The Karma of Go Stones

Érdekes és szívet melengető rész ez a karmáról, bár a fő gondolatmenet és kérdés (karma vs. szabad akarat) nekem most fura, hogy ilyen komoly kérdés, mert elég egyértelmű volt enélkül a fejezet nélkül is erre az én válaszom. Nem mintha nagyképű lennék, de az vagyok. :D

The Karma of Go Stones

by William Cobb

The notion of karma is found in the oldest strands of Indian thought. It is certainly pre-Buddhist, and is often referred to in casual ways by contemporary Americans. However, just what this notion involves, especially in a Buddhist context, is a matter of some confusion and controversy. At the popular level it invokes some sort of notion of the causal consequences of one's actions. Thus, you might explain your present situation as a result of karma or refer to the fact that a particular action will create good or bad karma with regard to your future.

The problem is that this seems to suggest some sort of determinism, the view that your present and future are entirely the result of your past actions, which seems to undermine the idea of free will and to suggest that one is doomed by one's past. Karma becomes a kind of fate. This pessimistic idea is very unattractive, but how are we to understand the fact that our actions have causal consequences for our future? Are we bound by the past, or are our future possibilities unlimited? Doesn't a belief in karma mean we are doomed to follow a predetermined path through life? Professor Michiyoshi Hayashi of Tokyo Christian Women's University, who has written a great deal about the philosophical significance of Go (unfortunately none of it translated into English), pointed out to me when I was in Japan learning how to teach Go that the stones we play in a game can shed a lot of light on this puzzling concept.

He began by pointing out that a person who did not play the game might think that the fact that the stones do not move during the game would tend to make the game static and boring. Yet the opposite is the case. The game of the unmoving stones is so dynamic and fluid that we find ourselves using language that implies that the stones in fact move. We speak of running and jumping, for example, and of slow and fast plays, etc. Professor Hayashi suggested that this is one of the ways in which Go is like life. The stones are like our actions. Once done they cannot be undone; we must live with the consequences of our actions. Yet that does not have the effect of imposing some sort of rigid determinism on us. Just the opposite.

The patterns of stones already on the board create the basis for an opening up of possibilities for future plays. And the possibilities opened up by a good play are so elaborate they seem dynamic and lively, highly flexible, full of rich and exciting options. Just the opposite of the fixed, static requirements of a deterministic system. Thus, the karma of the stones is like that of our actions in life. Before the first stone is played there is a virtually unlimited, but abstract, openness of possibilities on the board, but one cannot play a game in that abstract realm. One can only deal with actual possibilities, real options that exist on the board because of the stones that have been played. One's plays cannot be undone, but without stones in place on the board, there is a real sense in which nothing can be done. There is no context to give a play meaning and significance. The range and character of the possibilities created by a particular pattern of stones on the board may be more or less effective for the purposes of the game, and in that sense we can speak of good and bad karma in the stones.
But the karma of the stones is basically good, since without it there cannot be a game at all.

My future plays are not determined by my past plays, then. The past sets up the possibility of a limited number of futures, that is, the past sets limits on what forms the future can take, but my plays in each present moment decide which of these future possibilities will occur. Thus, there is no conflict between the karma of past actions and free will. The fact that the past cannot be changed and that the future is a consequence of the past does not mean that the future is determined by the past. As is often the case, a little reflection shows that Go players have an advantage in trying to understand something that often confuses people.

There is one special way in which Go differs from life in this area, however, and this was the theme of the fascinating cover of a recent issue of the American Go Journal (volume 30, number 3). Confronted with an empty board, we were given the problem of determining Black's best play. We do not think about how strange this familiar situation of making the first play is.
Playing the first stone is an absolute act of creation, the first moment in the life of a game, and this is a genuine creation out of nothing. There is nothing like this in our lives. We come to awareness already immersed in patterns of actions that set up limits on our possibilities at many levels.

We do not get to make the first play that will provide the fundamental shape of the world we will live in. That is why Heidegger speaks of our being "thrown" into the world. As we judge the situations we find ourselves in, there are many times when it would be nice to be able to face an empty board and make the first play in such a truly free way-with no karma. But, outside of Go, such a move is possible only when one has entered nirvana.

The Empty Board #8

American Go Journal XXXI, 2 (Spring 1997), 38-39