Enlightenment & Karma; Science & Causality.

For the enlightened, Karma (along with the related concept of Vipaka) is understood to be "Causality" in the most general sense. It has been said that without Karma there's no Buddhism, and indeed "enlightenment" itself can be viewed as the Vipaka (fruition, effect, end) of Karma (foundation, cause, means) in general.

Similarly, modern Western science was founded upon a general causality principle, namely "Mechanistic Materialism". According to this principle, force can only be transmitted via direct contact between two bodies, with the "ground" state (resting position) of objects being the literal "ground" of the Earth. Primitive indeed, yet this model (MM) was sufficient at the time to effectively override the Political doctrines of the day (flat Earth or Earth-centric models eg.), thus exposing the social elite as a fraud, and effectively leading Western Civilization and the rest of mankind out of a "dark age" of technological and scientific stagnation.

Essential to the scientific revolution and resulting Renaissance period wasn't some amazing technology or even a very good reality model (it was still very primitive), but rather the key was distributing the Causality Principle of MM over the doctrine, thus eliminating Politics as a root principle of causality. In lieu of a general causality principle, any argument amounts to a con game whereby "authority" and "reputation" outweigh any evidence and render proof all but impossible to regard.

Fast forward from the beginnings of modern science & folks like Bruno, Galileo & even Descartes, to the time of Newton: for the first time a theory was shown to be universal, but in the process the erstwhile universal principle of scientific causality (mechanistic materialism) was necessarily abandoned, as Newton's theory of motion implied force at a distance. This fact was well understood at the time by Newton and his contemporaries such as Lock & Hume, but seems to have been swept under the rug of history. Gone was an up-front causality model of MM, and in its absence centuries of renewed political and academic debates over which "authority" has the best "reputation" to ensure the doctrine's authenticity ensued, with the possibility of proving any of this all but extinguished and replaced by "might (or wealth) makes right" sort of political doctrine.

What does this have to do with Zen? Well, it doesn't specifically, but it does regard Buddhism in general, as any doctrine not founded upon a general causality model (Karma) necessarily devolves into politics and corruption, as the only evidence or proof available to support the doctrine becomes sheer weight of political force up to and (of course) including outright violence and war.

Submitted June 23, 2017 at 10:51PM by xxYYZxx http://ift.tt/2rZOgo4