A Buddhist Carol

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A Buddhist Carol

Journal Article

Making Sense of Śāntideva's Vision of Reality (Philosophy)

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:

Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol is one of the greatest tales of human redemption known in the Western world. As a child I heard it read aloud every Christmas, and there was always a thrilling magic to rehearing the story of Scrooge's moving spiritual transformation. Yet, the story raises an important spiritual question: Scrooge is a new man on Christmas day, but what about after that? We often vow to be better people and fail. Why is this? A Christmas Carol is, of course, pure fantasy—a deeply heartwarming fantasy that bears repeated hearings—but it nonetheless does raise a real question about how spiritual enlightenment is actually achieved.
      I still appreciate A Christmas Carol as much as I did when I was a child, but as I have grown older, and after having encountered Buddhist philosophy, I have also begun to contemplate the story of Scrooge's spiritual transformation in a new light. The Buddhist notion of karma entails that, even if we are deeply moved now to change our ways for the better, the unexamined patterns of thought that underpinned our past actions retain a latent force in our mind stream that can influence us unexpectedly. If we are not observant of these patterns of thought, we are likely to repeat the kinds of actions we have performed in the past. Because the force of karma can be very strong, "overnight" spiritual and moral transformations are comparatively rare. On a Buddhist reading, the end of A Christmas Carol is where the spiritual journey for Scrooge actually begins.
      This underestimation of the force of karma on Dickens's part was, of course, a necessary case of artistic license, but is somewhat conspicuous given that a realization of the law of karma plays a critical (albeit unnamed) role in the story of Scrooge's putative enlightenment. Scrooge's transformation begins with a visit from the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, a man who was as miserly and selfish as Scrooge himself. Marley's ghost is weighed down by a heavy chain, which represents his regret for having lived such a greedy and shortsighted life. "I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, yard by yard: I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."[1] He warns that Scrooge will be visited by three spirits whose lessons he must heed in order to redeem himself. "Without their visits," Marley declares, "you cannot hope to shun the path I tread."[2] Upon Marley's departure we are then treated to a Dickensian image of the Buddhist "lower realms." Scrooge looks out the window into the cold night air and sees a swarm of unfortunate ghostly forms, suffering and encumbered by heavy chains of remorse: "The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. . . . The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost this power for ever."[3] Later Scrooge's nephew Fred makes this pithy karmic observation: "Scrooge's offences carry their own punishment. . . . Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself, always."[4]
      Throughout the remainder of the night Scrooge is visited sequentially by the three spirits representing the Christmases past, present, and future, who, like the helpful bodhisattvas, show him scenes from his life in order to awaken him to a realization of the law of karma. By the Ghost of Christmas Past Scrooge is presented with painful images of his childhood suffering as well as the kindness shown to him by others in the past, and learns how the present direction of his life has been shaped by these experiences. The Ghost of Christmas Present reminds Scrooge of the precious opportunities all around him to do good by his fellow human beings, opportunities that he has failed to seize. Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Future, a terrifying, faceless, hooded specter, forces Scrooge to face his own mortality, but also teaches him the control he has over the future by choosing to live a more meaningful life. When confronted with the dismal images of his future death, unloved and unmissed, Scrooge decalers, "The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way now."[5] As Scrooge witnesses the bleakness of his current path, he is filled with deep regret.
      The scenes of Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Future bear a close resemlance to Śāntidēva's frightening verses on death in the Bodhicaryāvatāra (Way of the Bodhisattva). Śāntidēva's evocations of regret from chapter 2 of the Bodhicaryāvatāra capture the kind of horror Scrooge experiences when the Ghost of Christmas Future points relentlessly to his own gravestone. "The thought never came to my mind," writes Śāntidēva, "that I too am a brief and passing thing. And so, through hatred lust, and ignorance, I've been the cause of many evils" (The Way of the Bodhisattva, 2.38) . . . "I, so little heeding, had hardly guessed at horrors such as this—and all for this brief, transient existence, I have gathered so much evil to myself" (The Way of the Bodhisattva, 2.42).[6] Faced not just with the certainty of his own death but with the possibility of Marley's fate in the lower realms, Scrooge desperately petitions the spirit: "Are these the shadows of things that Will be, or are they the shadows of things that May be, only? Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses were departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus, with which you show me!"[7] Scrooge now realizes the law of karma, and he asks the most ancient and profound of spiritual questions: whether liberation is possible—whether the "ends can change" if one changes one's "course." Like Śāntidēva, it is not just fear of death per se but the regret of having wasted the opportunity to live a meaningful life that inspires Scrooge to be a better person. (Keeling, "A Buddhist Carol," 25–27)

Notes

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Stories (New York: Random House 2001), 23.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 89.
The Way of the Bodhisattva, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambhala, 2003).
Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 97.

Citation

Keeling, Paul M. "A Buddhist Carol." Buddhist-Christian Studies 31 (2011): 25–29.

Interconnections

Works related to this item

1 Scholarship on

Śāntideva (ཞི་བ་ལྷ་). Bodhicaryāvatāra [बोधिचर्यावतार]. byang chub sems dpa'i spyod pa la 'jug pa [བྱང་ཆུབ་སེམས་དཔའི་སྤྱོད་པ་ལ་འཇུག་པ།]. [The Way of the Bodhisattva]. Tengyur, RKTST 3216 http://www.rkts.org/cat.php?id=3216&typ=2.

Classical WorksAbout this item

An "Introduction to Bodhisattva Practice," the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra is a poem about the path of a bodhisattva, in ten chapters, written by the Indian Buddhist Śāntideva (fl. c. 685–763). One of the masterpieces of world literature, it is a core text of Mahāyāna Buddhism and continues to be taught, studied, and commented upon in many languages and by many traditions around the world. The main subject of the text is bodhicitta, the altruistic aspiration for enlightenment, and the path and practices of the bodhisattva, the six perfections (pāramitās). The text forms the basis of many contemporary discussions of Buddhist ethics and philosophy.