What's Karma, anywise?

[Mark Kohut]

However TRP deepened his knowledge and feeling about the concept of
karma, it IS surely more overt in later works, such as AtD most discursively, 
yes?
Vineland, perhaps, most thematically or is that Inherent Vice?
I dunno....another paper/book to be written.

But, just playing via a Western mind with karma as a concept akin to
other similar concepts, it can be stand next to penance--ala Catholicism, and 
also in
Against the Day.....

And, double-entry bookkeeping, say..............

And as I reread Chapter 12 again, one sees other likenesses: "the heart's 
authentic
income-tax form" p. 356 is a kind of reckoning not unlike as metaphors go, 
yes?...(I've never
liked this metaphor here).....

Or even the 'return of the repressed' can be seen as akin, yes?  

or, again, lightly in V., p358, 'he kicked inanimate tires, knowing they'd take 
revenge when he was
looking for it least."







----- Original Message ----
From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, December 10, 2010 12:55:57 PM
Subject: Re: What's Karma, anywise?

While I agree with Robin that the Hippie thinking of the 60s strongly
flavors Pynchon's approaches and understanding, as the drug culture
and new ageism of the 70s strongly influences mine, I think that
Pynchon is a lot smarter and more observant than I am (in part because
I know my IQ, in part because I see reflected in the world ideas I
first encountered in his fiction) and that he therefore is likely to
include a lot of acquired information both in his life and in his
work. It is my occasionally humble opinion that he likely knows enough
about Tibetan thought to keep his ideas straight. I can't comment on
Shambhala, other than to note it is the name of a well-known publisher
of books that involve Eastern influences--some new agey, some quite
systematic in their argumentative orientations.

As to karma, the idea in the west goes back well beyond the mid-20th
century. Before the rise of Islam, ideas traveled pretty freely along
with goods in trade across Asia Minor from Greece and Rome to India
and China and back again. Hence the profound similarities to be found
in Eastern and Western alchemical, ascetic and contemplative
practices. The Desert Fathers clearly emerge from the same tradition
as the Hindu ascetics and the Tibetan monastics. Westerners
encountered karma long ago and it continued under its Western visage
as cause and effect from ancient times until the Eastern term
reentered the Western dialog with that Blavatsky woman and her
Theosophical horde. That was the first contact between Tibetan
Buddhism and the West, in part because Buddhism only entered Tibet in
the 12th century due to pressure from the expansion of Islam into
India at that time. The Theravadan tradition of Buddhism passed along
the southern route through Burma into southeast Asia, and another
branch moved beyond the Tibetan plateau and into China, where it
combined elements with the Taoist establishment there to evolve into
Chan Buddhism, which, upon its eventual acceptance among Japanese
students evolved into Zen. It was Zen that showed up in the American
hip scene of the Beats after WWII, and Theravada that entered the
dialog with the Korean and Vietnamese wars. The Tibetan (Mahayana)
Buddhists reentered India when the Maoists invaded Tibet and began
their pogrom on religion there during the 50s. Tibetan Buddhism
entered the American scene proper in the 60s, when the first exiles
began to arrive here by way of the many Westerners who went to India
to seek enlightenment in the polluted rivers and befouled streets on
the way to the Himalayas. Those romantic new-agers invited their
teachers (lamas) to come teach in the US and the flood gates slowly
opened.

So. Karma. Yes, there is a cultural as well as an individual karma.
The law of cause and effect seems to be universal. It is only recently
that some questions have begun to arise as to whether cause and effect
always work in that order. That's a tough nut. I dunno about that
thread. I think, though, that Capt. Zhang in M&D offers enough opening
comment on national karma with his discomfort regarding straight
lines. Enforcing such unnatural divisions inevitably causes the effect
of bad chi, divisive decay and such. One handy metaphor I've been
using in translation with my Buddhist cares here at the Land of Calm
Abiding is impetus. The impetus of an idea, a way of life, etc.
carries forward, so that a son might carry on a father's way of
engaging life, and a company (even through changes of ownership and
management) carries forward its founders' intentions and
maladaptations. And so on, as Kurt Vonnegut liked to say. It is not
karma, exactly, but a near enough metaphorical idea to help American
chauvinists get the drift.

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 4:28 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Although the idea of karma had also been present in Pynchon's earlier works
> (cf. "Turbulences
> in the aether, uncertainties out in the winds of karma", GR: pp. 146-7), it
> came to full prominence
> not before Pynchon reappeared in the literary public sphere with Vineland,
> inside which karma is
> a key concept. The teaching is Tibetian. Directly related to Tibet is also
> AtD's idea of Shambhala,
> whereby the physical place is not the crucial point: Shambhala, as it says
> at least three times in
> the book, is to be found in our hearts. The (semi-faked) Tibetian seal on
> the cover (and then again
> on the page after the Thelonious Monk intro quote) of Against the Day shows,
> apart from being
> a self-ironic hint from P that we now enter an oh so holy book, some kinda
> affection for Tibetian
> culture on Pynchon's side. His approach to it is unavoidably a Western one.
> So maybe it makes
> sense when we, while looking for Pynchon's concept of karma, do consult an
> authority among
> the Western adepts of Tibetian Buddhism. Let's hear it from Pema Chödrön:
>
> "What is Karma?
>
> Karma is a difficult subject. Basically it means that what happens in your
> life is somehow a result
> of things that you have done before. That's why you are encouraged to work
> with what happens
> to you rather than blame it on others. This kind of teaching on karma can
> easily be misunderstood.
> People get into a heavy-duty sin-and-guilt trip. They feel that if things
> are going wrong, it means
> they did something bad and they're being punished. But that's not the idea
> at all. The idea of karma
> is that you continually get the teachings you need in order to open your
> heart. To the degree that
> you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how
> to stop armoring your
> heart, now you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life.
> Your life gives you everything
> you need to learn how to open further." (Pema Chödrön: Comfortable with
> Uncertainty, p. 124)
>
> Could imagine that Pynchon would agree wholeheartedly.
>
> We have to stop acting surprised when something happens to us.
>
> (Pynchonesque Questions: Do social figurations have a karma of their own?
> Like family clans or
> big corporations. Does the Traverse Clan have a genuine 'transpersonal'
> karma? The East India Trading Company, or the IG Farben?)
>
> Whatever this weekend has in store for you: I wish you heaven!
>
> Kai
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."