For the “Collective Karma” Seminar Unit’s inaugural year, this first session showcases three papers informed by non-canonical sources. Each paper discloses a unique take on collective karma in society: (1) familial responsibility, (2) moral metaphysics, and (3) “seeds-karma.” The first paper examines widely circulated medieval Chinese miracle tales, in which karma generated by a parent can be materialized in the child’s body. The second paper follows the tales-of-marvel genre, in 15th–17th century Vietnam, which map out a moral metaphysics about enduring love, inexplicable hate, and everything in between. The third paper studies an encounter of karma and social Darwinism in late 19th-century China among progressive thinkers who utilized a Yogācāra term, “seed-karma,” to wrestle with the question of species, race, and offspring. Together, these conversations uncover a rich array of repressed memories about collective karma found in vernacular literature.
This paper analyzes the “karmic retribution by proxy” trope in medieval Chinese Buddhist literature from the mid-third to mid-tenth century. In Chinese Buddhist miraculous tales, karma generated by an actor may not manifest upon themselves, but rather through the body of their child. This paper surveys surviving miraculous tales to determine why and how children assumed the role of proxies for their parents’ karmic retribution. By situating this trope within wider medieval Chinese repertoires of collective retribution, I illustrate that karma in medieval China reflected socio-cultural assumptions of collective or familial responsibility. I further place this trope alongside other concepts of collective or shared karmas in Buddhist thought, as well as examine medieval Chinese debates over the veracity of familial karmas. This paper contributes to scholarly conversations on collective karma in Buddhist traditions, underscoring the necessity to reevaluate conventional definitions of karma in light of noncanonical texts and lived contexts.
This presentation argues that Vietnamese tales composed in Literay Sinitic can shed light on the imagination of social karma in premodern Vietnam. First, I show how the hagiography of the magic-working monk, Từ Đạo Hạnh, synthesizes two karmic strands, his own life and that of Emperor Lý Thần Tông. The second story, focused on the vengeful rebirth of Lady Đào, illustrates how a past life karmic grievance can sometimes explain inexplicable hatred between people. I call this narrative process, "retrospective projection," the imputing of past-life events as causes for present social calamity or interpersonal conflicts. In short, read closely, heretofore unstudied Vietnamese tales composed in Literay Sinitic can shed light on how, in premodern Vietnamese religious culture, karma was not just individual, but also, social, a kind of moral metaphysics which was used to imagine enduring love, miraculous re-births, and also, sometimes, inexplicable hate.
This interdisciplinary study reopens Tianyan lun—the Chinese translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and the single most influential book in initiating late Qing intellectuals into social Darwinism—as a site for Buddhist global exchange and translingual practice, when the notion of “karma” offered Huxley and his Chinese translator and readers at once a ground of convergence and a point of departure. The term this study places in the spotlight is zhongye, literally “seeds-karma,” the heading of a chapter in Tianyan lun. Notably, “seeds-karma” is not a canonical configuration, but the term has left an indelible impression on some progressive-minded intellectuals, including Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zuoren. The notion of karma and the notion of “seeds”—which, in Chinese, also means species, race, and offspring—struck unusual chemistry when the Yogācāra revival and the pressing task of national salvation became two simultaneous events in fin-de-siècle China.