Revisiting the Culakammavibhanga Sutta -- Part 2

In the excellent article, “Kamma in Context: The Mahakammavibhangasuta and the Culakammavibhangasutta”, the author comments on the Culakammavibhanga sutta making some important points.

In the sutta, the Buddha replies to a Brahmin student who asks the Buddha the reason behind the differences in human beings in regards to length of life, health, beauty, wealth and so on. The Buddha replies by saying that it is a person’s ethical actions and not sacrificial actions which cause these differences.

As the author in the article states:

The cause of beauty, wealth, good health, a good and happy worldly life, according to the Buddha, is the moral quality of one’s individual behavior. And the antecedent of one’s moral behavior is the moral nature of one’s mind. This is the real point the Buddha is making.

While this goes a long way to help penetrate the meaning within the text, we are still left with some difficulties.

As remarked in part 1, the Culakammavibhanga Sutta is rife with repeated rebirth pericopes (on the dissolution of the body, after death, he appears in a happy/unhappy destination, even in a heavenly world/hell) which convey that long health, life, beauty and so on in are the result of actions leading to future rebirths. Instead of imparting a subtler and psychologically minded message that the author argues for, we are still left a metaphysical, categorical feeling about it.

These clashes of narrative tone suggest to me that there is something wrong with the text, which when examined, always seems to encounter difficulties when the rebirth periscopes are mentioned.

One example in the Culakammavibhanga Sutta is the passage where the Buddha mentions that long-life (a main concern of the Brahmins who saw long life as to lead to an immortal state) would be the result of not killing living creatures. Here the Buddha is subtlety criticizing the Brahmin performance of animal sacrifices; he is telling the young Brahmin student that by performing the sacrifice he is actually achieving the opposite effect of the intended goal.

Now with the rebirth pericope indicating that a short life will occur in the next life, the whole critique of the Vedic sacrifice no longer makes any sense. By saying that the result will only manifest itself in the next life does not deny that it works in this one. Granted, by killing lots of animals you may end up short lived in the next one, but within this current life you will be very long lived. With the rebirth pericope, it almost seems that the Buddha is agreeing with one aspect of the efficacy of the sacrifice. This is, of course, absurd as the Buddha always denied the efficacy of sacrificing creatures regardless if it whether it was in the present or in the future.

Another example of the rebirth stock passage causing difficulties is the Buddhas explanation for the differences in intelligence amongst human beings:

Here, student, some man or woman does not visit a recluse or a Brahmin and ask: ‘Venerable sir, what is wholesome? What is unwholesome? What is blameable? . . . But if instead he comes back to the human state, then wherever he is reborn he is stupid. . . .

Here, student, some man or woman visits a recluse or a Brahmin and asks: ‘Venerable sir, what is wholesome? What is unwholesome? What is blameable? . . . But if instead he comes back to the human state, then wherever he is reborn he is wise. . . .

If these categorical statements are taken seriously, it necessarily predicts that the vast majority of the coming world’s population will all be mentally impoverished because a good portion of them will not have the chance to meet a Brahman or holy man where they can ask the questions of what is wholesome or not wholesome.

If we remove the pericopes from both these examples, the passages in question start to make much better sense. In the case of the killing it would remove the problem of the effect of a short-life only working in the next life, and with respect with the example of intelligence it would allow for a more reasonable interpretation given its previous categorical nature would be excised. One such interpretation for the intelligence passage might be in seeing intelligence not just as having knowledge passed down by tradition but by actively seeking and questioning those around us.

Conclusion

The Culakammavibhangasutta sutta has been traditionally taught as explaining why people are born in a certain way. This simplistic interpretation does in no way take into account the overall context behind the text and does nothing to question the difficulties the stock passages present. By acknowledging the overall context and removing the stock passages, the text makes much more sense and truly reveals the genius of the Buddha.