Becoming Animal: Karma and the Animal Realm Envisioned through an Early Yogācāra Lens

Daniel M. Stuart

doi:10.3390/rel10060363

Abstract

In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm.” This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of Buddhist discourse during a millennium of historical development. I focus in particular on a middle period Buddhist sūtra, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, which serves as a bridge between early Buddhist theories of mind and karma, and later more developed theories. This third-century South Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text on meditation practice, karma theory, and cosmology psychologizes animal behavior and places it on a spectrum with the behavior of humans and divine beings. It allows for an exploration of the conceptual interstices of Buddhist philosophy of mind and contemporary theories of embodied cognition. Exploring animal embodiments—and their karmic limitations—becomes a means to exploring all beings, an exploration that can’t be separated from the human mind among beings.

Highlights

In his 2011 book Becoming Animal, David Abram notes a key issue in the field of philosophy of mind, an implication of the emergent full-blown physicalism of the modern scientific materialist episteme
We find evidence in early Buddhist sources of various ascetic practices reflecting an understanding that human beings are not distinct from animals on many counts4
While one might read these aspects of early Buddhist thought as amenable to David Abram’s ideas about “the current ‘turn toward the body’” in philosophy of mind, two aspects of the Buddha’s teaching are difficult to reconcile with it: The first is the notion of rebirth within a vast cosmology, including immaterial realms constituted entirely of minds or acts of cognition

Summary

Introduction

In his 2011 book Becoming Animal, David Abram notes a key issue in the field of philosophy of mind, an implication of the emergent full-blown physicalism of the modern scientific materialist episteme. He writes: Very few of those participant in the current “turn toward the body” seem to notice the wider, more subversive implications of their work. 10) acknowledges his indebtedness to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for the phrase ‘becoming animal.’ He notes that, as a phenomenologist, he takes the idea along very different avenues than Deleuze and Guattari do. In South Asian traditions— the śramana or ascetic traditions—the drives and urges central to the problem of suffering are those fundamental instincts most closely associated with basic forms of animal behavior: desiring food for sustenance and sex for procreation

The Buddha and the Ascetics

Karma and the Animal Realm

Contemplative Elaborations

Meditation and Metaphor

Envisioning the Animal

Mind and the Wriggling Insects Below

IIcame to the point where

Concluding

8.8.Concluding

Findings

33 The culmination