Karma
Ah, Buddhism – so spiritual, so compassionate, so deep.
Sharon Stone says the Chinese earthquake was bad karma.
“I thought, ‘Is that karma?’ When you are not nice, bad things happen to you.”
Ah right – we see that every day. Cosmic justice is dealt out with unerring accuracy and gratifying speed, day in day out. Well spotted, Ms Stone.
“I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else,” Stone said in footage widely available on the internet. “And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma?”
Yeah, that’s what it is all right. All those schoolchildren crushed under their schools, all their teachers, all their parents; they were all unkind to the Tibetans; China’s policy toward Tibet is of course decided by schoolchildren among others. All the children left orphans by the earthquake; they were unkind too. The people at the other end of China are of course a different breed entirely, and have never been unkind in their lives. Oh and Katrina happened because of all the whores and faggots in New Orleans, too. Glad we got that straight.
Forget the lack of any semblance of logic in her statements.
They are callous and heartlessly banal. And don’t even start me on ‘nice’…
Good call.
I love how the religious blame anything bad that happens to *others* on some notion of divine or supernatural “justice,” never taking in to account the suffering of innocents.
Well… it *is* Sharon “Celebrity Religion of the Week” Stone, after all. Up until recently, she would have blamed it on SPs.
And FWIW, it’s a complete misunderstanding of karma in *any* tradition that believes in karma.
Forget Sharon Stone. Celebrity idiocy is nothing new. What is appalling is that ANY NEWS OUTLET IN THE WORLD THINKS IT IS WORTH PUBLISHING WHAT ANY RANDOM POPULAR ENTERTAINER THINKS ABOUT ANYTHING!!
Even the entertainment news section ought to contain, I dunno, news about entertainment – movie deals, reviews, that sort of thing. Quotes form uninformed idiots on the news of the day SHOULD NOT BE NEWS, period.
Please, somebody just make them stop.
You’d think someone as used to dealing with publicity as Ms Stone would have a better BS filter. It’s amazing how some people’s confirmation bias can exploit the deaths of thousands of people. It’s sad to think that someone thinks the universe works that way and cares more about punishing the actions of a controlling elite than respecting the lives of the innocents.
Who really cares more for humanity: the humanists or the dogmatists (of any flavour)?
Not to mention all the Tibetans living in the affected region.
Serves ’em right for being so unkind to leave Tibet … Oops — I should say it serves ’em right for being so unkind to leave Tibet AND not follow direction of Mr. Lama.
No, not just celebracy idiocy .. that’s the type of thing Buddhists murmur, but only gets into the news if repeated by famous idiots.
Greater Tibet, you mean?
And where have you heard these whispers?
DFG, I admit it, I have Buddhist friends
I believe in Karma. It means I can treat people like shit all day long knowing they have done something to deserve it.
My understanding of karma suggests that this is a misrepresentation of how karma is supposed to work. The universe does not practice collective punishment.
Ken. There’s karma and then there’s karma. As a metaphysical conception of the harmony of all things it may have some kind of recherché charm. But as used colloquially, it tends to be used as a blunt instrument. Sharon Stone got the tone just right, I think.
‘The universe does not practice collective punishment.’
Now, that’s a relief!
I wouldn’t call it a relief, since what ‘the universe’ does practise is random manifestations of force, utterly unconnected to any human conception of merit or reprobation. Frankly, at least collective punishment would be morally comprehensible. Instead we wrestle with the great and tragic [to the human consciousness] absence of any ‘reasons’ for natural phenomena.
To perceive the perils and potentials of human life at any level above that of brute beasts, and also to acknowledge that there is no justice, no order, no ultimate goal or solace – that if we want such things we must construct them for ourselves and hold them together by our will alone, and constantly fail, because we are just matter and energy, no more perfectible than a rock or a tree – that is the agony, consciously chosen, inescapable, haunting, of anyone who possesses in equal measures wisdom and compassion.
Which are, in passing, the two cardinal virtues of Buddhism. Perhaps Sharon Stone didn’t notice.
That middle paragraph is very nicely put, Dave. Funny thing is, that paragraph captures the essence of the teachings of Gautama Buddha quite nicely. Karma isn’t at it’s core a Buddhist concept at all: Reincarnation and getting what you “deserve” in the next life for your actions in this life (which is the way karma is supposed to act in the non-colloquial sense), all of that jazz was borrowed from the most oppressive and inhuman caste-system-reinforcing elements of Hinduism.
Hell, even in the colloquial sense I’ve never heard anyone characterize or apply the concept of karma in such a stupid fashion. Usually, I hear it used in a casual (and often causal) sense of “What goes around, comes around – especially when you’re an asshole to people, who have a memory for that sort of thing.” I certainly don’t think Buddhists say anything remotely resembling what Stone said, except maybe brainless trend-following Western “Buddhists” who’ve never actually bothered to study Buddhism in any meaningful sense. Sharon Stone bears about as much resemblance to a genuine Buddhist as McDonald’s does to a genuine restaurant.
But what still bothers me about this story is that any proper news bureau anywhere in the world. This was published on the BBC website, after all, not featured next to a picture of Elvis’ half-alien grandchildren in the Weekly World News. It’s a sad statement on both the media and its consumers that such pointless random celebrity spouting off is considered newsworthy by any editor, even the entertainment news editor.
Dave expressed it perfectly!
Come on, Ophelia, you’re shooting fish in a barrel here. Pick on someone your own intellectual size, why don’t you?
Because this kind of silly demotic Buddhism is very popular, that’s why don’t I.
This puts me in mind of a reaction I had to Nussbaum’s focus on Quakers rather than patriarchal dominationist wingnuts. The distorted picture of Christianity is bad for everybody, but I think it has particular dangers for the Christians.
I’m a Buddhist. (A lousy, oddball, highly Western sort of Buddhist, but there it is.) So I know all too well that there’s a lot said about how wonderful Buddhism is — as you wrote, OB, “so spiritual, so compassionate, so deep”. In addition to irritating non-Buddhists, it’s not a great thing for Buddhism. To get a sense of what this thing is that they’re practicing, imho, Buddhists need to know about the side of Buddhist history that includes horrors and fuckups. Buddhism can go hideously wrong. Case in point: Sharon Stone.
My thought while reading about Nussbaum was about the role of most prominent Zen priests in WWII. If that’s what lifelong dedication to Buddhist practice does for you, then it’s not such a big wonderful deal, is it? It’s not a ticket to right living.
I keep finding this notion in some (Western, dim, ignorant, hyper-pious) Buddhists that once you’ve had some kind of Big Meditative Experience, you can’t really do any wrong. You’re set. Whoo-hoo for you. Sometimes I suspect that the notion is the evil love child of the concepts of satori and original sin. In any case, it’s as if they’re thinking to themselves, “Hey! You’re a Buddhist! Relax! Buy some accessories with OM on ’em! You’re one of the good guys! You’ve gotten your enlightenment card stamped!”
What a relief it must be to imagine that. But I’d like to think that the Buddha would not applaud it. As I understand it, his word for Buddhism was “vibhajjavada”, the “doctrine of analysis”; in other words, think, Ms. Stone, for crying out loud, think.
At the risk of perpetrating a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy, I’d have to say that such people, whom we might term antinomian pseudo-Buddhists, really aren’t getting it at all. But then Buddhism is a human institution, and therefore bound to be screwed-up in ways Gautama couldn’t have begun to have imagined. Vide supra.
Yeah, about Nussbaum and the Quakers.
That doesn’t really do anyone any favors, that kind of thinking. It’s a sort of reverse strawman – giving a falsely rosy picture of idea or institution X that one wants to protect or promote. It won’t do. Covering up the flaws just won’t do – because the flaws have to be confronted and dealt with, not covered up and denied.
OB: exactly. And if you don’t, what do you get? A shambling, brainless version of idea, system, or institution X. Zombie X.
And then people start naming alarm clocks and cereal after it. Given, that Optimum Zen cereal is actually pretty tasty, and I suppose that 9g of fiber could be said to bring inner harmony, but still I find the name a bit much.
(If you don’t confront and deal with the flaws, that is.)
I´m not a happy camper tonight so Dave sorry, but, nicely put & all, it still is a load of bollocks. Moral sense has no need of Buddhist or other blabla, & the Big Chaotic Cosmos with the specks of tiny humans argument has nothing to do with moral sense.
The realization that there are others, that without them it would be boring & that therefore we should respect them, communicate with them & improve social interaction suffices. No Buddha, no QM with mystic interpretation – just what a few thousands of years of thinking a bit for ourselves have brought forward with much much more to come.
And all the ‘Buddha didn’t mean that’, & ‘that’s just pseudo-Buddhism’ & ‘the Hindus are the real bad guys!’ is just (what was the word? …. Ah, yes ….) bollocks.
Mr Gautama probably was great but what followed in his name was as bad as the whole shabang in the West & he was for sure not an inch as great as Kant (for the simple reason that this latter had the benefit of 1000s of years of accumulated human brain if naught else).
Whatever you think of Buddhism (and I have a somewhat negative view of it), Sharon Stone is not “Buddhism,” any more than Christopher Hitchens (for example) is “secularism.” It’s hardly a “no true Scotsman” fallacy to point this out. No one person can speak for any “ism.” Except maybe Catholicism, and even that’s debatable.
I’d file this one under “Celebrities Say Stupid-Ass Things in the Name of Sounding Spiritual”-ism.
Wow, JoB, you are cranky! But note that Dave didn’t say (or hint, or imply) that the stuff he said in that paragraph I applauded was particularly Buddhist, except insofar as it’s an expression of wisdom and compassion – which of course Buddhist thought shares with any worthwhile approach to ethical matters.
*I* (not Dave) was the one who pointed out that karma is a concept imported into Buddhism from Hinduism – which is a matter of historical fact, and which you over-interpret by a long shot. I wasn’t saying that Buddhist thought – neither the core ideas or the often appalling accretions to those core ideas – is somehow pure or ideal or not open to some very legitimate criticisms. (I myself have had some sharply critical things to say about the fundamentally anti-human nature of “desire = pain” sort of nonsense, not to mention “world of illusion” bollocks.) I was just pointing out that nothing in what Sharon Stone said made sense as any sort of Buddhism. It’s just idiot gibberish.
When Christians say something stupid about God smiting sinners en masse, they are at least saying something consistent with their holy text: God smites people left and right in the Old Testament, often for ridiculous reasons. But no Buddhist tradition – East, West, North or South – interprets karma in anything like Stone’s bizarre application of the concept. Karma is a ridiculous idea, sure – but no version of karma is consistent with whatever asinine collective guilt and punishment notion is bouncing around in the echo chamber of Sharon Stone’s head. In fact, it seems very much like Stone has just taken the very common idea (often expressed by Christians of a certain conservative bent) that whole swathes of mostly innocent people are being “punished for their sins” by natural disasters and slapped the word “karma” on it.
There’s no “Scotsman” fallacy in pointing out the incompatibility of this particular moral idiocy with any version of Buddhism, nor does doing so in any way imply that any or all forms of Buddhism are free from *other* moral idiocies – they just happen to be free of Stone’s particular moral idiocy. The fact that Stone (mis-) used the word “karma” and calls herself a Buddhist (this month) doesn’t change that.
P.S. Kant was as susceptible to moral blind spots as anyone (if not more so), so please don’t put him on a pedestal: Read the absurd essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns” for the evidence. The essay almost constitutes a reductio ad absurdum for Kantian ethics: Every philosopher who thinks Kant’s ethical theory is essentially correct also thinks Kant misapplied his own principles in that essay. For my part, I think Kant’s position in that essay is perfectly consistent with the his ethical theory – and helps expose the fundamentally flawed nature of his approach to ethics.
She repeated the fundamental idiocy and then sought to excuse it by name-dropping?
I haven’t dug up the full statement of apology, but I don’t think she did. “Not being nice to the Dalai Lama” was part of the original statement at Cannes.
Snippets of her apology: “Due to my inappropriate words and acts during the interview, I feel deeply sorry and sad about hurting Chinese people… I am willing to take part in the relief work of China’s earthquake, and wholly devote myself to helping affected Chinese people.”
That said, in another statement (http://tinyurl.com/6dvk6o) she did reiterate that the Chinese haven’t been “nice”: “It was a big lesson to me that sometimes you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who aren’t nice to you.” *wince*
Correct me if I am wrong but the fact that the concept of Karma originated in another religion doesn’t mean that it isn’t a buddhist concept.
Christianity borrowed a lot of concepts and ideas from other religions but last time I checked the virgin birth, the ritual sacrifice of Christ to atone for humankind’s sins, the flood and countless other stories are still at the heart of christian dogma…
Now I am sure people will start explaining to me that the Dalai Lama is not the spiritual leader of all buddhists but he seems to be at least Ms Stone’s, and he is on record propagating some pretty whacked out ideas about karma and, yes, collective punishment. Disabled people being punished for transgressions in their past lives, the oppression of Tibetan people by the Chinese being punishment for feudalism (feudalism and slavery were rife in Tibet prior to the Chinese invasion), that kind of things…
So maybe we shouldn’t be too fast discarding the “No true Scotsman” fallacy here, just because G’s and Cam’s version of buddhism is more tolerant/open/palatable than others does not absolve the whole of the religion.
If Sharon Stone thinks her karma is Buddhist, then it’s Buddhist.
Why? If another Buddhist thinks it’s not Buddhist, does that cancel out what Sharon Stone thinks?
“The whole of the religion” cannot be represented by one person unless it’s the kind of religion with one single head, like Catholicism.
we shouldn’t be too fast discarding the “No true Scotsman” fallacy here,
No, the “no true Scotsman” fallacy would apply if someone called Stone not a True Buddhist or the Dalai Lama not a True Buddhist because they have unsavory views.
G, yeah, I was cranky but that is not of consequence. You just cannot split Hinduism & Buddhism because they´re a bit less organized than Christianity & Judeaism.
Arnaud said it but let´s say it again, reincarnation is a senseless idea when divorced from karma. Whilst I maintain Buddhism is as bad as any religion qua religion I’m not going to say it is as internally inconsistent as any system.
No need for literature references when common sense can be made to apply.
As to Kant – far from me to put him on pedestal. The point was that knowledge progresses and that it is stupid to be maintaining that somebody from feodal times could have as much of it as Kant (regardless of individual prowess). It could as well be stated similarly with Kant &, take, Quine w/o putting Quine on a pedestal.
After all, I come after Quine ;-)
So what you seem to be asking, Jenavir, is an exemption for buddhism from any criticism. Is Stone a buddhist or not? Is the Dalai Lama?
Are reincarnation and karma buddhist concepts? (I agree they are also hindu concepts but as I said one does not preclude the other)
As for their unsavoury views, people do not indeed claim that they make Stone or the DL Not True Buddhist, they only seem to claim that their imperfect comprehension of buddhism is the reason for their unsavoury views… Excuse me if I am unconvinced.
The DL is often described as the spiritual leader of Tibetan buddhism, add to that all the “dim, ignorant buddhists” in the West for whom he can do no wrong and you have a lot of buddhists. So, when do his views start reflecting on the whole religion? When 20% of buddhists follow him? 30%? 40%?
Or is it like in the Asterix of my childhood, when Gaul wasn’t occupied by the Romans because one village still resisted against the invaders?
If Sharon Stone thinks her karma is Buddhist, then it’s Buddhist.
So if I were an astrologer, and I were to claim that I was practising science, would that make me a scientist? Wouldn’t scientists who follow the the proper scientific method (falsifiability, peer-review, etc.) be entitled to say that what I was doing was not true science? If not, someone should tell Ben Goldacre to change the name of his website.
Ah… yes, Andy, but you see your comparison breaks down fairly soon: a strict definition of science can be given against which the astrologist’s claims can be checked.
Religions? I am not so sure. People keep changing their opinion on what their religion is according to the claim they are making. Such a tactic is at the core of the No True Scotsman fallacy. That’s why I asked the question: Is Stone a buddhist? Is the Dalai Lama?
Let me help Andy: yes & yes – the most preposterous of Buddhist claims is, by the way, claiming science as a support for their ways. As stupid as that, not even the likes of Sharon Stone fell.
“People keep changing their opinion on what their religion is according to the claim they are making.”
Exactly. Infinite flexibility for them, very strict criteria for us. One minute Murphy-O’Connor says he doesn’t recognize the god Dawkins doesn’t believe in, the next minute the pope declares that it’s Absolutely Forbidden for believers to refer to god by gender-neutral terms such as ‘the creator’ because god is a MAN and don’t you forget it and his SON is a MAN too and that’s important because they are FATHER and SON and to say anything else is heresy and bad stuff.
“People keep changing their opinion on what their religion is according to the claim they are making.”
Let me quote it again. My point, for those who objected, when I said that if Sharon Stone says she is a Buddhist, then she’s a Buddhist, is simply that there is no basis for making judgements about religion. Who’s a true Christian, for instance? Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, The Church of the Third Revelation (see “There Will Be Blood”). Try as you may, there is no way to pin it down. The same goes for all the different schools of Buddhism, so if I adopt a pattern of life and believing which takes parts of Buddhism as a basis, no matter how small, and call myself a Buddhist, who has the authority to tell me I’m not? The pope may think he does, but a large number of his followers don’t share the beliefs he says are necessary for being a catholic.
What about an astrologer who calls himself a scientist? Well, who’s to stop him? Homeopaths in Britain actually have hospitals, and are on the National Health! But scientists will go on doing their experiments, and testing their hypotheses, no matter what anyone says about stars and their influences, no matter what claims are made for the healing properties of plain water! If they claim to be scientists, then it’s fair to ask for evidence, that’s all.
What really gets my goat is someone saying, of Sharon Stone, that she’s not really a Buddhist, as though there is some core of truth there, which, when you have it, is unquestionable. It’s the same with being a Scot. Hey, I’ve got a Scottish name, and I love Scotland, but its cold and wet too much of the time, for all its haunting beauty. I even live in New Scotland, but for the life of me I can’t see much difference between me and my neighbour, and he’s French! So what is this core of being that is the being of Scots or French, German, Dutch or Somoan? If that’s what the No True Scotsman fallacy is all about, that’s all I wanted to say.
Hasn’t Sharon Stone made a simple logical error here?
[I’m not nice —> bad things happen]
doesn’t imply that
[bad things happen —> I’m not nice]
This is true whether or not you believe in karma.
So what you seem to be asking, Jenavir, is an exemption for buddhism from any criticism.
Huh? No, what I’m asking is that criticism of Buddhism or any other ‘ism’ not be based on the public statements of an individual celebrity. That’s a dumb way of criticizing any ideology. If I were going to critique conservatism as a whole, I couldn’t do it just by pointing to Mel Gibson.
Jenavir says: “That’s a dumb way of criticizing any ideology. If I were going to critique conservatism as a whole, I couldn’t do it just by pointing to Mel Gibson,” referring to criticising Buddhism based on celebrity statements.
First off, using conservatism as an example is scarcely to the point. You can be conservative in so many different and unrelated ways. (For instance, I’m very conservative in some ways. I’ve been drinking the same brand of cheap sherry for almost thirty years!) The point about ideologies is that, because they have no evidential basis, ideologies invite a kind of indiscriminate participation in something that is, looked at from outside, a unified world view. Not only that, but each participant is invited to use it in an absolutist way. This, they say, pointing at themselves saying it, is what it means to be a …, well, a whatever, a Buddhist, or a Christian, and anyone who disagrees isn’t really one of those. (Sharon Stone is an exception, by the way. She actually backed down and apologised. This is rare.)
So, that’s not a dumb way of criticising an ideology. It’s the only way. Because each instantiation of the ideology is as valid as any other, since there is no evidential basis. Of course, there are fairly easily understood limits. You have to be somewhere in the ballpark. But there are Christians who would use the hyphenated Buddhist-Christian, adopting freely from each tradition. And who can say, ‘You can’t be that’? Because saying makes it so. That’s the big advantage of worldviews that don’t require evidence. It’s as easy as saying so.
But, of course, it’s just this that makes ideologies themselves dumb, and beyond criticism or confirmation.
Because each instantiation of the ideology is as valid as any other, since there is no evidential basis.
Which is why someone seeking to criticize the ideology ought to collect many instances, not just one.
Which is why, quite a few posts ago, I introduced the Dalai Lama into the discussion (and, incidentally, asked the same question with a Paxmannesque persistence ever since). I am not saying that the Pope, or Jerry Falwell for that matter, is representative of all christians, just that it’s possible, through them, to be critical of christianity as a whole…
“Which is why someone seeking to criticize the ideology ought to collect many instances, not just one.”
This is the especial pleasure of living in the twenty-first century media culture–you don’t [i]have[/i] to collect the instances, they just drop themselves in your lap ready to be vivisected.
Some posters here have suggested that SS has misrepresented karma. Then the thread disintegrated into the most effective ways to criticise an idealogy, logical fallacies, etc.
Allow me to get to the crux: Karma is complete and utter Crap.
And invoking Karma is crapper! (crappier?)
I don’t know DFG, if you are really intent on having a kind of judgement passed on people after death, karma makes a lot more sense than heaven and hell…
Doesn’t presuppose a totally different dimension of reality, doesn’t oblige you to accept that an eternity of suffering is an acceptable punishment for 5, 10 or 20 years of misdeeds (or sometimes just ONE misdeed, or even just for having lived at the wrong time in the wrong place and never having heard of jeebus, or having the misfortune to die without a priest handy…) and propagate the idea that every soul whatever they do can be redeemed in the end of time.
Wouldn’t be such a bad concept if it had any truth in it!
On the other hand karma seems to me to promote acceptance of your fate (however shitty) and indifference to other people’s suffering. But that is pretty much par for the course for religions, whatever they like to tell us…
They say consolation, I hear resignation.
But it is complete crap in the most basic sense because it relies on one of my least favourite (because so inaccurate) ideas: that there is some magic mechanism that makes everything come out all right.
There is no magic mechanism. The good die young, shit happens, the truth does not always prevail, life isn’t fair.
What about Osiris weighing your heart? Or the Ten Courts of Hell? Or perhaps get killed in battle so I can hang out in Valhalla drinking waiting for Heimdall to blow his horn.
They seem pretty good.
The above is of course a joke.
Karma makes no sense, sorry Arnaud.
Even conceptually, it is another control mechanism.
Don’t be sorry DFG, it’s all good. (but you may want to re-read my post, I put quite a few qualifiers in there…)
And yes OB that “magic mechanism” is at the heart of every religion; you can say that it is this need to believe in inherent justice which is THE religious problem. Once again: consolation, resignation and, as DFG said, control.