Retribution, Buddha style

Retribution is a concept not only completely alien to Buddhists, but a prime example of the "delusions" that cause human suffering. In a nutshell, they see "reality" as nothing more than a series of causes and effects called "dependant origination." Nothing exists in and of itself. Take any object, say, a baseball. The baseball is really a core of rubber surrounded by string and all held together by strips of stitched leather. But the string is individual strands, the leather is the skin of a cow, and the rubber is some combination of chemicals that bind together molecularly. Taken down further, we get to atoms and sub-atomic particles that, in quantum theory, don't really exist until an observer measures them. And even then, the nature of their existence depends on who or what is the observer, the purpose of the observation, and other variables. It is this sub-atomic world, confirmed empirically by scientific research, that Buddhist precepts take on such great coherence.

You can see why Buddhists have such trouble with the notion of "blame." If our concepts of "self" are essentially illusory, or simply an evolutionary shortcut for an organism to survive in the macro-world, then there is no one person extant to "blame." Again, according to Buddhist theory, the "Thunderstick" who began this note has already changed into something else, and wouldn't you know it, science actually confirms that. But in the macro-world, I pretend that "I" am writing this note and Barry Bonds will determine that a "baseball" is about to bean him so he better duck out of the way. As Wolf Singer, the director of the Max Planck Institute and one of the presenters at Mind-Life meeting said, the "human brain doesn't need to know ultimate reality, but it does need to know that it must run from a lion." That statement led to a long discussion about the nature of "mind" and where "consciousness" resides, but that's another topic.