Alan Watts: Karma

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Transcript

00:00To be or not to be is not the question. These are not alternatives. They are things that go

00:07together just like up and down, back and front, solid in space. Now there's another aspect to

00:15karma which needs to be considered here, and that is that karma also involves the idea of the

00:25continuity of pattern. You know, strictly speaking, Buddhists don't believe that there is any soul

00:36entity which passes from one life to another. There is no sort of fixed eye or fixed ego which

00:46once was an animal and then became a man and then became an angel and then eventually became

00:50a Buddha or something like that. The idea of karma as the linking factor between the various lives

00:59is what we might call continuity of pattern. For example, consider an army regiment.

01:09A certain regiment goes on year after year after year. Old European regiments, for example, have

01:16existed for hundreds of years. And yet the personnel of those regiments and even the barracks in which

01:22they are stationed are entirely changed. In the same way, a university. Harvard University has existed

01:30for a long time. Oxford for a lot longer. And yet there is not a single member of the faculty, not a

01:37single student who was there when it first began. And yet, you see, the university goes on. Because what

01:45goes on is a pattern, a form of life. In the same way, the individual body of man, every seven years, I think,

01:57all the molecules composing our physical structure are entirely changed. And yet, something identifiable

02:03as the pattern which we associate with Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so is still there.

02:08Another fascinating illustration of continuity of pattern, in a sense, is wave motion. It's perhaps

02:17easiest to illustrate with something like a barber's pole when you twirl it. Now, as you twirl it, there's

02:26an illusion of something moving upwards from the bottom to the top of the pole. It seems that the strips

02:32go along. Now, actually, they don't go along. They just go round. And in the same way, also, when waves

02:40move across water, there's no water moving across. There is the wave pattern moving across. The water is

02:48just going up and down, as you can tell when you see, say, a dead leaf floating on the water's surface,

02:54and it isn't moved along by the waves. So this idea of continuity of pattern is the solution

03:05which Indian philosophy offers on the matter of the problem of death. The individual, as it were,

03:13entity is constantly changing. He does not go on, but the pattern or the karma, the pattern of action goes on.