Donald S. Lopez Jr.: commitment

Transcript context

…Who or what is it that drives, say, the cycles of reincarnation? Is it just a natural process like a chicken hatching from an egg? Or there’s something extra in the universe that we might think of as supernatural? Well, it’s the law of karma. Whether you want to call that supernatural or not is a question, but “karma” in Sanskrit just means action. It means that the universe is, in a sense, naturally ethical, that virtuous deeds, as defined, lead to happiness in the future — either tomorrow or a hundred lifetimes from now — and negative deeds, non-virtuous deeds, lead to suffering. This is the way that the Buddhists, without a god, can explain the suffering of the virtuous and the fact that the evil flourish sometimes. It’s all karma. As a result of that karma, we are reborn. There’s no beginning to the cycle of rebirth. We’ve all been reborn a bazillion times, and we will be reborn forever until we find the path out, which is what the Buddha teaches. The Buddhists have very specific places where we can be reborn. We can be a god, which is a Mount Olympus kind of god, not a creator deity. We can be a demigod. These have certain powers. We can be a human, we can be an animal, we can be a ghost, and we can be in hell. The Buddhists have a very elaborate system of hells: eight hot hells, eight cold hells, various trifling hells. The hells are quite horrific and described in great detail. Fire is a central theme in Buddhism, right?…

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