Rebecca French - Reality, Karma, and Nonduality скачать в хорошем качестве

Rebecca French - Reality, Karma, and Nonduality

Chapter 4, “Reality, Karma, and Nonduality,” establishes the metaphysical foundations upon which Tibetan legal reasoning rests. French begins with Buddhist understandings of reality as impermanent, contingent, and ultimately deceptive at the level of ordinary appearances. Through parables such as mistaking a rope for a snake, she illustrates how Tibetans were trained to distrust immediate perception and to recognize that what appears solid and self-evident is in fact provisional. This epistemic stance has direct legal implications: factual certainty is never absolute, and legal judgment must proceed with humility about what can truly be known in any given case. Central to this framework is the doctrine of karma and rebirth, which radically extends the temporal horizon of legal responsibility. Actions are understood to have consequences that may unfold across lifetimes, meaning that justice is not exhausted by outcomes in the present life. A person who escapes punishment may still suffer karmic consequences later, while apparent suffering may be the result of prior actions rather than present wrongdoing. As a result, Tibetan law does not aim to guarantee exhaustive justice here and now. Instead, legal processes operate within a moral universe where cosmic justice ultimately prevails, relieving courts of the modern burden of producing perfectly proportioned outcomes and allowing room for mitigation, reconciliation, and moral exhortation. The chapter culminates in the principle of nonduality, which undercuts rigid oppositions that structure much Western legal thought. Distinctions such as subject/object, guilty/innocent, plaintiff/defendant, or even law/religion are treated as conventional and pragmatic rather than ultimate. This nondual perspective encourages judges and mediators to attend to relationships, intentions, and contexts rather than abstract categories alone. While responsibility is still assigned, it is framed relationally and morally rather than purely adversarially. French argues that this metaphysical orientation helps explain why Tibetan law privileges negotiated settlements, moral persuasion, and ritual resolution over strict adjudication, and why law is experienced less as an external coercive force than as one modality of ethical cultivation within an ordered Buddhist cosmos.