..续本文上一页d that the very existence of the senses consists in activity.
It is not the mere contact between subjective organ and external object that constitutes the activity. Not the wick drenched in oil produces the flame. After analyzing a poem into lines, each line into words, each word into letters, we still cannot say that those letters compose the poem: for, only when set in a particular order they will form words and sense; out of order they are sheer nonsense. Thus an inpidual can be analyzed into corporeality, sensations, perceptions, differentiations and conceptions. Yet the mere heaping up of those aggregates would not constitute a living process in the sense of growth, of development, of kamma-formations. For even in an Arahat are present all those aggregates; but in him is missing that which binds them together in activity: craving.
Like the mind of the poet gave order to the letters which thus received life, so does craving set the aggregates in working order; and rebirth is the effect. Who only considers the formation of the letters will never be able to read and understand the poem. Thus he who only analyses the body in anatomy, or the mind in psychology, will never he able to read, understand and solve the problem of kamma i.e. of life as craving.
If body or mind is conceived as a thing complete in itself, identical with itself, as an isolated self-contained entity, it becomes absolutely impossible to explain the interaction of different subjects upon one another. As long as the process of life is cut up into artificial segments, each of them considered as something static, it is impossible to conceive the whole as a process in which all is seen in its natural connection.
As long as one is concerned with analyzing inpiduality into the five aggregates of existence (pa.tcakkhandha), one might consider a person as a rounded off whole of mind and matter (naama ruupa), isolated in so far as he is not another (na ca a.t.to). But things become different as soon as one is concerned no longer with the component parts, but with the process of its growth, kamma.
One can consider a tree in itself, composed of leaves, fruits, twigs, branches, bark, wood and further characteristics. Those peculiarities make a tree what it is, that inpidual tree and not another one. But all those peculiarities and component parts of the inpidual have come there by a process of growth; and in this process of growth the inpidual can no longer be isolated (na ca so).
Kamma is a process of action, mental action, mental action with craving.
“Cetana.m aha.m bhikkhave kamma.m vadaami”
“I say, O monks, that kammic action is volition.”
In this process of volitional activity the aggregates of an inpidual are not parts of a whole, but forms of action, modes of grasping.
As action with volition, kamma does not come in the field of observation, except through its effect. This effect is the reaction (vipaaka). It is somewhat incorrect to call this reaction old action (puraa.na kamma) for, if action is past, it is no more action, no process of actuality.
Yet to some extent the action is continuing its process in the reaction, which is entirely dependent on that previous action. It is with a view on the inherent connection of condition and effect that both will always belong to the same class. In dependence on the desirability or non-desirability of the effect, its cause is called either skilful (kusala) or unskilful (akusala).
From the fact that thus kamma is always either moral or immoral, it must be clear that kamma is the very opposite of fate, with which it is sometimes confused. For fate has nothing to do with morality, as it is a predetermining power (real or imaginative) that fixes one”s de…
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