appeal of collective karma to contemporary theorists such as these is understandable. As a tool for understanding moral change and selftransformation, karma itself is an indispensable component of Buddhist ethical thought, so its collective analogue provides an inviting heuristic both for diagnosing social problems and theorizing social change. What makes collective karma a bit vexing philosophically, however, is an apparent conceptual slippage between it and karma simpliciter. The unit of analysis to which karma is generally applied is the individual. As a component of Buddhist moral psychology, it conceptualizes how a person’s ethical lifeworld has arisen as such and what pathways for ethical and soteriological self-fashioning lie ahead of them.3 Does collective karma suggest an analogous path of ethical self-fashioning by or within a community? If so, what are the collective ethical and soteriological practices by which we can transform the shape of our shared karmic trajectory? To flesh out the philosophical import of the rather tricky concept of collective karma, I begin with a brief sketch of how karma figures into Buddhist ethics and soteriology and how Buddhist practice amounts to an exercise of transforming one’s karma. I then rehearse two key moments in Buddhist thought that invoke collective karma, comparing the ethical and soteriological significance of those moments and how they constitute an invitation to practice collective karmic self-fashioning. To illustrate what such a practice might require, I take up as an example the practice of transformative justice, a radical abolitionist theory that aims to address social theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 307 harm without taking recourse to the vindictive conventions of retributive justice. I ultimately conclude that a practice of working with collective karma in a contemporary, democratic context requires that a society step radically outside of the habitual categories and valuations that have historically dominated its political discourse and practice. The key to all of this is to view karma—at an individual and a collective level—not as punitive but rather as an empowering and forward-looking tool for theorizing and accomplishing profound ethical transformation. The Forward-Looking View of Karma “From karma various worlds are born.”4 This is how the Indian Buddhist scholar-sage Vasubandhu (fourth century CE) placed karma at the center of our psychology and, ultimately, our moral life. Although as a representative of but one early Buddhist school, Vasubandhu can hardly be said to speak for the whole of Buddhist philosophy per se, this view articulates the centrality of karma to Buddhist psychology broadly. Karma is indispensable to the Buddhist account of what shapes our experience of the world and how we can intervene upon it through contemplative practice. Due to its ethical and soteriological importance, karma is a formidable (and somewhat forbidding) topic in Buddhist philosophy. The historical Buddha himself even discouraged his interlocutors in the Acintita Sutta from belaboring a “[precise working out of the] results of [karma],” because it “would bring madness and vexation to anyone who conjectured” about it.5 This is perhaps especially true for Western audiences, from whom karma’s philosophical significance is often obscured by a false sense of familiarity with it. Although the term “karma” has fully entered the lexicon of the contemporary North American, it has done so largely by way of an appropriation that both distorts and flattens its ethical significance. In its casual usage, karma is taken to mean a form of punitive cosmic justice—that if I do something bad, then there will be a poetically Newtonian, equal-and-opposite bad thing that will boomerang back upon me.6 For example, we might hear about someone’s belief that they “usually have very good karma” when it comes to quotidian strokes of good luck, such as easily finding a parking space. Or, basking in schadenfreude at seeing someone they do not much like or respect suffering for their apparent faults, someone might smugly tweet, “That’s some karma right there!”7 308 jessica locke When taken with more nuance, karma actually stands to give us a compelling view of how our moral psychology is shaped and what it takes to free ourselves from ethically infelicitous ways of thinking, feeling, and experiencing our world. The word karma means “action” in Sanskrit,8 though the kinds of action to which this term refers comprise not just gross, physical actions but also the subtler actions of our speech and even thought. All of our actions of thought, speech, and deed contribute to the ongoing sedimentation of the structures through which we have a world, adding either positively or negatively to the habits that structure our inner life.9 In that sense, whatever each of us is experiencing in this moment is imbued with the mood of our karma, and however we act from one moment to the next will add to that karmic sedimentation, either deepening that mood or subtly shifting it. This is relevant to Buddhist soteriology, because in general the whole point of Buddhist practice is to liberate oneself from suffering (Sanskrit: dukkha) by interrupting the force and momentum of karma that is rooted in ignorance (Sanskrit: avīdya). The most pernicious karmic habit from which we must disentangle ourselves is our reification of the self and, particularly in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the reification of any substance, category, or concept whatsoever. Our tendency toward reification shows itself most directly in the afflictive emotions (Sanskrit: kleśa) that it elicits. The pithiest taxonomy of afflictive emotions categorizes them as threefold: ignorance (particularly the ignorance that gives rise to reification in the first place), and the passion and aggression in which we become entangled on the basis of that ignorance. The affective dramas of oscillating between passion and aggression polarize our world; driven by aggression, we ward off what we regard as fearful or threatening, while clinging to anything that stands to fortify or mollify the self with which we so stridently identify. Any occasion upon which I act from a place of ignorant self-cherishing and the fear and desire that it motivates, I am adding to the sedimentation of the affective habits that keep me ensconced in suffering. This is why working to shift karma—to shift the mood of our world and the habits by which we sediment its perceptual and affective structure—is a critical dimension of Buddhist practice. Although transforming the karmic structure of one’s relationship with the world requires acting “out of character” in a way that may very well feel counterintuitive in the extreme if not outright unnatural and impossible, the entire Buddhist path hinges upon our ability to do so. theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 309 This fundamental optimism and ambition of Buddhist practice underscores the fact that karma is not simply a device by which the universe punishes us for our misdeeds. While karma helps explain how we got to where we are, it also points to the available trajectories of where we can go from here. This is why I insist that karma should be understood as forward-looking, pointing toward the open future of our habituation and the capacity we have to engage in practices and experiences that will change us for the better, shifting our karma in the direction of liberation. In the final analysis, teachings on karma are an open invitation to change. The Buddhist view of karma does, however, place an enormous amount of responsibility in the hands (and the mind) of the individual, who is understood as the author both of their own suffering and their own liberation. For example, the twelfth-century Tibetan Buddhist master Gampopa isolates karma as a specifically individual phenomenon in which an individual’s actions ripen into specific events or experiences undergone by that individual particularly. As he puts it, “you experience the results of the karma you create.”10 Thinking about karma in this way is meant to instill a healthy kind of fear about the results of our actions, with which we will all inevitably be confronted as those results ripen in time. It also expresses the predominating view in traditional Buddhist psychology that karma is ultimately something that each of us cultivates and then experiences on an individual basis. For this reason and others, Buddhist ethics is sometimes faulted for being unduly inward-looking and for lacking a robust social or communal dimension. Notwithstanding the emphasis on values such as compassion and the importance of the community of practitioners (Sanskrit: sangha) in Buddhist life, the karmic picture we get of Buddhist psychology and practice appears to be a largely solitary project turning on individual effort and experience, with the impact of social ties and communal bonds playing a supporting role at most. Furthermore, holding an individual solely responsible for the suffering they experience—arguing that whatever conditions they encounter in life are the ripened results of their own thought, word, and deed—does seem rather retrograde in a sociohistorical context in which confronting structural oppression is one of the most pressing moral issues of our time. In this sense Buddhist ethics seems to have left itself open to the critique that it is too individualistic and that it lacks the tools for theorizing questions of social justice or injustice. 310 jessica locke The Psychological and Social Dimensions of Collective Karma There is, however, a more socially driven reading of karma that illuminates how karma can intersect with and reverberate within cultural practices and political institutions. Although it is not developed with nearly the same technical nuance across Buddhist traditions as karma simpliciter, the concept of collective karma (Tibetan, Wylie spelling: thun mong gi las) plays a meaningful role in the phenomenological account of experiences held in common by members of a community as well as in Buddhist political thought.11 In this section, I focus on two such articulations of collective karma that come, respectively, from the early Buddhist Yogācāra tradition and the theory of Buddhist governance expounded through centuries of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist sources. Though disparate in their sourcing, each of these instantiations of collective karma undermines the view that we are each unavoidably siloed in karmic echo chambers and indicates instead that much of our karma is interdependent with that of the collective. Yogācāra—sometimes dubbed the Buddhist phenomenological tradition—is known for its explanation of how experience is shaped by the structures and proclivities of our consciousness. A key conceptual tool that it deploys in this explanation is the storehouse consciousness (Sanskrit: ālāya-vijñāna), the foundational level of a being’s consciousness in which the karmic impressions of all previous experience are stored as “karmic seeds.” These karmic seeds come to fruition within the future experience of an individual, arising as the specificity their world of experience either in this life or in a future life.12 But this account of consciousness raises a question: If the karmic seeds residing in each of our storehouse consciousnesses are what give rise to our world of experience, then what explains the fact that most of us tend to experience a world that is largely similar to that experienced by others? Why do we not all live utterly isolated in solipsistic worlds that are determined by the specificity of our individual karmic seeds? The Yogācārins answer this by way of collective karma—the view that beings inhabit a world that is held in common by the power of similar karma that gives rise to an experienced world they can share. For example, a commentary by the sixth-century Yogācāra scholar Asvabhāva notes that “perceptions appear similarly to all who experience them through the force of maturation that is in accordance with their own collective karma.”13 In other words, Asvabhāva attributes the arising of a theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 311 world that a community of subjects experience in common to the fact that they have been impressed upon by similar experiences leaving similar karmic seeds in their respective storehouse consciousnesses, thus establishing their collective karma. William Waldron is emphatic in his assessment of this claim: “This is a profoundly significant passage. Put simply, our ‘world’ appears to us in similar ways because we have similar karma to experience it similarly.”14 The contemporary Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh further elaborates on this issue in his verses on Yogācārin psychology in Understanding Our Mind: “Store consciousness is neither the same nor different, / individual nor collective. / Same and different inter-are. / Collective and individual give rise to each other.”15 The contents (and therefore the manifestation) of the storehouse consciousness cannot be distinctly separated into those belonging to “self” and “other,” individual and beyond-the-individual. Because we are inextricably bound in a vast web of interdependence,16 the aggregation of an individual’s karmic seeds cannot be said to be absolutely individual, divorced from the cultural and social factors that contextualize experience. Given the ineluctable interdependence of all phenomena and all beings, there is something a bit artificial if not outright metaphysically dubious about drawing hard and fast distinctions between the individual and the collective when it comes to analyzing the factors that shape our experience of the world. Waldron attributes the cultivation of collective karma to a largely linguistic and perceptual process that “bridges our individual and collective experience of the ‘world,’ connecting our similar karmic activities with the similar ‘worlds’ these activities bring about.” He locates the arising of the “cultural, social, and cognitive ‘worlds’ we inhabit, not simply as individuals but even more essentially as social beings” to this intertwining of the individual and the collective in our storehouse consciousness.17 In other words, according to the Yogācāra view, the world we experience cannot be entirely private, because it is structured by factors that similarly shape others’ experience. The intersection and commingling of the factors that shape an individual’s consciousness—the karmic seeds that are planted through their thoughts, words, and deeds, as well as the cultural and environmental contexts that provide the conditions for those thoughts, words, and deeds—indicate a radically interdependent and dynamic quality of conscious experience that cuts across an individualistic reading of Buddhist psychology. 312 jessica locke As Waldron notes, this has social and political ramifications. He suggests that, based upon this, “we all have a larger responsibility in the construction of our ‘world’ than we commonly acknowledge. . . . The issue of which particular concepts, categories, and classifications we produce, proclaim, and protect—unconsciously or otherwise—is of vital importance.”18 This point is very well taken. Our ethical selfhood is porous, and the Yogācārin reading of collective karma should prompt us to take seriously the “concepts, categories and classifications” that we employ, as these will contribute to a mutually reinforcing cultural and psychological feedback loop that shapes both individual and collective karma. All experience changes us—including our experience of the social and cultural mutuality in which we are located. From a karmic perspective, the company we keep—and the language, values, and mores that we take in and put into practice in that company—matter very much. This point underwrites Buddhist theories of governance, in which collective karma accounts for the shared experience of a group of people in a social and political context. Collective karma can be the basis for a sense of solidarity within a community, and bettering the conditions under which that community is bound together karmically is the work of good governance. The contemporary Tibetan politician Samdhong Rinpoché gives voice to this perspective, remarking in a 2012 interview: “Karmic responsibility means that we believe in collective karma and individual karma. You and I have absolutely individual karma which has nothing to do with each other, but we [also] have a lot of collective karma. Due to collective karma, we are talking; due to collective karma, we are sitting in one room. . . . So someone born as Tibetan, in Tibet, or has Tibetan parents, their collective karma belongs to the Tibetan people.”19 Here, Samdhong Rinpoché uses collective karma as an explanatory tool for understanding what brings individuals together around a common experience, from two people’s paths crossing in the course of their professional lives, to a national group being drawn together through a specific national identity and history. Samdhong Rinpoché’s interviewer, Martin Mills, uses this point to analyze how collective karma produces in the Tibetan political imaginary a specific view of political associations and rulership and how “notions of communal and shared karma imply moral solidarities and boundaries that have shaped Tibetan understandings of legitimate governance” such that “intentional economic transactions and ongoing legal relations were seen as having a necessary and unavoidable karmic dimension.”20 theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 313 He argues that the theory of collective karma, particularly as manifested in Tibetan Buddhist political culture, displays “a general preoccupation with the moral nature of institutional responsibility.”21 Viewing policy decisions as interventions into the shared karmic conditions of a whole society puts a particular kind of moral pressure on social and political deliberations. The timeline for political thinking is not a news or election cycle but rather the incalculably complex unfolding of the moral development of a community and each of its members. It bears mentioning that within the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist frame from which Mills draws, this view of institutional karmic relations is deeply hierarchical. Those who find themselves at the head of an institution see themselves as karmically bound with all the subjects of that institution and hold a special degree of moral responsibility for using their influence to positively impact the karmic culture of the collective. A relationship of benevolent care for the collective karmic well-being of the kingdom is incumbent upon political leaders, and in fact is that from which the legitimacy of governance is in part derived. This attitude toward collective karma and rulership has precursors in early Buddhist texts on kingship. The Rājovāda Jātaka, for example, tells the story of a king who ventures out into his kingdom incognito to try to ascertain firsthand the well-being of his subjects. He visits an ascetic in the forest who offers him some figs gathered from the woods that were “luscious and sweet, like powdered sugar.”22 When the (still disguised) king marveled at their sweetness, the ascetic attributed the sweetness of the fruit that grew spontaneously in the forest to the just rule of the king himself: “In the time of unjust kings, oil, honey, molasses, and the like, as well as wild roots and fruits, lose their sweetness and flavor, and not only these but the whole realm becomes bad and flavorless; but when the rulers are just, these things become sweet and full of flavor, and the whole realm recovers its tone and flavour.”23 Just as with individual karmic seeds that come to fruition as sweet or bitter experience, here we have the metaphorical “sweet fruit” that flowers from the rule of a just king as a public good to be enjoyed by his subjects. The opposite is the case, as well; when a king is unjust, the whole kingdom over which he rules incurs the karmic impact of that injustice, bearing bitter fruit not only for the king individually but also for the kingdom into which his influence flows. Read together, these points from Samdhong Rinpoché, Mills, and the Rājovāda Jātaka indicate, first, how the shared experience of members of 314 jessica locke a political unit is ultimately a karmic relationship. Any group of people brought together by virtue of their membership in a political unit or even simply their shared exposure to a political, economic, or environmental event are there due to their collective karma. Further, the relative health of a political unit has karmic valences, inasmuch as the governance structures of a kingdom—be they benevolent under a dharmic king or malicious under a vicious ruler—provide the environmental conditions within which these subjects are bound together and undergo their mutually reinforcing, interdependent individual and collective karmic cultivation. Although the specificities of individual experiences will always vary, the relative sweetness or bitterness of the life that a society shares is the fruit of the governance under which they live. These sources on Yogācāra and Buddhist governance provide a sketch of the interdependence of individual and collective karma and the importance of using a political system to exploit that interdependence positively, bringing about the sweet fruit of meritorious karma through good governance. But what does this picture of the politics of collective karma illuminate about a contemporary democratic order? In a Buddhist premodern era, when monarchy was the unquestioned norm of governance, the sovereign holds an enormous amount of responsibility for influencing collective karma. But when sovereignty lies not with the king but with the people (at least in theory), from whence comes—and to where flows—the capacity to influence collective karma, for good or for ill? Particularly in light of Waldron’s exhortation toward a careful curation of the factors shaping our collective karma, and in the absence of a benevolent dharmic king with the ability to shift our collective karma on the power of his own dharmic merit, what are the available trajectories for fashioning collective karma? A Karmic Reading of Transformative Justice One model for what collective karmic practice could look like in a contemporary context is the alternative justice model of transformative justice (TJ). What I am particularly interested in vis-à-vis transformative justice is the way that it seeks to upend our societal habits around responding to social harm, radically reframing the nature of crime not through the antagonistic frame of “criminal versus innocent” but rather as a symptom of an underlying social malady that is exacerbated if not caused by entrenched social theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 315 and political habits. As an abolitionist theory, TJ is extremely demanding of a community, requiring all of those impacted by an instance of social harm to refute the conventions of retributive justice that operate according to a primitive affective economy dominated by a fear of the criminal and a desire to see them punished. By critiquing the reifications of categories like “innocent” and “criminal” and interrupting the fears and desires that motivate retributive justice, TJ provides a useful model for thinking through what a practice of shaping collective karma can look like in a democratic context. TJ is an extension of the practice and philosophy of restorative justice (RJ). With precursors in indigenous conflict resolution practices in First Nations communities in North America as well as the Maori in New Zealand, RJ was popularized in the 1990s as a more humane alternative to the standard criminal justice system. Whereas retributive justice is driven by the task of determining via adversarial litigation what laws have been broken, who broke them, and what punishment they deserve, RJ aims to restore or “make whole” the relationship that has been broken by the offender’s violation rather than punish or ostracize the person labeled as a “criminal.” An (anonymized) example of a restorative process that took place in my home city of Baltimore involved a white professional woman, Gabi, whose Vespa scooter was stolen from her garage by Jarrell, a Black high school student from the historically redlined neighborhood less than a mile away. When the police arrested Jarrell, Gabi was given the option of a restorative justice process rather than a standard adjudication process. She opted for RJ, which included a facilitated meeting with Jarrell and his mother and an agreement that Jarrell would fix Gabi’s garage door that he had broken in the course of stealing the scooter, thus “restoring” what had been broken in the course of this small instance of a social harm—the broken garage door and the broken relationship between community members that the theft represents. But is there not something inherently disempowering and unequal about Jarrell and his mother “agreeing” to “restore” the communal “trust” that had been broken by virtue of his theft, when the very conditions under which all of these parties were living—in a highly segregated city, in which residents of the beleaguered “Black butterfly” are grossly underserved, while people like Gabi are clearly so much better served and protected by all city agencies? Here the notion of “restoration” seems quite thin, and 316 jessica locke while certainly better than a punitive model that would simply have fed a child into the carceral system, it still seems to paper over the larger societal patterns that placed Gabi and Jarrell in their obviously inequitable positions to begin with. This critique is what gave rise to TJ, whose advocates point out that very often crime takes place within unequal and oppressive social and institutional contexts, and “any theory or method that ignores the racism and classism that are basic to retributive justice is missing something very vital, and will serve to reinforce that racism and classism further, by not challenging it.”24 TJ seeks not only to restore the relationship between victim, offender, and community but also to critically examine the equity of the relationship that it is seeking to restore. For this reason, the most fundamental critique of RJ by TJ practitioners is that “the idea of restoring justice implied that we had justice, and lost it.”25 TJ thus emphasizes that alongside and within efforts to address specific ruptures in the social fabric via restorative practices, achieving actual justice also requires critiquing and transforming the hierarchies and inequities—particularly racism and classism—that underwrite the rupture in question. This view leads TJ into some fairly challenging stances. For example, in a discussion on how to address sexual harm and gender violence, the abolitionist organizer Shira Hassan remarks: “It is really critical for people to think about the difference between punishment and consequences. Punishment often is actually not the same as transformation. Even though it feels good to wear the ‘kill the rapists’ T-shirt, that isn’t the thing that is actually going to get us the world we want to live in.”26 By challenging certain under-examined concepts—such as the distinction between punishment and consequences, and which of these produces felicitous social outcomes—and even critiquing the desire to dehumanize rapists, Hassan is voicing the fundamental ethos of TJ. She is saying that if we really want to address problems even as grave as sexual assault, we cannot rely upon ossified oppositions of good and evil, innocent and criminal, victim and rapist—categories upon which the current system of mass incarceration in the United States relies. This abolitionist view of social transformation seeks a radical break from our well-worn societal habits of antagonistic dualisms—the habits that polarize our political environment and reinscribe the habits of dehumanization and social disconnection of which they are both symptom and cause. theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 317 Here we might recall Vasubandhu’s claim: “From karma various worlds are born.” On an individual basis, Buddhist practice is about taking seriously the kind of world we are creating for ourselves through our thought, speech, and deed. Within the broader frame of collective karma, we can see that the concepts, categories, and classifications that a culture adopts will partially structure the world that those participating in that culture experience, and the policy choices that a society adopts become part of the structure of experience that a community holds in common. What makes TJ a practice of collective karmic intervention, then, is the way it challenges the foundational concepts and categories that a society cashes in on as the affective and political currency of addressing social harm. In the same way that the doctrine of karma prompts us to examine and interrupt habitual tendencies such as the reification of the self or harmful cultural mores, TJ holds that to address social suffering, we need to mend ruptures in the social fabric using methods that transcend and even reverse patterns of social disconnection rather than reinscribe them. TJ thus disrupts the conventional frame of retributive justice, which in its demonization of the criminal and its drive to punish, manifests a polarized social world not unlike the binary of self and other that is the central problem of Buddhist moral psychology. TJ’s abolitionist answer to social harm demands that we—as a society—act “out of character” by no longer cashing in on those polarities, reframing the whole question of social harm not as a matter of battling fearsome “others” but rather as addressing systemic issues in which we are all, in some way, interdependently and irreducibly involved and for which we must take collective responsibility. The nature of social harm itself is located not in the “criminal” but in the fact of rupture itself and in the unjust systemic, societal conditions that contextualize that rupture. This approach is founded upon a politics of interdependence that says that we cannot address social harm by inflicting other forms of social harm. The distribution of responsibility for repairing and maintaining the social fabric exemplifies a revised, contemporary ideal of Buddhist governance. In a premodern context, the sovereign’s wisdom and virtue is the primary instrument for engendering the health of the polis. Translated to a democratic context, it is incumbent upon the community itself to manifest the wisdom and virtue that will bear sweet karmic fruit rather than the bitterness of continued social dysfunction and injustice. Inasmuch as political sovereignty is—in the abstract, at least—distributed under democracy, so 318 jessica locke too must be the cultivation of wisdom and virtue in the exercise of political power, especially when it comes to systems such as criminal justice and mass incarceration that under current conditions are manifestations of profoundly harmful and oppressive social polarizations. Solidarity, Collective Karma, and Buddhist-Inspired Social Change Ultimately, collective karma names the trajectory held in common through which a community heads toward shared suffering or shared liberation by virtue of the systems that bind them together in social life. At both the individual and the collective level, fear and desire rooted in ignorance are the two most potent contributors to the sedimentation of individual and collective suffering. More than anything, collective karma entails an ethics of interdependence and a politics of solidarity. Theorizing collective karma places us within a web of mutuality—the irreducibly interconnected, “in-it-together-ness”—that is our social life. Aside from clarifying what collective karma means, this analysis helps illuminate a Buddhist view of social change more broadly. Working with any karma means doing the challenging, perhaps awkward-feeling daily practice of unsettling the seemingly “natural” or “immutable” structures of our experience and well as of society—one thought, feeling, word, or deed at a time. Working with collective karma in the interest of liberation likewise entails a fine-grained, thoroughgoing transformation of our systemic practices not through revolutionary rhetoric or even simply replacing one harmful system with a slightly less inhumane replacement. Collective karmic intervention calls for the radical work of acting “out of character” at a systemic level in a way that might feel impossibly unrealistic or uncomfortable. The always-unfinished quality of our collective karma indicates that there is nothing natural or inevitable about our commitment to dysfunctional social systems such as retributive justice. The original purpose of the Buddha’s teachings on karma is to draw our attention to the ways in which we can take responsibility for the shape of our ethical subjectivity and orient ourselves toward liberation. In the same way and for the same reason, the theory of collective karma—in traditional Buddhist texts and in contemporary engaged Buddhism—invites us into a forward-looking theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 319 project of radical social change in the interest of cultivating a humane and just society. notes 1. Larry Ward, America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2020). 2. David Loy, The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997); David Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008); David Loy, Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis. (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2019). 3. Traditionally, this karmic process transpires both at a psychological level, which is the primary focus of this article, as well as within a cosmological frame that unfolds across multiple rounds of rebirth. Because I focus here on the moral psychology of Buddhist practice and its possible social analogues, I have limited my discussion of karma in this piece to the psychological dimension of karma. 4. Vasubandhu and Ninth Karmapa Wangchuk Dorje, Jewels from the Treasury: Vasubandhu’s Verses on the Treasury of Abhidharma and Its Commentary Youthful Play by the Ninth Karmapa Wangchuk Dorje (Woodstock, NY: KTD Publications, 2012), 35. 5. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, trans., “Acintita Sutta: Unconjecturable,” 1997, https:// accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.077.than.html. 6. To be fair, some of this confusion stems from the fact that different Indian traditions have different readings of karma. Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists all have distinct approaches to and uses of karma, which understandably can lead to confusion among those uninitiated to the rather vast doctrinal differences between these three traditions. 7. Scholars are not immune to similar misreadings of karma. A onedimensional sketch of karma that as a form of “moral accounting” can be found in Whitley R. P. Kaufman’s investigation of karma as a form of theodicy and possibly a source of something like divine justice (“Karma, Rebirth, and the Problem of Evil,” Philosophy East and West 55, no. 1 [2005]: 28). 8. In Pāli, the term is kamma and in Tibetan (Wylie spelling), las, both of which translate literally as “action” as well. 9. If this account of Buddhist ethics sounds phenomenological, that is for good reason. Although there are various systematic interpretations of Buddhist ethics, I am sympathetic to Jay Garfield’s argument that much Buddhist ethics can best be understood as moral phenomenology (“What Is It like to Be a Bodhisattva? Moral Phenomenology in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33, nos. 1–2 [2012]: 333–57; Engaging 320 jessica locke Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]). In a similar vein, Matthew MacKenzie gives a salutary phenomenological reconstruction of karma by way of the work of Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, and Eleanor Rosch (“Enacting Selves, Enacting Worlds: On the Buddhist Theory of Karma.” Philosophy East and West 63, no. 2 [2013]: 194–212). 10. Gampopa, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation: The Wish-Fulfilling Gem of the Noble Teachings, trans. Khenpo Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1998), 119. 11. Thun mong gi las can also be translated with “shared karma” as well as “general karma.” Berzin defines thun mong gi las as “Karmic tendencies and potential built up jointly by a group of beings, the results of which they experience in common” (“Collective Karma”). Elsewhere, he defines it as “[a limited group of individuals’] shared experiencing of environmental or societal situations or occurrences when this group experiences them . . . [as well as] the environmental or societal situations or occurrences that provide the circumstances for this group to experience them” (Alexander Berzin and Jonathan Landaw, “Collective Karma and Natural Disasters,” Study Buddhism by Benzin Archives, 2021). 12. I suggest William Waldron’s excellent monograph on the ālāya-vijñāna, which gives a much fuller picture of the intricacies of Yogācāra than this necessarily brief treatment can offer (The Buddhist Unconscious). 13. This is from Asvabhāva’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha-upanibandhana (Tibetan translation title: theg pa chen po bsdus pa'i bshad sbyar), 268. This rendering from the Tibetan translation is based upon Waldron’s (Buddhist Unconscious, 165), with my own revision to render the phrase that ends the passage—thun mong ba rang gi las—as “their own collective karma” rather than “their own similar karma.” Although Waldron’s translation is linguistically and philosophically sound, rendering the key concept at hand—thun mong gi las—as “collective karma” or “shared karma” is also perfectly serviceable (cf. “Collective Karma”) and salutary for the sake of terminological continuity in this piece. 14. William S. Waldron, The Buddhist Unconscious: The Ālaya-Vijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2003), 165. 15. Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind: 50 Verses on Buddhist Psychology (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2002), 84. 16. The basis for this argument is the metaphysical view of emptiness, which says that nothing can be said to hold inherent, independent, substantive existence but rather everything exists interdependently. 17. Waldron, The Buddhist Unconscious, 168, emphasis original. 18. Waldron, The Buddhist Unconscious, 169. 19. Martin Mills, “The Perils of Exchange: Karma, Kingship and Templecraft in Tibet,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 24 (January 2015): 190. 20. Mills, “The Perils of Exchange,” 191. 21. Mills, “The Perils of Exchange,” 208. theorizing collective karma through transformative justice 321 22. Robert Chalmers, trans.,“Jātaka 334: Rājovāda-Jātaka,” 2014, Jātaka 334. https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/jataka-tales-english/d/doc80504. html. 23. Chalmers, trans.,“Jātaka 334.” 24. Morris, Stories of Transformative Justice, 19. Morris further critiques the very nomenclature of restorative justice as “unhealthy for victims” because it sets them up for a fantastical expectation that there is some method that can, in fact, bring them back to some original state of wholeness. The fact is, Morris argues, that the trauma that they experienced cannot and will not be undone. We cannot recreate some perfected version of the past, and it is misleading to promise such a thing. Instead, the goal should be to help the victim “recognize they can transform the world positively from their pain” (19). 25. Morris, Stories of Transformative Justice, 19. 26. Sarah Jaffe, Mariame Kaba, and Shira Hassan, “From ‘Me Too’ to ‘All of Us’: Organizing to End Sexual Violence without Prisons,” in We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, ed. Tamara N. Nopper, 41–48 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 47. works cited Asvabhāva [Ngo bo nyid med pa]. Theg Pa Chen Po Bsdus Pa’i Bshad Sbyar [Tibetan Translation of Mahāyāna-Saṃgraha-Upanibandhana]. P. #5552. Berzin, Alexander, and Jonathan Landaw. 2021. “Collective Karma and Natural Disasters.” Study Buddhism by Benzin Archives. https:// studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/lam-rim/karma-advanced/ collective-karma-and-natural-disasters. Chalmers, Robert, trans. 2014. “Jātaka 334: Rājovāda-Jātaka.” Jātaka 334. https:// www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/jataka-tales-english/d/doc80504. html. “Collective Karma.” 2014. Glossary, Study Buddhism by Benzin Archives. https:// studybuddhism.com/en/glossary/collective-karma. Gampopa. 1998. The Jewel Ornament of Liberation: The Wish-Fulfilling Gem of the Noble Teachings. Translated by Khenpo Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion. Garfield, Jay L. 2012. “What Is It like to Be a Bodhisattva? Moral Phenomenology in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33, nos. 1–2: 333–57. ———. 2015. 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