Editing SG31SBE-T (section)

=== Poverty Is Also a Matter of Collective Responsibility ===
'''A:''' Buddhist reasoning does not permit such one-sidedness. In this case Buddhism clearly asserts social “joint responsibility” (rentai sekinin, 連帯責任); it does not assign responsibility to one side alone. This is what Buddhism means by “collective karma, collectively experienced” (gūgō shokan 共業所感).<ref>Gūgō shokan 共業所感 refers to the collective experience of conditions arising from “shared karma” (gūgō 共業), in contrast to karmic consequences attributed solely to an individual’s actions. Seno’o invokes the concept here to reinterpret karma socially: poverty and economic inequality are not simply the individual karmic responsibility of the poor but conditions collectively produced and therefore entailing collective responsibility.</ref> ''If responsibility is joint, then capitalists too must bear part of the responsibility for the impoverished lives of the proletarian masses. More broadly, it is a responsibility shared by society as a whole. Once we discover that defects in the capitalist economic system are among the causes of poverty, shouldn’t reform of that system become the first question confronting us as a matter of joint responsibility?''

'''B:''' But if that is so, how should we understand such ideas as “one’s own karma, one’s own recompense” (jigō jitoku, 自業自得) and “cause and effect through the three existences” (sanze inga, 三世因果)? Are you saying there is absolutely no individual responsibility…

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…at all?

'''A:''' I am not saying that individual responsibility does not exist. The question is whether responsibility is confined to an individual’s private life or whether the transformation of society is regarded as fundamental. We cannot determine which is fundamental without correctly understanding the relationship between the individual and society.

Now, in “one’s own karma, one’s own recompense,” an individual self is posited, and the actions it performs through the cycle of rebirth are described as “one’s own karma, one’s own recompense” or “cause and effect through the three existences.” But so long as no-self is a fundamental principle of Buddhism, this way of thinking must naturally be re-examined.

For if we assert an individualistic doctrine of “one’s own karma, one’s own recompense,” Buddhism’s fundamental principle collapses; while if we assert no-self, “one’s own karma, one’s own recompense” cannot stand in that form. In this connection, a scholar named Rhys Davids is said to have explained that “the view current at the time”—the individualistic theory of karmic causation through the three existences—“was added to the teachings of original Buddhism without being logically integrated into them.”<ref>T. W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922), a pioneering British scholar of Pāli Buddhism who emphasized the tension between the Buddhist denial of an enduring self and the doctrine of karmic continuity across successive lives, describing the latter not as transmigration of a soul but as the “transmigration of character.” Seno’o draws upon this historical-critical interpretation to argue that an individualistic doctrine of karmic recompense was not fully consistent with Buddhism’s fundamental teaching of no-self.</ref> I suspect that is indeed the case.