Religion, Mind, and Society Critical Commentary

Synchronizing Karma: The Internalization

and Externalization of a Shared,

Personal Belief

Steven G. Carlisle

Abstract When people internalize cultural materials, they do not absorb them as passive recipients

but, rather, adapt and apply them in ways that satisfy personal needs while also expressing them in

ways acceptable to the community. It is not just a process of moving things into the individual but one of

synchronizing imaginings of experience. For Bangkok’s Buddhists, karma is a concept that is both cul-

turally shared and, often, deeply personal. Karmic experiences are understood individually and shared

through personal karmic narratives. A set of shared standards determines which stories can be accept-

ed as describing karmic experiences while also serving to shape the individual’s interpretations of those

experiences. Although social monitoring of interpretations of individual experiences makes belief in

karma acceptable, the intersection of abstract doctrine with personal interpretations gives the doctrine a

nearly undeniable veracity. Therefore, synchronized karmic beliefs thrive, despite Bangkok’s rapid de-

velopment and cultural change. Addressing dynamics of synchronization moves psychological

anthropology beyond frameworks of acquisition and internalization to considerations of negotiating

agency in the reproduction of culture. [Buddhism, internalization, karma, imagination, narrative]

Because people have different experiences, how is it that they can come to have beliefs that

are shared across the demographic spectrum of a society while also being deeply integrated

into their understandings of the workings of the worldFthoroughly believed to the point

that they can affect many of a person’s habits? That is, how are shared religious beliefs in-

ternalized? Although it may appear counterintuitive, for beliefs like karma, internalization

comes through processes relating to the formation of projective systems. The idea here is

not that people project thoughts and feelings out and that other people take them inFit is

that the rules that govern the projective system are negotiated publicly, and allow people

to synchronize their interpretations of personal experiences, creating the sense of a shared

experiential reality. Public karmic narratives sit at the nexus of abstract religious doctrines

that describe the nature of reality, personal experience, and the social sanctioning of inter-

pretations of those experiences. Social monitoring of karma narratives keeps karmic

interpretations of personal experience broadly acceptable and consistent while these per-

sonal experiences of karma give the doctrine a compelling veracity. At times, therefore, the

karmic order is accepted not because it satisfies people’s desires but because it appears ab-

solutely true. If deeply held beliefs grow out of shared negotiations, then perhaps we should

look at processes of synchronization, rather than internalization.

194 ETHOS

ETHOS, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pp. 194–219, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. & 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2008.00011.x.

The ethnographic material here is drawn from participant-observation of and interviews

with middle-class Thai Buddhists, all of whom also expressed a belief in karma. Research for

this article took place over 30 months between 1999 and 2001. Subjects were ethnic Thai

Buddhists in their twenties, thirties, and early forties at the time; all were residents of

Bangkok; and all were members of the middle classes.1 The informant base includes, for

example, teachers, small merchants, and low- and mid-level executives. This work involved

more than two years of participant-observation, and extended ethnographic interviews with

approximately 20 subjects. Data include karma stories told by several dozen individuals, as

well as stories available in Thai public media since 1999. Interviews, conducted primarily in

Thai, were open-ended, but generally focused on questions concerning family life, morality,

love, and Buddhism. Although stories often arose during the natural course of discussions, a

few were solicited, after a subject had made it clear that he or she believed in karma. The

stories selected for this article were typical of the larger pool: especially among the young,

anecdotes that involved cruelty to animals were common, as were stories about repayment

for the sacrifices of elders.

Personal narratives are more than reports about reality. They embody theories about con-

nections between events (Bruner 1987; Capps and Ochs 1995). They do not just describe

things as they are, but participate in the production and affirmation of visions of reality.

Synchronized belief in karma is carried through narratives that follow negotiated guidelines.

What sorts of negotiations give rise to shared yet personal systems like karma? Some broad

restrictions on stories must apply if a projective system is to be able to allow information to

work along the two axes, the social–personal and the doctrinal–experiential. First, however,

it is necessary to sort out the type of karmic narrative that is relevant here. In addition to

occasional discussions of Buddhist doctrine, the subject of karma appears in conversation

in a number of different forms. Most commonly, people discuss their own experiences,

descriptions that often take a form like this: ‘‘I went to the temple and made an offering to a

monk [which is a source of good karma], and I felt good about it.’’ They occasionally make

vague references to one another’s karma, as when one struggling merchant announced that

another merchant, who had done well during the economic crisis of the late 1990s, had

succeeded because of his karma. What contributed to his good karma, however, and how,

exactly, it contributed to his success in business, remain unknown to the speaker. A third sort

of conversation about karma also takes place: one in which specific moral actions and karmic

responses are connected and described, often in great detail. This article will focus on this

sort of narrative, in which projections are clearly defined.

Such narratives constitute approximately half of the stories I gathered during the research,

and nearly all of the best-elaborated narratives.

The Bangkok-Thai Buddhist doctrine of karma is straightforward: good acts are always re-

warded, bad acts always punished, in proportion and in kind. Because of personal interest

and attention to cultural norms, many residents of Bangkok develop individual relationships

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 195

with their karma, through a process of reification of projected information. The idea that

the universe at large is ordered is academic to them; what is of interest is not the universe’s

relationship to karma but their own. Because of individuals’ ability to project ideas onto the

universe, they perceive karma as more than a force of nature. Just as Weber’s Calvinists’

concerns led those subjects to think about the double-predestining God as personally sig-

nificant, thoughts about karmic retribution and reward lead many Thai Buddhists to think

about karma as an active presence in their own lives. This ranges from a mild but persistent

preoccupation, described by one person as a feeling of being unclean, to a life-shaping ob-

session. Chatri, in his early thirties, has shaped much of his life around his belief.2 He claims

that his planFwell underwayFis to commit his life to giving of himself, and to die without

accepting more than the minimum of gifts and kindnesses, so that in future incarnations he

will thrive. For many urban, middle-class Thai Buddhists, karma is not simply an ordering

principle; it is a force with which they interact, and with which they have personal relation-

ships. Karma helps order the universeFbut what matters in these cases is the fact that it

orders their lives in it.

Analysis of karma stories can go beyond general statements about a desire for order. In

this article, I examine personal anecdotes about karma in an effort to understand specific,

widely shared guidelines that shape that order, and the particular forms of engagement that

make karma both universal and personal, connecting Thai Buddhists not just to the uni-

verse, but, through socially shared experiences, to a view of the world that they share with

one another.

Context: Anthropological Literature and Theory

Many scholars have approached the topic of karma, but for the most part, they have not

explainedFand rarely examinedFkarma’s ability to take on deep personal significance.

Since Rhys Davids (1896) began to publish his work on Buddhism around the turn of the last

century, a variety of approaches have been taken in analyzing this phenomenon. The works

of K. N. Sharma (1997) and Gombrich (1996) take broadly historical and theological van-

tage points, whereas the contributions of others (E. Daniel 1983; S. Daniel 1983) rely on

contemporary source material for symbolic analyses and treatments of contemporary social

significance. Others (such as Lau 2001) take a psychological approach, looking at karma as a

response to needs and desires. About one thing, however, all analysts agree: karma works as a

bridging concept, one that spans the gap between the mundane and easily considered reali-

ties of daily life, and the great, abstract order of the universe. It is on this level, what Hiebert

calls the ‘‘transempirical’’ (1983:121) while also this-worldly, that explanations for karma

can be sought: it is seen both as experiential and as universal.

Karma poses a problem on the practical level. Although the idea that every moral action is

eventually met with an appropriate responseFa sort of ethical first law of thermodynamicsF

there is no way of knowing exactly what that response will be, or when it will come. Because

196 ETHOS

of the existential firewall that exists between incarnations, allowing karma to carry over from

one lifetime to the next while blocking out memories of the past, there is no way of har-

nessing knowledge about an individual’s karma for practical effect. No one can say with any

certainty what will happen, and, except in cases where one’s karma returns during the same

lifetime, why something will happen.

This may be why many of the anthropologists who have looked at karma report that it is

often an explanation of last resort. People generally rely on more clearly defined explana-

tions before falling back on karma (Babb 1983; Beck 1983). Hiebert (1983:120) reports that

his informants frequently attribute events to physics, fate, astrology, spirits, and the gods as

well as karma. Why, then, maintain the karmic tradition at all? Why is it that karma plays a

central role in ancient Vedic texts as well as contemporary television dramas?

Gombrich (1975:219) argues that karma’s golden-rule implications make it socially useful.

Keyes asserts that, although making merit results in good feelings, ‘‘it is not the state of

mind that is significant . . . but the social recognition of being a person of virtue’’ (1983:268).

He uses this conception to explain one of the central problems faced by anthropologists of

Buddhism: how to explain karma’s persistence among worldly populations. Karma can be

used as a basis for an ethical system among worldly Buddhists because of the ability to

transfer merit from one person to another (Keyes 1983:270). Keyes sees merit being made

primarily in religious contextsFwhen one transfers it to the dead, and when one receives it

by sponsoring a young man when he enters the Sangha (1983:273–274). He views merit as

compensation for those who sacrificeFas a reward, for example, for wives who lose their

husband’s labor to the monastery (Keyes 1983:282). I have found, however, that in Bangkok,

it plays a role away from the temple as well.

Obeyesekere (1968, 2002) argues that karma is not so much social necessity as logical

necessity. He argues that reincarnation religions will, once they have become ethicized

and conceptualized, develop along two distinct but necessary tracks: one that leads to

Nirvana and escape from the cycles of birth, suffering, and death, and one that leads

ultimately to karmic justice within the system of rebirth. Karma exists as a theodicy (or

as an answer to theodicy, depending on one’s interpretation of the word [Obeyesekere

1968:11]).

Many other scholars (such as Hiebert 1983 and Sharma 1973) follow a similar line of rea-

soning. They begin with the idea, along Geertz’s (1973) lines, that concepts like karma

persist because, if they cannot make the universe known and controlled, they make it seem

knowable and controllable.

Religious answers to [the problem of theodicy] do not try to deny that the just suffer sometimes, in spite of their righteousness, but only deny that their suffering is inexpli- cable, or without either value or meaningFeven if that meaning is not fully accessible to human comprehension. [Sharma 1973:347]

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 197

Karma is a concept that defines the universe as an orderly and balanced place.3

Obeyesekere moves beyond this. Where Obeyesekere argues for the philosophical need for a

just universe, other thinkers argue that karma fulfills desires that reflect cultural modes of

satisfying personal needsFemotionally, cognitively, or otherwise. There is merit in both of

these approaches, but this second approach raises questions that it does not answer: what,

exactly, could make a universe feel ordered? How does this doctrine of karma satisfy this de-

sire? And why stick with karma, especially in globalized cultural environments, when other

explanations are available? Given the fact that karma’s effects on psychological well-being are

often negative (in the form, e.g., of that persistent feeling of uncleanness, because of the

awareness that one has accrued a karmic debt that must be repaid), then does the desire for a

particular form of ordered universe continue to hold when that order offers the potential not

just for bad feelings, but for events as terrible as, for example, retributive murder?

The utility of an idea is importantFbut when it comes to internalization, this is not suffi-

cient. In this article, I argue not that middle class Thai Buddhists internalize karmic

doctrine because it is useful to them, as some of the authors noted above have argued but,

rather, because in spite of its drawbacks the forces that lead to the internalization of karma

cause it to appear to be undeniably true.

Internalization

The notion that the projection of ideas is integral to internalization may seem more than a

little counterintuitive. The problem lies in the fact that internalization is not an apt term to

describe the variety of processes that the word needs to describe. Before we can proceed,

then, we need to make sense of the notions behind internalization.

An understanding of internalization, which we can define generally as the processes through

which people become invested, emotionally or cognitively, in cultural information, is es-

sential to making sense of human cultural experience. The term, however, does not serve its

users well for several reasons. First, the use of a single term that covers a wide variety of

processes suggests that the different internalization theories are comparable. Throop (2003)

attempts to compare them. But he points out that Melford E. Spiro’s use of the term focuses

on the ‘‘binding of emotion to cultural propositions,’’ whereas Obeyesekere’s theoretical

attention is drawn to something rather different, ‘‘the effects of cultural propositions on

cognitive and perceptual systems’’ (Throop 2003:114). Instead of attempting to critique one

against another, we might recognize that this class of theories describes many discrete but

similar processes ranging from the internalization of material attached to precultural expe-

riences (e.g., Spiro 1997) through childhood and child-rearing experiences (Briggs 1998;

Vygotsky 1981) to mature, shared understandings of reality, like Turner’s ritual process

model (1969), that attempt to demonstrate that organized rituals allow for the creation of

deep-seated beliefs in one’s position in a social structure. Shore develops this connection

198 ETHOS

between ritual and internalization further, arguing that, through repetition, rituals create

procedural memories (as well as episodic ones) and lead to the development of a semantic

code for interpreting events (1996:259). If we keep in mind the different contexts for which

they were developed, we do not need to prioritize one theory over another.

There is something that all of these theories share: all are poorly served by the choice of the

word internalization. The word brings with it certain assumptionsFassumptions that most

internalization theorists actually appear to eschew. The word suggests that the processes

that are of interest are ones in which conceptualizations enter a mind and body, like salt

poured into a shaker. Anthropologists cannot understand internalization, however, if

we look only at the way cultural materials go into a person; after all, every day, everyone

encounters a wide variety of cultural information, and, as Spiro (1997) points out, some

becomes deeply internalized, or relates to things that have already been internalized,

whereas much of it does not.

To distinguish between different levels of internalization and differential relevance among

individuals, we need to look not at the way information enters, but at the ways it gets used.

Do many situations evoke particular pieces of information? Is this information applied to

many issues? Does it shape one’s perspectives on certain circumstances? To understand

whether a piece of information has been internalized, anthropologists need to make sense of

an individual’s perspectiveFto understand the way a person envisions the structure of re-

ality, understand the ways the individual applies that structure to the environment, and the

ways he or she communicates that structure to others. It is not the process of information

coming in that is useful; it is the processes through which information comes to fit in with

what appears, to the individual, to exist outside, and how each person communicates this to

others. This is, of course, what makes salt worth thinking about. What is most interesting is

not what happens when it goes into the shaker (that comes later in the discussion), it is what

happens when it comes back out again: to what it is applied, with what effect.

There are several ways to talk about this sort of relationship between the individual mind

and the information available in a society. We could talk only about personal, idiosyncratic

internalizations that give rise to things like what Obeyesekere calls an individual’s set of

‘‘private symbols’’ (1981:14). This process demonstrates the ways that material enters an

individual and becomes idiosyncratic. But for the most part, when anthropologists talk

about this relationship, they are concerned with the ways that people across a society

manage to come to believe what appears to be the same basic thing in what appears to be the

same basic way. Moving from the individual level to the social, then, internalization

becomes not just a question of information going into a mind or information coming out,

but rather of the reproduction of informationFthe ways that people communicate cultural

information to one another so that it is received, integrated, and then communicated to

potential recipients, recipients who have their own personal, distinct patterns of internalized

material with which to think. Receive, integrate, expressFthese all must contribute to the

study of internalization.

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 199

This is quite a heavy burden for a word like internalization to bear, implying only ‘‘taking in.’’

The word itself suggests that it is the processes that get the information into a person that

matterFthe ways information is conveyed, the social, cultural, and ideological structures

that create an air of veracityFand an incautious reader may take it to imply the reification of

culture: if people internalize culture, then it is culture that plays actively on (and through)

the recipient. This fits in well with certain older models of the relationship between culture

and people (e.g., that of configurationists like Benedict [1934]Fthe term may be an artifact

of earlier anthropological culture theories that describe one-way streets).

It is worth noting, however, that this is not adopted by the other thinkers cited here. As Briggs

(1998) argues, experiences happen to individuals, and the idea that there is a generalized indi-

vidual, that minds could be shaped culturally to receive the same information in the same ways,

makes very little sense. It is clear, however, that people do accept or construct similar versions

of the same idea, and do use ideas in ways similar enough to allow effective communication.

The process of integrating shared cultural information involves finding a place for it in an

individual’s idiosyncratic, experientially based vision of the world. From the individual’s

point of view, then, the process is one of fitting pieces of cultural information into one’s

vision of the world. In that case, if we focus on the active abilities minds employ, it makes

more sense to talk about the externalization of cultural information. Internalization is not

reified culture acting on identical people; instead, coming to terms with culture involves

active minds communicating more-or-less similar ideas, creating a comprehensible social

environment in which others can learn or reaffirm previously held ideas.

Neither internalization nor externalization describes the process completely. One suggests the

reification of culture as the active force, the other suggests that minds are fundamentally free

from cultural influence. We need to recognize that there is an interactive relationship, people

acting in culturally informed ways, and cultures acting through people. There does not seem

to be an ideal term in English for this, but for our purposes here, the word synchronization will

suffice. It allows for analytical recognition of differences between individuals while also iden-

tifying shared beliefs and ideas. If it does not directly suggest the processes of internalization

and externalization, then at least it does not exclude either of them, or play favorites. As it is

commonly used, the word does not suggest the notion of deep structuring of worldview, but

I will ask the reader to include that sense in its meanings as well.

Projection and Projective Systems

The synchronization of a common belief in karma among middle-class Thai Buddhists is

made possible by the human ability to externalize their notions. The mechanism that makes

this synchronization possible is the human ability to create projective systems. In this case,

the system operates based on a number of generally unarticulated rules that relate to the

interpretations of personal experiences in two ways simultaneously: they connect doctrine

200 ETHOS

to narratives based on experience, and they allow individuals to develop stories that fit into a

socially favored form. In this way, interpretations of personal experiences, shared as karma

stories, help stabilize and make acceptable the popularly sanctioned, popularly shared belief

in karma, whereas doctrinal abstractions about the nature of reality are given the veracity of

those experiences.4

There are cases in which the projection of thoughts and feelings is both necessary and cul-

turally appropriateFcircumstances in which people have questions that they need to

answer to know how to act, but for which it is not possible to find empirical evidence to

support any particular view over another. Is the universe just or not? Is God really working

in mysterious ways? Lacking incontrovertible evidence to answer questions like this, one

must rely on subjective reflections of what makes sense to an individual or a group. Here, we

find projective systemsFsystems of conceptions that reflect an individual’s own under-

standings and feelings read onto reality. Kardiner (1945:38–46) described this as a basic

property of cultures. Along with systems based on experience-based reason, projective sys-

tems serve to allow people to make sense of their worlds. Instead of depending on empirical

evidence to understand the ways things work, he wrote, projective systems rely on the ex-

ternalization of repressed childhood fears and traumas as the basis for understanding.

Functioning as defense mechanisms, they serve as responses to the traumas inflicted on

children by the members of a society. The early fear of a punishing father, for example, gets

expressed as fear of a punishing god, and the need for obedience in the familial environment

is translated into religious prescriptions.

If we accept Kardiner’s idea that cultures really are primarily the outgrowths of psycholog-

ical needs, with some secondary feedback mechanisms moderating them, then his

conceptualization makes sense. But if we look at the history of a concept like karma, then the

idea of this particular projective system growing out of child-rearing practices frays around

the edges. As a fundamental tenet of both Buddhism and Hinduism (and found, in various

forms, elsewhere as wellFin Ancient Greece, e.g., or among certain Native American

groups [Obeyesekere 2002]), the belief has spread, with relatively little change, across a large

number of diverse societies (e.g., Keyes and Daniel 1983). Furthermore, belief in karma has

lasted through the changes of several thousand years. Although it may serve to protect

people in some societies against particular common traumas, we need to find a stronger

explanation for the prevalence and endurance of this idea.

Projective systems appear often across the spectrum of human cultures serving the vital pur-

pose of providing people with the relatively abstract guidelines they need to make sense of the

workings of the universe. This allows them to make many of the decisions they need to func-

tion in daily life. If we approach projective systems not as an excrescence developed from

childhood trauma, but rather as a historically produced (and psychologically reproduced) tool

used for dealing with the ordinary exigencies of living, externalizing notions of the ways the

unknowable works, then we can talk about things like karma stories as the practical, inten-

tional externalization of Thai Buddhists’ interpretations of ideas of moral balance.

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 201

In the case of projective systems, a belief becomes acceptable not on the basis of authority of

any direct, culturally unquestionable evidence but because of the fact that members of a

society accept the idea that the object onto which ideas are projected (God, the universe, or

anything else) behaves in line with the individual’s culturally informed expectations.

Projection, as a defense mechanism, involves the externalization of a particular emotion,

motivation, desire, or idea by one individual onto an outside entity as a way of dealing with

an otherwise-intolerable stress of recognizing it in oneself. Projective systems, however, in

normal sociocultural functioning, involve externalization not because the feeling or thought

is intolerable, but because it is necessary or useful in making sense of some aspect of the

workings of reality.

Projected beliefs differ from socially sanctioned beliefs in that social sanctioning can explain

why people pay lip service to a belief, why it gets talked about in a community, but this does

not explain how people come to feel invested in it. For this to happen, people must be more

than familiar with a doctrine: they must be able to see it relate to their experience. Thus,

communities with effective projective systems are able to span the gap between shared

doctrine and individual experience using a set of rules that guide the interpretation of ex-

periences, fitting them into a general schema that allows for a belief to be both shared and

personal. An understanding of doctrine comes to meet an understanding of experience.

That is, the belief can be synchronized.

Karma as a Projective System: Standards for Interpreting and Talking about Karma

Lambek (2002) has considered the relationship between socially shared projections

and culture among Malagasy-speaking sorcery victims. The rules that govern the relation-

ship between victim and malevolent spirit bear some resemblance to the rules that guide the

relationship between Buddhist and karma. He writes that the account of one informant

shows:

an interesting implication of the rule that the healer or diviner should not reveal the identity of the sorcerer. The curer’s reticence provides the victim the opportunity to construct her own interpretation, one which is consistent, meaningful and psychologi- cally relevant to her and which will not be challenged in any public forum. Thus, the victims of sorcery internalise its meaning. [Lambek 2002:206]

Schieffelin reports something similar among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea.

There, mediums put on performances for the community in which various spirits are

thought to emerge, and give, among other things, information about the locations of lost

pigs. The medium does not know the whereabouts of the missing animals, but has an idea of

the sorts of places they might be found, and goes on to describe a location in terms specific

enough to draw out exact locations from the members of the audience, but vague enough to

provide cover in case the pig is not where the listeners decide it is (Schieffelin 1985:718).

202 ETHOS

In this way, the medium creates an opening in the narrative into which the audience can insert

its own ideas. Coming in to the séance predisposed to believe the medium, the members of the

community then ‘‘complete the construction’’ of the sense of reality of the medium’s descrip-

tions (Schieffelin 1985:721). The medium guides the creation of a story, which the audience

itself has helped produce, and in which it can believe, and this, then, serves to demonstrate the

veracity and value of the medium’s spirit communications to the community.

In Lambek’s and Schieffelin’s work, as in this study of karma stories, the effort is made to

connect personal perceptions, emotions, and ideas to the greater whole of the culturally

conceptualized universe. (Unlike Lambek’s and Schiefflin’s cases, both of which depend on

specialists in developing vague-but-recognizable narratives, karma stories are usually cre-

ated and judged by amateursFordinary lay Buddhists whose intention, generally, is to

explain events in their lives.) It appears that the rules that govern the projective system must

lead to certain types of conclusions: these conclusions cannot be so vague as to be mean-

ingless, but they cannot be so specific as to be visibly wrong; they must be consistent enough

to produce narratives that fit into recognizable categories, without being so rigid that they

can be disapproved through analysis. They cannot be so private as to be entirely idiosyn-

cratic and incomprehensible to others, but they cannot be so standardized as to be

inapplicable in specific cases.

Projective systems are also socially sanctioned. Just as the successful medium develops a rep-

utation for effective spirit communication, successful karma stories serve to reinforce the

notion that karma is a potent force in Buddhists’ lives. Thus, projective narratives tend to

reinforce the rules governing the creation of the next generation of stories, at the same time

that they follow the rules set out by their predecessors. This means that it would be possible

for the nature of stories that grow from projective systems to evolve, as new judges negotiate

the validity of new narratives in new circumstances, the shifts must gain acceptance over time.

In the case of karma stories, these requirements are satisfied through adherence to a specific

set of generally unarticulated standards, constituting principles of karma. Some narratives

make broadly acceptable karma stories; others do not. Here is a brief synopsis of the shared

standards (to be discussed in greater detail shortly), drawn from popular Buddhist beliefs, of

the principles a believer must keep in mind when forming karma narratives:

1. Karma, inherent in the universe, is always just, but never merciful.

2. Karma is impersonal. As a force and not a sentient being, it cannot play favorites, for-

give, or persecute vindictively.

3. Because humans have no absolute way to measure right and wrong, one must gauge

one’s karmaFand, thus, develop karma storiesFbased on how one feels. If a person

feels she has done something very bad, she can expect a very strong karmic response.

4. Karma makes metaphorical connections between actions and events, which humans

can perceive.

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 203

5. At the same time, karma is private. Except in cases in which the causeFeffect rela-

tionship is extremely intense and visible, the importance of feelings and the scope of

personal history mean that the individual is the final arbiter of his or her own percep-

tions of karmic causeFeffect relationships. (This would hold unless a story violated

another standard.)

Narratives are formulated in such a way that they can be shared and evaluated as really being

about karma, and really being true or notFwhile reflecting the idiosyncratic ideas of an

individual mind. When these rules are followed, the story can become socially sanctioned:

belief tends to reinforce belief, evidence to reinforce evidence. The following example

demonstrates the workings of these standards:

From the ages of 10 to 12, Aw says, she used to prepare crabs for her family’s dinner. She bought them live, and before killing them, she would poke their eyes out with her knife. She liked the way they pulled their eye-stalks back, and the way the dark liquid would ooze from the damaged sockets. She did this for quite some time. Several years after she stopped, however, she developed a pain in her left eye. It grew worse and worse; she wore glasses, then covered the eye for parts of the day, but nothing relieved her suffering, and her doctor could find no physical problem. It interfered with her studies and made her chronically uncomfortable. The problem continued for a year, until Aw and her mother took a temple retreat. At the temple, Aw meditated for a week. As she meditated, the pain in her eye faded. Aw believes that her malady was karmic retribution for slicing the crabs’ eyes, and that the meditation improved her karma, which resolved the issue. She now can see perfectly. Today, she is in excellent health, except for an occasional pain in her lower back; she used to like cutting ants in half with her cooking knife.

Standards 1 and 2: Karmic Doctrine and the Human Universe

According to P. A. Payutto, an influential theologian on the subject whose teachings are

broadly representative of many Bangkok Buddhists’ beliefs, karma describes one aspect of an

immense system of causes and effects in which everything is related, connected together

in a great chain of changes, thoughts, words, and actions (1993:11). ‘‘Buddhism teaches

that all things, both material and immaterial, are entirely subject to the direction of causes

and are interdependent’’ (Payutto 1993:1). The Buddha divided Dhamma (‘‘the law of na-

ture’’ [Payutto 1993:1]) into five categories. There are five kinds of causes, each associated

with its own sort of effect: there are physical causes and effects, the effects of heredity,

relationships between thoughts and other objects of the mind that give rise to further

mental objects. Then there is karma, which describes another subset of natural relations, the

causeFeffect relationships between human intentions and their results. Finally, there is

‘‘the natural law governing the relationship and interdependence of all things’’ (Payutto

1993:2), which asserts that all these causes and effects are connected: an idea can lead

to a physical action from which further feelings may spring, inspiring karmic retribution,

and so on.

204 ETHOS

Because of the interrelation of all things, the Thai Buddhist conception of related actions

involves recognizing connections that might not be identified by others. Doctrine dictates

that the laws of physical Dhamma are in action when a glass falls to the ground, and breaks

on impact. In the same way, karma dictates that every intention is returned to the intender: if

the glass was broken in anger, then in some way, that anger must return to the actor. At

times, the connection will be clear: the glass breaks and the breaker cuts his or her hand as a

result. At other times, however, the connection is not physically immediate. For example, a

valued piece of glass could break later, resulting from a different physical cause, but from the

same karmic cause. (This sort of cause and effect mix and match is considered par for the

course.) In this case, the connection can only be made metaphorically. Similarly, if one slits

the eyes of a crab, one must expect a return following the other rules of DhammaF

one might cut oneself immediately if the knife slipsFor later, experience pain through a

connection that can only be made metaphorically. According to the Dhamma, then,

metaphorical causes and effects are every bit as natural as physical collisions.5

Payutto uses the word flow to describe these connections. For example: ‘‘If there is wrong

view, it follows that any subsequent thinking, speech, and actions will tend to flow in a

wrong direction’’ (1993:12). The word works to conjure, in some minds, at least, the image

of all things creating a stream, all moving along togetherFeach thing as integral to every

other thing, as what drops of water become after they have entered a stream.

Payutto uses the word outflow to describe the connections that are taken as evidence of the

actions of karma. He quotes the Buddha:

Monks! What is Right View? I say there are two kinds of Right View: the Right View (of one) with outflows, which is good kamma and of beneficial result to body and mind; and the Right View (of one) without outflows, which is transcendent, and is a factor in the Noble Path. [Payutto 1993:13]

Notice that this flood of causes that starts other causes is the inevitable result of karma. An

enlightened one who is without karma has managed to step out of this stream and dry him-

self (psychologically) of the causes and effects of desire. Everyone elseFand everything

elseFis stuck in this integrated Dhammic system, subject to all five sorts of causes.

Karma, then, cuts both ways. Intentions and desires are the source of suffering, and call to be

eliminated; but if one does good things and makes merit, the doctrine of karma teaches that

one will necessarily be rewarded. This gives rise to the impetus to give gifts, especially to

monks (more rewarding recipients of gifts than the laity, because monks are, theoretically, at

least, purer): in addition to developing connections, any debt accrued by others will neces-

sarily be repaid by someone at some point in the future. Karma is always just. There is no

escape for the wicked; misdeeds are always repaid in kind. This idea forms the core of the

narratives that people tell about karma. This idea of justice is the first requirement for

determining whether events are karmicly related in developing a karma story.

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 205

At this point, I have given a brief overview of a complete and viable philosophical descrip-

tion of reality, a system that could exist but that, on its own, without the support of the other

standards, lacks a compelling veracity. With regard to karma, the system could just as well be

fantasy. What is needed, before this can become personalized as a projective system, is a way

for humans not just to share a potential universe with karma but to connect directly with it.

This is the job of the next standard.

Standard 3: The Importance of Feelings in Gauging Karma

Different cultures employ different models to describe the workings of the mind,

and, thus, formulate the relationship between individuals and reality in different ways.

According to D’Andrade, the European American folk model of the mind places

emotions somewhat at odds with certainty of beliefs in some cases: ‘‘Feelings are portrayed

as ‘coloring’ one’s thinking, ‘distorting’ one’s judgment. . . . The image here seems to

be of a force which is a sort of perturbation of the medium’’ (1987:124). In other societies,

however, feelings need not cloud the issues, but can, in fact, clarify them. By many

Thai ethnopsychological standards, ones’ own emotional status is taken to be an important

indicator of the nature of reality as well. In answering the question, ‘‘What is good?’’ many

Thai Buddhists tend to depend on their emotions more than, perhaps, many Americans

might. But the issue goes much deeper than this. When evaluating the questions ‘‘What is

real?’’ or ‘‘What is true?,’’ the tools that these individuals use rest on emotion and intuition

as well as on reason and perception. Emotion and intuition are often thought of as the

bases for evaluating reality. Lacking the sort of intuition that comes with enlightenment,

it is emotion that matters to most people when making sense of karma. Reality testing,

then, is more a holistic matter than simply a rational one. (A similar point is made by

Nisbett et al. [2001].)

There is a widely shared belief in Thailand that karma plays an important role in the

structuring of mental states.6 Good people like to do good things, the theory goes. Doing

good and living well makes a person feel good, and doing wrong makes a person feel bad.

If your karma is good, then, this must mean that you feel good. People who feel bad

experience this negative feeling as a result of behaving badly. In this way, karma is often

collapsed into a feeling. When a person considers whether he or she is basically a good

person or not, the tendency is not to think about the things one has done over the course of

one’s life, but, rather, to think about how one feels in generalFbasically happy or not.7 The

acts that cause karma are not considered; what becomes salient is the emotion, a sense of

well-being, or a relative dread. Joey, a young executive, expressed this emotional measuring

of himself in reality this way: ‘‘I heard about Christians, if they do something wrong . . . they

can go to the preacher, and . . . everything’s gone, just finished.’’ Instead, he is stuck waiting

for the other shoe to drop, which leaves him with an unclean feeling. ‘‘I do not mean like

dirty,’’ he added in English, ‘‘but it stays with you forever.’’ As particular moral events recede

into the past, it appears, the sense of karma as relating to acts gives way to karma as

thought about as an emotional state. Karma becomes personal not just in the form of

206 ETHOS

memories, but in the form of emotion. ‘‘Karma, you know, that’s the feeling, you [can] not

see everything, just the feeling, because you know, if you do something wrong, something

bad, you are going to get something bad after that, or maybe next yearFthat’s the feeling,

just the feeling.’’

What gives this emotional sense its validity? It appears to stem from a popular reinterpre-

tation of the doctrinal Thai Buddhist model of the mind, that perception and intuition, not

rationality, reveal the truth of reality:

Now intuitive insight, or what we call ‘‘seeing Dhamma,’’ is not by any means the same thing as rational thinking. One will never come to see Dhamma by means of rational thinking. Intuitive insight can be gained only by means of true inner realization. [Buddhadasa Bhikkhu 1956:43]

True Dhamma seeing can only be done by those who are very advanced in their study of

Dhamma. But this opens the door to a variety of notions about knowing that are based on

Buddhist folk models: that rationality is not the final arbiter, and also that more personal,

less shareable forms of knowing are also valid. That people have a sense that something is

true, in some cases, is sufficient evidence that it is true. Feelings may be individual, but this

does not mean that they do not reflect an objective reality. In this case, a sense of emotional

certainty is taken as an appropriate intuition of Dhamma. This reflects a central feature of

lay Buddhism in Thailand: important but difficult and inaccessible doctrines are often sim-

plified so that they can be seen in everyday experiences. In this case, it is the jump from the

idea that one can intuit Dhamma as it applies to a situationFincluding one’s karmaFto the

idea that one can feel one’s karma.

Evidence for this is ample, but indirect. Having finished his bachelor’s degree, Od had ap-

plied to attend graduate school at Chulalongkorn University, which housed the most

prestigious faculty in his field in Thailand. He did not spend the day before the final inter-

viewFexam studying. Instead, he went to the shrine at the Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel and

made an offering to Brahma. Would Brahma help him? Od claimed that his visit to the

shrine had made him feel good. This was the same form of answer interview subjects gave

consistently when asked why they wore amulets: would the spirits pictured protect them?

Yes-or-no answers were never given; they answered, again and again, that the amulets make

them feel good. These answers were as direct as they could be, given the emotional idiom in

which they were expressed: yes, the spirits were protecting them, the proof was in the feel-

ing. Yes, these spirits are realFbut this recognition comes not through reason based on

remembered experience but through an emotional evaluation of the situation combined

with knowledge of the world.8

That many Thais draw the connection between feelings and karmic realities makes

sense from their experiences as children. A monk who has written on child-rearing issues,

Panyananda Bhikku, combines child rearing with karma:

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 207

In order to prove to [children] that ‘‘Do good, make good, do bad, make bad [holds true],’’ when they made a mistake and were punished, they see that ‘‘do bad, make bad’’ is for real. [2000:18]

Further, if a child does something wrong, his parents should let him know ‘‘that doing such a

thing was bad and they become bad persons. You don’t like them to do that again. Do you

want us to love you? If you want our love, please do not do such a thing again’’ (Panyananda

Bhikku 2000:64).9

This consistently reinforced connection between feeling loved and doing right appears to be

generalized in maturity as a sense that one can feel one’s karma directlyFthat is, if a person

does good things, they will feel good. Of course, this needs to be expanded: people do not

want to raise children who respond to punishment alone. They want to raise children who do

not need to be punishedFor, rather, who can punish themselves when they do wrong things.

The focus on the fear of punishment as the motivator for good behavior is central to

Thai child-raising practices.10 Pannee, a 41-year-old mother of a teenage daughter, puts

great emphasis on the idea of raising a good child. Working hard to tie her daughter’s

happiness and sense of security to obedient behavior, she tries to make her child feel

uncertain of her parents’ love and support when she is bad. Her methods, she says, are

these: ‘‘OneFhit. TwoFI don’t give pocket money. ThreeFI don’t talk to her when I’m

angry. . . . She likes to talk to her parents.’’ This third method, withholding communication,

is an important tool in her repertoire for child care and control. The message is clear:

emotional comfort comes only through being good. A useful child-rearing tool is justified in

terms of karma, and, thus, the doctrine comes to be a part of the ways that people structure

ideas about experience.

Having this connection to karma made viscerally, through punishment (and also reiterated

by the monks), appears to cement the association in the minds of young Thai Buddhists.

Karma is, of course, an ancient, pre-Buddhist religious concept, but the idea of being con-

nected to karma through feelings arises from the experiences of being raised in this Thai

Buddhist environment, and then tied to doctrine.

At this point, karma takes on a certain veracity: it is real because people feel it. Through

the habits of living, doctrine and experience coincide. Now that this is established, we

can examine the ways that it plays out in everyday experienceFemotional reality must be

connected to events.

Standard 4: Karmic Metaphors

For an event to be a karmic response to an earlier one, there must be a metaphorical con-

nection between the two. In Aw’s case, the connection was found through the fact that eyes

played an important role in both stories. Had Aw been stabbed or injured with a blade, she

208 ETHOS

may have divined a karmic connection between the knives. Connections are always

determined after the fact, and are generally based on categories available within Thai

culture.11 Metaphorical connections often revolve around parallel body parts like eyes or

arms, around parallel actions, such as shooting a gun or stabbing with a knife, and around

monetary transactions. Other sorts of connections are, of course, possible, but occur less

frequently in my sample.

Although to a foreign eye, it may appear that karma is qualitatively distinct from other forms

of causality, one important feature of the Thai Buddhist universe is its natural tendency to

work through metaphor. To see the world karmicly, one must accept the idea that all human

actions are connected in the flow of causes and effects, and one must be willing to put the

resources of the mind to workFthose resources that can make connections between

thingsFto interpret relationships in this great flow of being. The laws of physics and the

law of karma are both considered a part of the DhammaFall entirely natural. The abilities

to draw karmic parallels and find karmic ironies, then, come to be seen as functions of in-

terpretation of perceptions, not of creative invention.

The fact that connections must be metaphorically appropriate is important because, in

limiting the number of possible connections, it shows karma to act in rational ways, com-

prehensible if not predictable. The fact that good actions reap good responses and bad

actions reap punishments removes the possibility that Aw would be rewarded for injuring

her crabs. The idea of proportionality, and the relative unimportance of crabs in her mind,

and those of most Thais, removes the possibility that, for example, the deaths of the mem-

bers of her family could have been attributed to this particular behavior. The emphasis on

metaphorical appropriateness limits the possible connections much further for the devel-

opment of publicly sanctioned karma stories. This winnowing of possible stories is

necessary for social control of the form: by keeping the possibilities relatively narrow, story

standards can be maintained. At the same time, the general insistence on finding strong,

clear metaphorical connections aids in the creation of the belief that the connections arise

from karmic necessity and not from creative invention: after all, how could the pain in Aw’s

eye not be related to the crabs? Vivid connections like this draw attention away from the vast

library of experiences from which people can draw karmic connections. That Thai Bud-

dhists share a vision of karma through these narratives makes sense, then, but how does it

tailor itself to specific lives?

Standard 5: Evaluating Rewards and Punishments Subjectively

There is one more issue with which karma stories must deal. At times, there appear to be

great discrepancies between the punishments that karma visits on those who behave badly.

Aw tortured crabs, and suffered discomfort for a year. But a monk who, as a boy, had

engaged in comparable acts, nearly paid for his transgressions with his life. In retribution for

having killed some birds to eat and made a turtle soup, he breaks his neck in a car crash, and

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 209

then is scalded with water boiling over from a broken radiator (Phra Rajsuddhinanamongkol

2000:52).12

Interpretations depend on the raw material of storiesFthe events that happen in a

person’s life. This is filtered through the disposition of the individual in working out

how great or how little the retribution or reward for one act is. Minor actions may reap

great repercussions, and large acts may be perceived to draw small responses. At times, the

fit between cause and effect seems poor. The appropriateness of the metaphor one finds

must work in conjunction with the intensity of a person’s feelings about an instance to

determine whether one’s karma is back in balance after one perceives a response to an

earlier act. If the retribution for a crime seems too slight, it can always be argued that

further punishments will come later. If it is too great, then perhaps it is connected to

something else as well. Naturally, there is a personal elementFthe monk, steeped in

an environment that emphasized the idea of sin, may have carried his burden more heavily

than Aw did.

There is a sort of a mixing and matching that goes on, then, in the pairing of karmic events,

some of which appear to rest on the happenstance of metaphorical similarities, and some

of which relate directly to the salient emotion (guilt for having done wrong, confidence

about having done right, and the like). Although this can be socially mediated to some

degree (certain acts, like premeditated murder, require a certain level of retribution) for the

most part, many of those interviewed were willing to accept the independent personal

reports of others, in terms of their senses of the intensity of the feeling that needs to be

resolved, and the events the resolutions respond to. In most cases, being able to judge

another person’s experience with karma would require such an impossibly high level of

intimate knowledge that people generally accept the stories of others as true, and as evidence

of the existence of karma, as long as the perceptions fall in line with the accepted forms

of the narratives.13

A note on maintaining conformity among narratives: I never heard anyone tell a story that

fell outside of the guidelines given above, and those who were asked did not remember

having heard karma stories that did not fit the bill; the standards that define an appropriate

karma story are sufficiently simple that all of my informants appear to have mastered them.

They were, however, generally able (and, often, eager) to articulate the basics of karmic

doctrine, and, during interviews, to correct errors in hypothetical karma stories presented to

them. Could someone like Aw, who injured animals, lose her wallet in karmic retribution?

(This would violate standard 4.) One interviewee said that, in that case, karma might be

‘‘catching up’’ with some other bad deed. ‘‘If she lost it, maybe it’s because she had stolen

[money] from somebody before,’’ he said, suggesting that the cause and the effect here could

be parts of two distinct karmic series, and offering a different, stronger possible narrative.

Whether he would do this in the course of ordinary conversation with other Thai Buddhists

is, of course, a different questionFbut Thai Buddhists do, in fact, have the ability to

monitor and correct one another’s stories.

210 ETHOS

Sanctioning of Beliefs: Narratives as Evidence in a Just Universe

Evidence of the truth of the doctrine of karma, then, that one will be repaid for all of one’s

moral acts, can be seen in the universe, and gathered from experience. Some people are born

rich, Pannee points out, and some are born poor. Some are intelligent and handsome,

whereas others are stupid, or luckless, or plagued with physical problems. Here, she follows

a line of argument thought to have originated with the Buddha himself: how could it be that

we are all born so unequal, she asked, were it not for what we had done before we were born?

But, the anthropologist replied, what if the universe is unjust? Pannee had no answer for

this, nor did any other member of the study. There is a fundamental predisposition in Thai

culture that brings people to believe that the universe is ultimately fair. Every story of kar-

mic justice serves as evidence to support this contention. But what does it mean when the

good suffer and the greedy prosper? This is repayment for the deeds of past lives, when

everyone was different. All narrative evidence supports the claim that karma is real; for most

Thais, counterevidence can be disregarded immediately. Karma is, then, socially acceptable,

doctrinally true, and personally experienced.14

Integrated Narratives: Personal Symbols and Experience

Obeyesekere (1990) argues that the ability to manipulate the personal meanings of public

symbols allows people to use personal idioms to work through psychological problems. The

argument made here heads toward a similar goal by a different path: where Obeyesekere

explored the public–personal dimensions of individual symbols, I explore the use of publicly

sanctioned processes for developing symbols that are basically personal but also publicly

acceptable. Pierced crab’s eyes do not carry a strong symbolic meaning to most Thais, but

because of their value in the context of Aw’s karma narrative, her personal meaning can

become sensible and comprehensible to people who hear the story.

More than this, karma stories often reflect an individual’s understanding of her place in her

social and psychological world. What makes this story important to her, and worth thinking

about in the terms of her life, is not just the fact that it tells her something about her past: it

is important because it can help her think about the present challenges she faces in her social

and psychological world. Although some karma stories appear to have relatively little rele-

vance to their tellers’ lives, others can act as useful tools for thinking about their teller’s

situations. In this section, I discuss the ways that two karma stories help their tellers think

about their positions in their worlds. After discussing Aw’s case, I go further and examine the

way that actions based on a belief in karmic connections help an orphaned adult, who falls

outside of normal familial social structures, to feel better integrated, and become able to

fulfill his filial obligations.

Aw is like many young adults in that her story relates to the youthful mistreatment of ani-

mals, experiences that were pleasurable at the time, but arouse feelings of discomfort later

on. The fact that this sort of story emerges often among adults in their twenties probably

reflects the fact that they have reached an important stage in psychocultural development.

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 211

For many middle-class Bangkok Thais, the period between a person’s late teens and early

twenties marks an important transition, from economic dependence on her parents to some

level of independence, from a period of close supervision to a time when she is ableFand

often requiredFto make many decisions on her own. Among those interviewed, one

important measure of maturity relates to the ability to recognize one’s position as an active

moral agent: to understand that doing things that satisfy oneself may hurt others. One key

gauge of adulthood, then, is the ability to understand not one’s place in the hierarchy (that

comes much earlier), but one’s ability to hurt and help others both above and below oneself.

Young adults are aware, however, that the ability to make decisions does not necessarily

imply the wisdom to make them well. This feeling of uncertainty is probably intensified by

the fact that, although they are expected to act independently, they are encouraged to con-

tinue to accept the moral authority and superior wisdom of their parents, as part of the

obligation that will last the rest of their parents’ lives. (‘‘My mother is my goddess,’’ one

professional in his late twenties explained.) It is not a formally marked milestone, but many

Thais see the importance of developing the ability to understand one’s place in a community

defined in part by hurting and helping others.

During the period of our interviews, Aw was about 20 years old, a college student living with

her parents, but working at her boyfriend’s shop. Within a few years, she expected, they

would move in together and start a family. She was beginning to feel the increasing burden

of adult responsibilities. She talked about her desire to be good, and her inability to avoid

bad acts completely. She wanted to avoid doing wrong, but she had become aware of the

difficulty in being certain. When asked about the difference between right and wrong, she

replies: ‘‘I don’t really know. I’m not quite grown yet, not quite sure.’’ In Aw’s life, then, the

story of the crabs speaks to several issues with which she was dealing. She understood her

need to live ethically while also being aware of the difficulty of the task, and the limitations

of immaturity. She was aware of the need to be prepared to take on adult responsibilities

while also understanding that the failure to behave maturely can have serious consequences.

The commonness of stories about harmful immaturity among her peers, then, is not sur-

prising; it serves to remind them, and help them think about, the relationships between

maturity, wisdom, and the power to do harm, and to make sense of a bind in which they find

themselves: compelled to act, they are uncertain about their abilities to act wisely.

Hierarchical obligations play an important role in Thai social structures in general, and the

debts children owe their parents are very important in the lives of younger subjects. For the

most part, Bangkok children repaid their parents through gifts of material goods, money,

and time spent working. Bandit, however, was in a different position. His mother died when

he was quite young, his father, when he was 17. This saddled him with a karmic debt he was

unable to repay directly. Thus, he made use of a different sort of karma story from the ones

discussed so far: instead of connecting a human action with the universe’s work to balance it

out, he described the moral actions of his parents in providing for him when he was a child,

then explains his own response to those actionsFhis intentional moral acts of repay-

212 ETHOS

mentFto balance his karmic debt. Instead of looking after his parents as an adult in a form

similar to the ways they looked after him as a child, by giving them things directly, he made

donations of food and money at a temple. Although he was aware that the monks would

make use of the earthly aspects of his offerings (the money was, in fact, intended to be used

to support them), a ceremony was performed in which the food is sent to his parents in their

afterlives. When he talked about them as they lived, he mentioned love, but when he talked

about them after their deaths, the language changed. He spoke about his present relation-

ship with his motherFone of givingFlargely in terms of karma. He did not talk about gifts

in terms of love, as most Thais tend to do with living parents, but in terms of karmic obli-

gation. ‘‘When I help . . . her, I think about karma, to repay her.’’

Revolving around Bandit’s notion of debt and proper repayment, this story condenses

information about Bandit and his relationships with his parentsFbut it also demonstrates a

way that a boy orphaned in late childhood, who falls outside of the normal hierarchy,

can think of himself as satisfying his social and moral obligations. Attempts to continue

connections with the dead are far from unfamiliar to anthropologists (Klass 2001), and

karma stories provide one vehicle for this sort of interaction and integration. Bandit can

connect himself, through the metaphor of his donations, to important social structures and

personal relationships in which he could not otherwise play a part.

Conclusion: The Process Matters

Only in the simplest sense does this explanation of synchronization focus on internalization

as a process through which cultural materials get inside a person. Instead, synchronization

describes a process through which culturally sanctioned doctrines are linked to personal

experiences through a set of shared principles. This allows two processes to occur. First,

these processes permit the development of karmic narratives that shape the interpretations

people give to some of the events of their lives. Second, people set up standards through

which such narratives can be evaluated for conformity to broadly accepted norms. Pressure

from Buddhist institutions in Thailand may cause karmic beliefs to be present in conversa-

tion, but this pressure cannot explain why the beliefs are so deeply held. Nor can the

prevalence of karmic understandings be explained by an individual’s desire to believe. The

doctrine can be useful, but this does not impel its integration into individual worldviews.

Rather, deeply felt appropriation of karmic beliefs is a function of the way a particular set of

ideas works in a particular set of institutional contexts, in interaction with certain functions

of human minds. The complex of karmic doctrines and narrative standards, in conjunction

with Thai religious, social, and cultural norms opens the door to active participation in

karmic ideasFand in this, individuals and media help communicate and perpetuate basic

principles that in turn perpetuate themselves through continued discourse.

It is important to note the distinction between experience and shared understandings, both

of which are essential to making sense of the workings of culture and society. Different

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 213

individuals lived their karmic lives differently. Some were satisfied with what they took to be

the positive state of their karma; others found it a burden. Some tried not to worry about it;

others committed themselves to immense karma-improvement projects. Certainly, narra-

tives varied from person to person. But these different, individual experiences of karma are

only possible, only comprehensible, because of a fundamentally shared understanding of

karma’s workings in nature.

This brings us to the apparent intensity of interest in karma as an explanation for life events

among the urban Buddhist middle class, as compared to reports of lower levels of interest by

anthropologists like Keyes and Hiebert. Keyes suggests that karma was an explanation of

last resort among his rural informants (1983:265), but in the urban context I studied, karma

appears to have taken on a more important role. In some ways, this seems unlikely.

As capitalist markets grow, the moral calculus of living often grows more complex. Instead

of leading relatively circumscribed moral livesFwhere one’s actions are confined largely to

oneself, one’s family, and one’s neighbors, it is now possible to buy goods produced in

sweatshops, and support corporations that damage the environment. The rise of modern

media has expanded the notion of community (as Anderson [1991] argues), and certainly

social activists (incl. engaged Buddhists like Sulak Sivaraksa) are working to promote

awareness of the ethical connections that come with life in the modern world. If karmic

beliefs were accepted because they felt good, then, as awareness of communal culpability

rose, one might expect to find interest in karma waning. This is not the case, however.

Furthermore, the recent arrival of new and different value systems in the cultural market-

place should expand the challenge, as television, the internet, and print media expose

Thais to foreign ideological systems. In Bangkok, however, something counterintuitive has

happened: instead of being lost in the cultural muddle of modernity, the coming of

new forms of communication appears to have increased attention to the doctrine of karma.

Unlike many traditional institutions and ideas that are crumbling at the feet of global cul-

tural change, the doctrine of karma appears healthy and vibrant. Its experiential-doctrinal

nature makes it durable.

This returns us to the questions asked by many of the thinkers who have worked on karma

in the past: why do people continue to synchronize the belief so deeply? The doctrine’s

usefulness, or the good feelings it often produces, are not sufficient to explain this. Rather, it

is accepted because of the self-perpetuating process of synchronizing doctrine and experi-

ence. The modern media have contributed to this. It is owing in part not to the increased

presence of preaching monks (although they certainly do participate in this) but of news-

paper articles, television series, and films, apt forms for conveying the ironic and titillating

stories that karmic narratives often turn out to be. Although Buddhist doctrine (considered

by itself ) might be facing new forms of competition in the globalized cultural marketplace,

advances in communication work enhance the process of synchronization rather than

destroy it.

214 ETHOS

The belief system, then, survives not just because it is institutionally useful, or because of the

psychological satisfaction it produces, but because the logic of experience forces people to

see it as true. Where social monitoring of interpretations of individual experience makes

belief in karma acceptable among Thai Buddhists, the intersection of abstract doctrine with

those interpretations give the doctrine a veracity that is hard to deny. Karma and, perhaps,

other beliefs in other systems as well, is accepted as part of ordinary experience not for its

utility, but because of the depth of its synchronization: it appears necessary and true, even

when unpleasant.

STEVEN G. CARLISLE is Lecturer in the Program in Culture, Art, and Technology, and Visit- ing Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.

Notes

Acknowledgments. This research was funded in part by the Stoller Foundation Memorial Award and the Hayman

Dissertation Fellowship.

1. For the purposes of this article, middle class refers to those people with income that can be expended on consumer

goods on a regular basis, but who, unlike the upper classes, lack significant political or economic power on an

individual basis. Although nearly all informants fell in this category, a few had little surplus income and thus fall at

the very edge of this category.

2. Like all interviewee names used here, ‘‘Chatri’’ is a pseudonym.

3. A note on the differences between Buddhist conceptions of karma and Hindu conceptions: where middle-class

Thai Buddhists conceived of karma as reflecting only an individual’s relationship with a moral universe, some an-

thropologists of Hinduism (Lichter and Epstein 1983; Sharma 1973) report that karma can be passed from person

to person, through physical contact, prolonged proximity, or via other methods that have nothing to do with one’s

own individual moral behavior.

4. In spite of the current prevalence of deterministic theories about the relationship between cultural forces and

individual thoughts and actions (e.g., Foucault 1976), a number of theories have emerged that, like the one pre-

sented, here, look at shared individual contributions to the development of culture. Hutchins’s work on distributed

cognition (1995) has contributed greatly to this approach, as has the work of Dorothy Holland and colleagues

(1998).

5. Of course, things happen for which people know no obvious karmic correlate. In those cases, my informants

tended not to talk about karma very muchFit is responding to something certainly, but what? In this life, or an-

other? As a law of nature in a vast and largely unknown universe, my informants believe, the influence karma often

extends beyond their abilities to develop coherent narratives about it. Narratives could be formed; people just lack

the information to do it. It is the moments in which the connections can be divined, however, that lead to the

creation of stories.

6. Obeyesekere asserts that the theory of karma creates a level of ‘‘psychological indeterminacy’’ (1968:21) because

people know that they are susceptible to retributions and rewards for actions that took place outside of their present

lives. Unanticipated illnesses and other crises do tend to occur suddenly throughout the courses of Thai lives, but

still, some of this uncertainty is mitigated because my informants generally believe that they can feel their own

karma. Without denying the importance of actions in other lifetimes, they believe that they can feel karma related to

SYNCHRONIZING KARMA 215

known actions (although people did know of cases of people who had experienced a sort of karmic dread for reasons

they did not identify).

7. This subjective approach to understanding the moral worth of one’s actions could lead to troubling contradic-

tions. Some murderers are happy. There are explanations available in Thai culture for these situations. Killers,

Pannee explained, cannot truly be happy. To kill another human being intentionally, a person must be somewhat

deficient, in moral-psychological terms. A killer may think he is happy, then, but this simply reflects either self-

delusion or short-sightedness. How could one be happy, after all, if one knows that one will be visited by a pun-

ishment comparably horrible to murder?

8. Lévi-Strauss (1963) discusses the importance of recognizing the variety of different ways through which things

come to seem certain in different cultures, and calls into question modelsFincluding scientific onesFthat seek to

reduce reality to any oversimplified model.

9. This confluence of love and discipline is unique neither to Theravada Buddhism nor to Thailand. Tobin and

colleagues found a similar set of connections, for example, in their work in China. Facing the same need to be cared

for when they are old, they found that Chinese parents raise children who are responsible enough to have the means

to care for elderly kin, but loving enough to want to bother (1989:96). The idea of discipline is an essential com-

ponent of parental love. As a result, the demands placed on children by, for example, preschool teachers, ‘‘are

perceived by the teachers, the wider society, and perhaps by the children not as cold or harsh treatment but as an

expression of care and concern’’ (Tobin et al. 1989:96).

10. Levy reports that a similar approach is taken in Tahiti: ‘‘The overt goal of managing children is to produce

docility and ‘fear’ of trouble. People hope that children will obey because they are ‘afraid’ not to’’ (1973:447). He

details a number of fear-inducing mechanisms, including shaming, taunting, and threatening (Levy 1973:449).

11. It is possible that connections in some karma stories are based on personal, idiosyncratic categories, but their

private nature would not assist in general acceptability, and are usually not held up for consideration as proof of the

existence of, or the workings of, karma.

12. Killing animals for food is still killingFand vegetarians are considered to have somewhat better karma than

meat eaters. However, eating meat is not considered to be especially detrimental to one’s karma.

13. Pannee told a story that proved to be an exception to this rule: the overseer of a slaughterhouse was gored to

death by one of his buffalo. Here, the connection was plainly visible to her, and, in any case, the man was dead, and

thus in no position to disagree with the interpretation.

14. In his description of the Azandes’ use of poison oracles to predict the future or to divine the unknown, Evans-

Pritchard (1976:146–163) discusses a large number of ways in which mistakes made by the oracle can be justified

through experience. The number and complexity of justifications for mistakes, inconsistencies, and problems with

the oracles reveals a much more complicated system for maintaining the belief than we find in the karmic system.

This is because karma stories are formed retrospectively, and relate to events that can be chosen from a very broad

repertoire of experiences. The oracle, however, is often used to answer specific questions about the present and

future. Further, karmic doctrine provides an out that the poison oracle cannot: things may occur in response to

events that took place during entirely unknowable other lifetimes.

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