From karma to intention

What The Buddha Thought By Richard Gombrich,
Equinox, £14.99

It is the contention of Richard Gombrich, the former Boden professor of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford, that the Buddha, who died around 405 BC at the age of 80, “was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of all time.’’ He proceeds to establish this claim through a very close reading of the Pali Canon (the surviving Pali texts), which he believes is the most important evidence for the understanding of the Buddha and his ideas.

Gombrich uses the concept of karma as his point of entry for understanding the Buddha’s ideas. The Buddha took the idea of karma from brahminical thought but completely refashioned it. For him, the basic criterion for understanding karma was intention. Morality was intention. From this it follows that an individual is autonomous, and the final authority is the individual’s conscience. Thus, according to the Buddha, “we are entirely responsible for our moral condition and what we make of it.’’ The Buddha thus freed the individual from the shackles of brahminical ritual and dominance. By linking karma to intention, the Buddha overturned brahminical caste-bound ethics.

The putting of new meaning into old concepts was part of the method of the Buddha. Much of his teaching was in the nature of a dialogue with brahminical orthodoxy, which the Buddha subverted. The teachings of the Buddha were thus rooted in particular intellectual and socio-economic context.

The claim that individuals are responsible for their own decisions has very significant ramifications. It means that the Buddha set a high premium on intelligence. The word that he used for a morally good act was kusala, which could mean healthy as well as skilful. Though Gombrich is of the opinion that the ambiguity was deliberate, he argues that the Buddha used the word more often to suggest skilful: “a good moral choice is an intelligent and informed choice’’.

This was another blow at orthodoxy since the brahminical guru-sishya tradition did not privilege intelligent independent thinking. On the contrary, it emphasized obedience and deference.

Gombrich further argues that by making intention the core of morality, the Buddha marked a great step forward in the history of civilization because “it meant that on the ethical plane all human beings are in a general sense equal, even if they differ in their capacity for making sound moral judgements.’’ The Buddha made human beings the master of their own destinies, each individual responsible for his or her actions. Given the conditions of his time and the preconceptions that most people of the time harboured, this was an extraordinarily bold claim that has a modern resonance.

One important feature of Gombrich’s exposition is the manner in which the Buddha used language, especially his attempts to break the hold of Sanskrit over all forms of learning. He used vocabulary figuratively, and this is often a source of misunderstanding by subsequent generations. One of the purposes of this book is to clear many of these misunderstandings and misreadings.

This is by no means an easy book to read despite the lucidity of Gombrich’s prose and exposition. The trouble is, however, worth taking for anybody interested in the ideas of the Buddha and their importance for humankind.