Revisiting the Culakammavibhanga Sutta -- Part 1

In an excellent article in the Western Buddhist Review, “Kamma in Context: The Mahakammavibhangasuta and the Culakammavibhangasutta”, the author sheds new light on the Culakammavibhanga sutta by providing context to the text by taking into account the worldview of the Buddha’s interlocutor.

He justifies this approach by arguing that the, “Buddha’s discourses need to be read bearing in mind that he is responding to the world views and life-accounts of others.”

The first part of the article explicates the Buddha’s notion of kamma in relation to the Vedic traditions of the sacrifice, and begins to quote the Culakammavibhanga sutta where the Brahmin student named Subha asks the Buddha:

What is the cause, what is the reason that lowness and excellence are to be seen among human beings . . .those of short life span . . . long life span . . . those of many . . . and of those of few illnesses . . . those whose are ugly, those who are beautiful?

The author then states:

For a Brahman student to be asking the question of the Buddha is interesting, for, within the tradition of the Vedas . . . there are a variety of answers to these questions. The answers lie, in part, within the context of sacrificial rites. . . . Subha is asking about casualty, particulary about causes that bring about worldly benefits.

The author goes on to list such “worldly benefits” found in the Vedas as “life, health and prosperity” which closely matches the things Subha is asking about. From this it can be inferred that Subha is asking such questions as he is curious what the Buddha thinks causes these benefits, perhaps trying to find confirmation of the utility of the Vedic sacrifice or at the least gain another perspective.

It is important to emphasize here that Subha is not asking the Buddha about anything concerning the afterlife; he is asking the Buddha about things concerned with this life.

The Buddha first responds to Subha rather cryptically by saying:

Student, beings are owners of kammas, heirs of kammas, they have kammas as their progenitor, kammas as their kin, kammas as their homing-place. It is kammas that differentiate beings according to inferiority and superiority.

As the author points out, it almost appears that the Buddha is agreeing with Vedic tradition by saying that kamma or action is all important. For in the Vedic tradition, kamma or karma is the ritual action of the sacrifice that is believed to maintain the cosmos and influence the world.

The sutta continues with Subha asking for further clarification and the Buddha replying:

A person who kills living creatures . . . on the dissolution of the body, after death, he appears in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell. But if . . . he does not reappear in a state of deprivation . . . but instead comes back to the human status, then wherever he is reborn he tends to be short lived, while a person who refrains from killing living creatures . . . on the dissolution of the body, after death, he appears in a happy destination, even in a heavenly world. But if . . . he does not reappear in a happy destination . . . but instead comes back to the human status, then wherever he is reborn he tends to be long lived.

As the author points out:

As the Buddha goes on to explain in full, it becomes clear that he is using the term ‘kamma’ not in the sense of ritual activity but in a quite different way. . . he is redefining the causal basis of kamma by making a subtle shift in meaning from action to . . . an ethical dimension to the kamma process.

In other words, the Buddha is subtlety redefining kamma as not sacrificial action but ethical action.

This does indeed make perfect sense, yet there is still the issue as to why the cosmological stock passages of being reborn in hell and so on are present. Why would the Buddha be talking in such a categorical fashion about the results of actions in the next life when Subha is clearly asking about how results or differences are manifested in this one?

To me these rebirth pericopes or stock passages do not fit the overall context of the sutta and suggest to me that they are interpolations. I will argue my case in greater detail in part II, demonstrating that such passages were indeed most likely added and do nothing but obscure the more subtle and important message behind the text.