Kamma takes care of criminal act, regardless of death penalty
This is a response to Valerie Y. Davidson’s letter “In defence of the death penalty” (Sunday Times, July 29, 2012).
Bearing in mind that we live in a predominantly Buddhist country, we hope the following, which is an excerpt from the text titled “Kamma and Causality” by Francis Story (also known as Anagarika Sugathananda) will be helpful.
“Ditthadhamma vedaniya kamma provides us with data for studying the operation of the law of cause and effect objectively. In the usual course of things, crime brings its own consequences in the same lifetime, by a clearly traceable sequence of events, but this does not invariably happen. For a crime to receive its due punishment, a complicated machinery of causes has to be brought into operation.
“First, there has to be the act of crime, kamma. Its punishment then depends upon the existence of criminal laws, of a police force, of the circumstances that enable the criminal to be detected, and many subsidiary factors. It is only when all these combine that the crime receives its due punishment in the same lifetime.
“If the external factors are missing, the kamma alone will not bring about its consequences immediately and we say the criminal has gone unpunished. This, however, is not the case. Sooner or later, either in the same lifetime or a subsequent one, circumstances will link together, albeit indirectly, and give an opportunity for the kamma to produce its results.
“Hence, from the Buddhist standpoint, the question of capital punishment rests not on considerations of mercy to the murderer, which must always be a source of contention, since mercy to a criminal implies a social injustice to the victim and
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lack of protection to potential victims; it rests on a consideration of the kammaresultants to those who are instrumental in punishing him with death, since it is kamma of the worst order to kill or cause another to take life.
“It is not possible here to enter into a discussion of the moral difference between the action of one who kills another from greed or anger and one who carries out a sentence of death in the course of duties to society. That there is a difference cannot be doubted, yet for Buddhist psychology, it is clear that no act of killing can be accomplished without the arising of a hate-impulse in the mind.
“To take life quite disinterestedly, as advocated in the Bhagavad Gita, is a psychological impossibility. There must, in any case, be desire for the accomplishment of the act, or the act itself could never be carried out. This applies to every action except those performed by the Arahat. Since there is no ‘unchanging Atman’, no distinction can be made between the deed and the doer.”
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