The Apocalypse Can't Absolve your Sins: Karma and Time in a 9th-Century Buddhist Polemic

Among the earliest extant Tibetan writings from Dunhuang, there is a text that belongs to a cult that prays for the coming of an apocalypse known as the Tempest. This Tempest will put an end to the present Evil Age and usher in a new Good Age, at the beginning of which believers and their ancestors will live again. Though the cult seems not to have survived, it was the target of a Buddhist polemic that railed against how the Tempest allowed people to escape the logic of karma. The polemicist inveighs, "the coming of the Tempest will not expunge your sins!" Drawing on both this cult and the polemic against it, this paper queries the extent to which time itself can be a liberating force that acts upon a given group of people, and the putative threat that such an idea poses to certain Buddhist understandings of karma.