that one's present state and character are solely his/her own responsibility. Every one is the result of one's own past deeds. This tends to produce a certain fatalism so far as one's present life is concerned. (13)

The basic criticism is thus that the very notion of karma undermines the need for social critique since it entails that an individual's present situation, including their situation within society, is the inextricable result of their own past actions. Likewise, it can be argued that by taking karma as a type of moral causality Buddhists obviate the need to develop real social critique because they have a fail-safe ontological mechanism already build into their system that guarantees that good actions will be rewarded and bad ones punished. Winston King reflects this kind of criticism in remarking that:

karma is Justice incarnate. . . The mills of karma may grind slowly but they grind with absolute moral fineness. . . Hence in the Buddhist world there is no pressing need for human enforcement of the standards of right and wrong, or the imposition of "just" punishments upon the wicked.(14)

If the mechanisms of karma always ensure, using Susuki's metaphor, that "one reaps what one sows," what need is there for any humanly enforced social mechanisms for the righting of individual wrong, the enforcement of justice, or the improvement of material conditions?

Not only does the operation of karma seem to make the social function of retribution and reward superfluous, but the very individualistic framework in which karma has traditionally been explicated tends to enforce the claim that the Buddhist tradition is too narrowly focused to take much notice of social factors. Karma, as we have been delimiting it so far, is concerned solely with individual actions and consequences, narrowly accenting the effects of actions upon individuals. Thus, in Zen Buddhism the idea appears to be to focus wholly upon one's own actions in order to ultimately free oneself from the chains of karmic retribution, without any consideration for the role that social factors play in determining an individual's situation. This leads naturally to an accent on individual release from the difficulties of worldly existence, and thus to the goal of Buddhist life, nirvana, that we will turn to next.

If karma is the basic Buddhist moral concept, then we might ask; what is the Buddhist solution or response to the kind of moral issues embodied in their notion of karma? The answer to this question is crucial, for the "supreme good or value in an ethical tradition . . . determines the nature of the total ethical structure in the final analysis."(15) Thus, in the Western monotheistic tradition it is ultimately the will of God that grounds the ethical behavior of the participants. In comparison, we can follow King in affirming that as to this ultimate good "there can be no doubt in Buddhism: its name is Nirvana."(16) Abe himself has made the following observation on the ultimate end of Buddhism:

The fundamental aim of Buddhism is to attain emancipation from all bondage arising from the duality of life and death. Another word for this is samsāra, which is also linked to the dualities of right and wrong, good and evil, etc. Emancipation from saṃsāra by transcending the duality of birth and death is called nirvana, the goal of Buddhist life.(17)

Nirvana is traditionally taken to represent the final aim or end of Buddhist life; the goal toward which all Buddhist life is ultimately directed. However, the concern has often been raised that this very end that structures Buddhist life is incompatible with the formation of any social ethic. This criticism actually runs in two directions, each of which we will examine in turn.

First, the notion of nirvana must be understood in relation to another Buddhist notion, that of saṃsāra. Saṃsāra represents the ordinary world in which we live, the world of birth and death, pleasures and pain, strife and struggle. Now according to the first noble truth of Buddhism, this world is a world of suffering. Not that we never experience pleasure or happiness, certainly Buddhists will recognize that we do so often. Rather, Buddhism suggests that ultimately even such ordinary joys lead to a deeper suffering (termed duḥkha) that is caused by our very attachment to the things in which we find such pleasure and security. As Christopher Ives puts it:

because all things inevitably change, people experience unnecessary pain to the extent that they take themselves to be permanent or clutch to things and situations deemed necessary for fulfillment.(18)

According to Buddhism everything is part of a larger process of birth and decay, through which things come into being and then pass away. Likewise all distinctions, such as those between pleasure and pain or good and evil, are also always relative to a particular set of circumstances within this larger process. Thus in becoming attached to things, whether it be material things or emotional states like pleasure or even to the self, we end up substantializing them and taking their reality as absolute. But within the Buddhist framework such attachments will always lead to suffering in the end because ultimately all of these things are transitory and their absolute being illusory. Thus, Buddhism takes it that we must overcome these cravings and attachments that can never be satisfied, and in the Mahayāna tradition nirvana is precisely this "existential awakening to egolessness . . . from attachment to the dualistic view that distinguishes pleasure as something to be sought after and suffering as something to be avoided."(19) As I mentioned, however, two pertinent questions might be raised as to how this notion of nirvana as the goal that drives the Buddhist's worldview can be made compatible with any type of systematic social critique and reform.