Karma

Paul Carus was a German born American philosopher, theologian, and prolific author working at the turn of the twentieth century, best known to history as the long time editor of the Open Court Publishing Company and of the journals The Open Court and The Monist. Carus was one of the most important early American interpreters of Asian religion and philosophy for Western readers, and his many books on Buddhism, Taoism, and comparative religion played a significant role in shaping how educated Americans first encountered these traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Karma is one of Carus’s many short books on Buddhist concepts, written for a general American readership that had little prior knowledge of the underlying traditions. Carus was not a Buddhist himself but he had a serious philosophical engagement with the religion and corresponded with leading Buddhist figures of his era, including Soyen Shaku and D.T. Suzuki. His book on karma takes the central Buddhist doctrine and works through its philosophical implications in language that a Christian or secular Western reader of the era could engage with.

The book is short and accessible, written in the slightly formal nineteenth century philosophical style that Carus tended toward. He works through the basic concept of karma as moral causation, the relationship between karma and rebirth, the question of free will within the karmic framework, and the practical implications for ethical conduct. He draws comparisons with Christian doctrines of providence and judgment and with Western philosophical concepts of cause and effect, in the comparative mode that was his signature.

Carus’s books on Asian religion are now historical artifacts more than living introductions to Buddhism. Modern scholars have moved well past the framings he was working with and many of his interpretations have been substantially revised. But for readers interested in the history of how Western Buddhism developed, in the prehistory of the modern engagement with Asian thought, or in the wider intellectual culture of late nineteenth century America, Carus’s work remains worth knowing.