Karma

21 March 2023

Karma

“Now when the dead have come to the place where each is led by his genius, first they are judged and sentenced, as they have lived well and piously, or not.  And those who are found to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the Acheron and, embarking upon vessels provided for them, arrive in them at the lake; there they dwell and are purified, and if they have done any wrong they are absolved by paying the penalty for their wrong doings, and for their good deeds they receive rewards, each according to his merits.  But those who appear to be incurable, on account of the greatness of their wrong-doings, because they have committed many great deeds of sacrilege, or wicked and abominable murders, or any other such crimes, are cast by their fitting destiny into Tartarus, whence they never emerge.  Those, however, who are curable, but are found to have committed great sins – who have, for example, in a moment of passion done some act of violence against father or mother and have lived in repentance the rest of their lives, or who have slain some other person under similar conditions – these must needs be thrown into Tartarus, and when they have been there a year the wave casts them out, the homicides by way of Cocytus, those who have outraged their parents by way of Pyriphlegethon.  And when they have been brought by the current to the Acherusian lake, they shout and cry out, calling to those whom they have slain or outraged, begging and beseeching them to be gracious and to let them come out into the lake; and if they prevail they come out and cease from their ills, but if not, they are borne away again to Tartarus and thence back into the rivers, and this goes on until they prevail upon those whom they have wronged; for this is the penalty imposed upon them by the judges.  But those who are found to have excelled in holy living are freed from these regions within the earth and are released as from prisons; they mount upward into their pure abode and dwell upon the earth.  And of these, all who have duly purified themselves by philosophy live henceforth altogether without bodies, and pass to still more beautiful abodes which it is not easy to describe, nor have we now time enough.”

(Plato, Phaedo: Plato I: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, translated by Harold Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1914, pages 387-391, 113D - 114C, ISBN 0674990404)

 

1.  When I recently finished a commentary on Phaedo by an analytic philosopher, which I mentioned in an earlier post, I discovered that the commentary ends abruptly.  There is no mention of the last section of Phaedo where Socrates speaks in cosmological and allegorical terms about the journey of souls after death. 

This brought back to my mind when I was a young man studying philosophy at a Master’s Degree program.  I was taking a seminar on Plato and one of the dialogs discussed was Phaedo.  During the discussion neither rebirth nor karma were mentioned.  Only the logical structure of certain arguments presented for the reality of, or the immortality of, the soul were discussed. 

It was only after I took a long journey through Buddhism that I returned to Plato.  At that time when I read Phaedo it was like I was reading a completely different book; the salvific nature of the teachings were immediately present to me.  But I also felt cheated by the way the spiritual and mystic nature of Platonism was made inaccessible, even when it was right in front of the students’ eyes.

2.  Modernity has a number of ways for making access to the transcendental difficult such as reductionism, chronocentrism, psychologizing, etc.  In this kind of instance, modernity simply ignores the transcendental nature of Plato’s dialogues.  If you are a student the clear, though unstated, message is that those passages that refer to the transcendental are not worth spending time on.

3.  The allegorical unfolding of the karmic consequences of the way people have lived their lives at the end of Phaedo is, to my mind, deeply moving and packed with meaning.  But you need to be open to this kind of writing and many in modernity are not.

4.  I think the way to read this kind of writing is to read these passages the way you would read a poem; that is to say that you allow for symbolism, metaphor, simile, and all the other tools that a skilled writer uses to convey meaning.  You allow for wordplay such puns and double meanings. 

5.  I find this presentation of the journey of the soul in the afterlife to be uplifting and inspiring.  It is inspiring in that it places our one life in the context of a vast series of lives that can constitute a great journey back to the One.  It is uplifting in the way that a prayer to the Divine is uplifting when the Soul makes contact with the One.