Patañjali, like the Buddhists, understood that the material world is in a state of constant change. Given that the ego, mind and intellect are located within the domain of the material world, this means that these too are subject to change from one moment to the next. Furthermore, philosophers in both camps located the source of our suffering in a mistaken attachment to an impermanent ego self. Beyond this, however, Patañjali posits an eternal and unchanging dimension to human existence, the puruṣa, a steady witness to the ever-unfolding drama of our material existence.
sadā jñatā citta-vṛttayas tat-prabhaḥ puruṣasyāpariṇāmitvāt (IV.18)
Patterns of consciousness are always known by pure awareness, their ultimate, unchanging witness.
(Translated by Chip Hartranft in Narasimhan, p.138)
In his commentary on IV.18, Edwin Bryant highlights the unchanging nature (apariṇāmitva) of the Self as an axiomatic truth of Hindu philosophy. The central philosophical difference between Buddhist and Hindu philosophers revolves around the existence of this eternal and unchanging Self. Buddhist philosophers reject the existence of anything permanent within human existence, a position known as Not-Self (an-ātman—note that Patañjali generally uses the term puruṣa rather than ātman for the unchanging Self). This fundamental difference plays out in both theory and practice. For example, whereas Patañjali stresses the role of ignorance (avidyā) as a source of our suffering, in which we misidentify the impermanent ego self as our real Self, the Buddha emphasized our craving (tṛṣṇā) for permanence as the source of suffering.
Identity and change: philosophical overview
Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a near contemporary of the Buddha and in concurrence with him, is well known for his infamous maxim that everything is constantly changing. According to Heraclitus, I can’t step into the same river twice, not just because the river itself is constantly changing, but also because I am too. Likewise, for example, the watch I wear on my wrist today is not strictly the same as the watch I wore on my wrist yesterday. Physics tells me its material composition is constantly changing. Yet I think of it as being the same. Perhaps this is just convenience or metaphysical laziness on my part. Or, maybe there can be some justification for arguing that any given object can be considered the same, despite having undergone change. Even though I know that, at the microscopic level, my watch is always changing, because there is a material continuity through space and time that preserves its function as a timekeeper, that might be sufficient for claiming it as the same watch. Some of you may be familiar with the example of the ship of Theseus, a philosophical thought experiment designed to prompt our thinking about what makes objects the same through time. Over a period of time, the ship of Theseus had all of its components replaced until nothing material from the original ship remained. Is it still the same ship, despite the fact that its material composition is entirely different?
What about us? We are far more complicated than a watch, but like the watch, we are gradually and constantly changing from moment to moment. Once I was a tiny baby, then a child, a young adult and so on, all leading up to the present Joy Laine, a woman in her late sixties. As is the case with everyone who lives for an average lifespan, I have undergone significant physical and psychological changes. Despite this, most of us feel that we are the same person throughout our lives. What makes us feel this way? Beyond how we feel, we have to ask what the objective basis might be for claiming that we are the same person throughout the course of our lives. The question becomes compounded for those who believe in rebirth.
Questions such as these constitute the philosophical problem of personal identity, a problem that occupies philosophers to this day. Contemporary philosophers differ on the question of whether it is philosophically coherent to think ourselves as being the same person throughout our lives. Those who argue for a continued identity throughout the course of our lives are divided on their reasons for thinking this. There are those philosophers who posit some unchanging essence within each of us, like a soul, that gives us our continued identity through time. Others deny the existence of any such element. Any sense we have of being the same person through time must be constructed on the foundation of elements that themselves are constantly changing, like the river of Heraclitus or the watch on my wrist. We build a sense of identity through time on the basis of continuities like beliefs, character traits and especially memories. This is known as “the bundle theory” of personal identity.
In the Indian philosophical tradition too, we see similar patterns of thought. On the one hand, there are philosophers, such as Patañjali, who believe in an unchanging Self that runs like a thread through our existence linking all of our experiences together like the beads on a necklace. On the other hand, there are those philosophers such as the Buddha who lean more towards a bundle theory. According to the Buddha, no thread runs through our life holding the beads together. Our experiences are braided together solely on the basis of complex chains of causal connections, a rope with no single thread running all the way through it.
It is not surprising to discover that questions relating to personal identity crop up in different cultures, since it is a problem deeply intertwined with other significant questions—most notably, issues of moral accountability.
Buddhist selfless persons
In the Questions of King Milinda (Milinda Pañha), an important Buddhist text from around the beginnings of the Common Era, Nāgasena, a Buddhist monk, engages King Milinda in a dialogue about the nature of personhood. King Milinda is new to Buddhist philosophy and asks the kinds of questions that any novice would be tempted to ask. Hence, it is an important teaching text, helpful to anyone curious about how the Buddhist view of universal flux could possibly be crafted into a coherent account of personhood and moral accountability. Nāgasena asks King Milinda the same question I asked above:
What do you say to this your majesty? When you were a young, weakly infant lying on your back, was that you, the person who is now king? (QM)
King Milinda responds as follows:
Indeed, no sir! The young, tender, weakly infant that was lying on its back was one person, and the grownup me is another person. (QM)
Nāgaseṇa posed this question at a point in their dialog where Nāgasena had already initiated the King into the Buddhist view that there is no unchanging essence at the core of our being. Hence, the King’s answer is less surprising. He is giving Nāgaseṇa what he feels would be the “correct” answer from a Buddhist perspective. Nāgaseṇa, however, responds as follows:
If that is the case, your majesty, then there can be no such thing as a mother, or a father, or a teacher, or an educated man, or a righteous man, or a wise man. Pray, your majesty, is the mother of the zygote one person, the mother of the embryo another person, the mother of the fetus another person, the mother of the newborn another person, the mother of the little child another person, and the mother of the grown up man another person? Is it one person who is a student, and another person who has finished his education? Is it one person who commits a crime, and another person whose hands and feet are cut off in punishment? (QM)
Nāgasena’s response here is crucial because it tells us that Buddhist philosophers do not seek to obliterate the idea that we are still accountable for our past, even though we are changing all of time. King Milinda is in danger of misinterpreting the Buddhist position as being more radical than it is, that we are a different person from one moment to the next, and hence wholly disconnected from our past iterations.
If we are to understand the differences between Patañjali and the Buddhist philosophers therefore, it is important to understand their differences within the framework of commonality. Buddhist philosophers, in agreement with Patañjali, believe in rebirth and supernatural karma, that the consequences of past actions exert their influence not just within the current lifespan, but can reach into future incarnations. Buddhists, however, argue that this world view can function alongside their fundamental belief, that there is no unchanging Self at the heart of human existence. Patañjali and the classical commentators of the Yoga Sūtras dispute this, arguing that in the absence of an unchanging Self (puruṣa) the idea of karma is incoherent.
Using a series of remarkable illustrations, Nāgasena explained the Buddhist perspective to Milinda, clarifying for him what binds the different stages of our lives together and what binds one incarnation to another. Buddhism is often known as ‘the Middle Way,’ not just in terms of its practices but also in terms of its philosophical views. It attempts to steer a middle course between eternalism, the view that an eternal and unchanging Self lies at the heart of human existence acting as a kind of metaphysical glue, and annihilationism, the view that with death our existence comes to an end. King Milinda asks Nāgasena, “How does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating?” Nagasena responds with this illustration:
Suppose your majesty were to light a light from another light; pray, would the one light have passed over [transmigrated] to the other light? ....... In exactly the same way, your majesty, does rebirth take place without anything transmigrating. (QM)
Like the flame of a candle moving from one candle to another, no one thing moves through time from one life to the next. Nāgasena further explains how the continuities both within a life and from one life to the next are constituted out of a complex causal chain of events. The relationship between lives and between the actions within a life is that of “dependent origination” (pratītya samutpāda), illustrated by Nāgasena with the relationship between the mango tree’s dependence on the mango seed that gave rise to it. This is how the past gets transmitted into the future. Each event occurring in one moment of time gives rise to its successor in the next moment of time. My relationship to “my” future lives is somewhat akin to the relationship between a parent and a child.
Patañjali and the commentators reply
The Buddhist view that all existing things are impermanent did not mean, therefore, that Buddhists rejected key ideas such as rebirth and moral accountability for past actions. The challenge for Buddhist philosophers was to show how these ideas were still tenable within their worldview of universal change. Their philosophical opponents, Patañjali among them, pressed the Buddhists on these points. In the absence of an unchanging Self removed from the constant churning of the material world, the philosophers within the Yoga Darśana argued that notions of moral accountability (karma) and rebirth become incoherent.
We have already examined the mechanisms underpinning karma, how the past is stored in the unconscious mind in the form of material impressions known as saṁskāras. Like seeds stored in a granary, an image employed by Buddhist and Yoga philosophers alike, they retain the potential to bear fruit at a future time given the right causal circumstances (IV.9 and IV.11). Sometimes this mechanism operates wholly at an unconscious level. My present experiences can be influenced by my past without my realizing it. At other times, the present may trigger a conscious memory of a past experience and thereby exert its influence. Buddhist and yogic explanations at this level are similar, though Buddhist philosophers would want to emphasize that the saṁskāras are themselves always changing, transmitted through time by chains of cause and effect.
It is important to note that theories of karma are intended as factual accounts of how the consequences of our actions are carried forward through time. In that sense, they should not be confused with legal or theological systems of punishment and reward administered by some judicial authority.
In the western philosophical tradition, John Locke has been the foundational thinker for laying out the circumstances under which it is morally justifiable to punish someone for actions committed in the past. For Locke, conscious memory is the moral glue that makes us liable for our past actions. He argued that we cannot be held truly accountable for actions that we cannot consciously remember today. In the absence of conscious memory of a past action, he argued that we cannot be considered the same person now as the person who carried out the action in the past. Controversial even in his own times, at the center of his argument is the idea that moral responsibility rests on a feeling of personal ownership of our actions. Locke argued that in the absence of being able to remember performing an action, we will not feel that sense of ownership and should not be held liable. Many contemporary philosophers accept this basic intuition of Locke, that there needs to be some strong personal connection between who we are now and who we were in the past to be held accountable for past actions.
As noted above, Indian theories of karma, however, are less about which actions we ought to be punished for. Rather, it aspires to be a descriptive theory of how our past actually impacts the present. Patañjali and the Buddhists are not arguing that we should suffer the consequences of forgotten past actions, but that we will suffer the consequences of past actions.
Conclusion
Those of us who come to Yoga Philosophy steeped in the assumptions of western philosophical and legal thinking have to be on guard not to bring a distorting lens to Indian views. We should not assume to equate theories of karma with our systems of punishment and reward, but, rather, we should first attempt to understand it within its own terms. We have had to explore some complicated philosophical territory to even arrive at a place where we can begin to unravel the differences between the Buddhist philosophers and Patañjali when it comes to karma and rebirth. Next month we will explore and attempt to understand these differences.
Joy Laine taught philosophy at Macalester College for over thirty years and teaches Iyengar Yoga around the Twin Cities.
Selection of Resources and Further Study
Edwin Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. North Point Press, 2009.
Eric T. Olson, “Personal Identity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
Rama Prasada, The Yoga Darśana of Patañjali. Logos Press, 1912/2005.
T.W. Rhys Davids (translator), Questions of King Milinda (QM). Reprint, J.P. Publishing House, 2013.
