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Evelyn Linton's avatar

To believe in the existence of past and future lives, one needs to understand causality in the narrow sense, as well as impermanence.

Nia Quinn🌿's avatar

The law of cause and effect permeates all dharmas, both worldly and transcendental.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​🙏💛

Renata c's avatar

🌹🌹🌹🙏🙏🙏

Middle Cosmos's avatar

The equivalence of cause, impermanence, and entity stopped me.

Not a list of three separate properties. The same thing, seen from three angles.

Modern physics circles something similar: any physical state necessarily has causal power. There's no neutral participant in a system. Any entity that exists also, necessarily, affects.

The substantial cause vs. cooperative condition distinction maps interestingly onto how biologists distinguish intrinsic causes from enabling environments. Though the shared substance-continuum criterion is more precise than anything in Western philosophy of causation I've encountered.

The karma example grounds it in practice: past karma as the uncommon cause, the one that varies person to person. Conditions are cooperative causes, common to many. It reframes karma not as punishment but as a causal trajectory that conditions can accelerate or redirect.

Does the neoshakya tradition treat the cooperative condition as equally indispensable, or does it give the substantial cause a privileged status in the chain?