Abstract
This article reconsiders the meaning of karma in classical Jain and Buddhist philosophy and its implications for ethics and politics. Against modern popular and activist appropriations that recast karma as a principle of justice, responsibility, and worldly repair, I argue that Buddhist and Jaina sources understood karma primarily as a contaminant: the binding force that traps beings in saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death marked by suffering and delusion. The task was not to perfect karma but to exhaust, transcend, or dissolve it, a project inseparable from the renunciatory ideal.
Part One traces this negative valuation of karma in Jaina and Buddhist sources, from the Jain metaphysics of karmic matter to the Buddha’s definition of karma as intention, to Abhidharma theories of continuity, and to Nāgārjuna’s radical deconstruction of karmic causality as empty. In each case, karma emerges not as cosmic justice but as the very machinery of bondage, demanding renunciation as its practical corollary.
Part Two turns to the broader implications of this view. I develop the notion of renunciation as a form of ascetic resistance: an apolitics that resists the karmic economy itself, neither reforming nor fleeing the world but refusing its logic of action and accumulation. This perspective is then contrasted with modern activist reinterpretations, which recast karma as a resource for social justice, ecological responsibility, or political resistance. While powerful in their own right, these activists risk reinscribing the very economy of action that renunciation sought to overcome.
Finally, the article suggests that the renunciatory critique of karma retains philosophical force in the Anthropocene. In an age of ecological collapse and political exhaustion, the lesson of these traditions is not that we must “make saṃsāra great again,” but that some problems cannot be redeemed within the frameworks that generate them. Their rejection of the karmic economy discloses another mode of resistance—ascetic rather than activist, apolitical rather than political—in which life is revalued as the possibility of peace beyond accumulation, identity, and striving.
Introduction: The Paradox of Karma
The idea of karma has long fascinated both insiders and outsiders to Indian traditions. In contemporary popular discourse, however, it is often reduced to a natural moral law, a cosmic guarantee of reward for good and punishment for bad. This simplistic notion has been eagerly adopted, typically with slight variations, by activist movements of many stripes, in which spirituality and politics are said to merge.[1] In this spirit, Neo-Jain, neo-Buddhist, and neo-Hindu reformulations—largely developed outside Asia—along with eclectic “yogic” lifestyles shaped by New Age thought, Western esotericism, and harmonialism, [2] recast karma according to preferred political allegiances.
Today, activism—political, social, environmental, or spiritual—is increasingly framed as a moral imperative, even a heroic stance. To resist its logic is to risk appearing suspect. Its discourse permeates the arts, academia, the media, and even religion, celebrating the “active,” outspoken individual as the virtuous counterpart to the villainous capitalist “businessman.” This cultural valorisation of activism profoundly reshapes how karma is imagined, especially in the popular wellness and spirituality literature marketed to Western audiences.
A striking example is found in Tibetan Buddhism, in the Karmapa’s The Heart Is Noble,[3] a collection of talks and teachings for a general readership, that recasts karma as a thoroughly worldly principle of interdependence and responsibility. No longer a subtle, delusive mechanism of bondage, karma here functions as an ethical calculus of cause and effect, urging mindful consumption, compassionate action, and ecological engagement. In this well-intentioned reframing, karma is reified as worldly justice, a summons to reform society through collective good deeds.
This article argues that while such activist readings appeal to contemporary intuitions of justice, they profoundly distort how karma functioned in classical Indian philosophy. Far from serving as a mechanism of moral progress, karma was more often regarded as a contaminant, a binding force that tethers beings to saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death marked by suffering, impermanence, and delusion. The task, therefore, was not to perfect karma but to transcend, exhaust, or cleanse it. In this sense, the doctrine of karma was traditionally inseparable from the ideal of renunciation.
Johannes Bronkhorst has traced the genealogy of this transformation.[4]
In the Vedic world, karman meant a ritual act. Its efficacy was technical and amoral: properly performed sacrifices maintained cosmic order (ṛta) and secured benefits. Intention was irrelevant; precision was everything. The Śramaṇa traditions (Jainism, Buddhism, Ājīvikas) decisively broke with this worldview. For the Jainas, karma became a moral-psychological substance binding the soul; for Buddhists, karma was redefined as intention itself (cetanā). In both cases, sacrificial causality was replaced by moral teleology. Suffering and rebirth were explained not by divine whim or ritual failure, but by one’s own actions and desires. This moralisation of karma was revolutionary. It universalised responsibility, rendering human beings the authors of their fate, and explained apparent injustice without recourse to divine judgement. Yet it also introduced a new problem: karma itself became the obstacle. Whereas sacrificial karma had been a means of sustaining cosmic order, moral karma became the very machinery of bondage.
This article seeks to explore this paradox—the negative valuation of karma. I argue that in both Jaina and Buddhist sources, karma is framed not as a moral guarantee but as a contaminant to be purged. This reframing underpinned the rise of the renunciatory ideal and gave birth to what may be called ascetic resistance: the apolitics of renunciation. By refusing the karmic economy that bound householders to the cycle of desire and accumulation, renouncers carved out an alternative ethos, neither political reform nor quietist withdrawal, but a principled rejection of the world.
The paper proceeds in two parts. Part One turns to the sources themselves, focusing on Jaina and especially Buddhist accounts. It traces the development from the Buddha’s redefinition of karma as intention, through Abhidharma attempts to secure karmic continuity, to Nāgārjuna’s radical deconstruction of karma as empty of intrinsic nature. In each case, karma emerges not as a principle of cosmic justice but as the very mechanism of bondage. Part Two then considers the broader implications of this view. It develops the idea of ascetic resistance as a form of counter-politics, contrasts the ancient rejection of karma with modern activist reuses of the term, and asks what these traditions might offer for thinking about life in the Anthropocene.
I suggest that the result is a liberating way of reading karma: not as a consoling law that explains suffering, but as a diagnostic of entanglement and a call to detachment. This attitude, I suggest, constitutes a political stance in its own right, a quiet yet uncompromising refusal that should not be drowned out by activist rhetoric.
1. Karma as Contaminant: Jaina and Buddhist Sources
1.1 Jainism: the Weight of Karma
Few traditions take the binding character of karma as seriously as the Jainas. In Umāsvāti’s Tattvārthasūtra, karma is described not merely as a causal law but as a quasi-material substance (dravya) that adheres to the soul. The text enumerates eight principal types of karmic matter—knowledge-obscuring, perception-obscuring, deluding, obstructive, lifespan-determining, body-making, status-determining, and feeling-producing—along with 148 subtypes (Tattvārthasūtra 8.1–9). These karmic particles infiltrate the soul through passions and activities, weigh it down, and obscure its innate luminosity.
The consequence is stark: every embodied existence is karmically compromised. Even apparently virtuous actions, insofar as they involve attachment, attract subtle karmic matter. For early Jains, the mere fact of living the life of a householder binds to hell.[5] This is why Jain ethics often appear severe. The task is not simply to perform good deeds but to minimise karmic influx (āsrava) altogether and to wear away past accumulations (nirjarā). Liberation (mokṣa) is possible only when the soul is utterly freed from karmic accretions, rising naturally upward, radiant and weightless, by its own purified nature.
This metaphysics of karma underpins the radical asceticism for which the Jain tradition is renowned. Practices such as fasting, celibacy, vigilance over speech, and even the careful avoidance of harming microscopic life are not merely moral disciplines but techniques of karmic prevention. The renouncer’s refusal of worldly entanglement is thus both ethical and ontological: each restraint is a shield against new karmic adhesions, each austerity a solvent that dissolves past residues.
In this vision, karma is pollution; renunciation is detoxification. However virtuous the household path, it cannot suffice, for every social bond and every act of possession implicates one in fresh karmic influx. Hence the Jain renouncer embodies a mode of ascetic resistance: not the reform of worldly life, but its abandonment as karmically compromised. This resistance is not political in the usual sense, for it does not seek to restructure society. It is apolitical in the precise sense that it resists the very economy of action that makes politics possible. By undoing the bonds of karma, the renouncer gestures towards a freedom that can never be secured within the karmic order, the ritualised social habitus.
1.2 Buddhism: Karma as Intention and Bondage
The Buddha redefined karma not as ritual action, as in the Vedic context, but as cetanā, intention. In the Aṅguttara Nikāya, he declares: “It is intention, monks, that I call deeds (karma); For after making a choice one acts by way of body, speech, and mind” (AN 6.63).[6] Intention is thus the generative force of moral life: the decision to act conditions speech and bodily conduct, setting in motion consequences that extend beyond the moment of action itself. This definition both interiorizes and universalises karma.
Yet this radical interiorization also deepens the problem. While intention is morally significant, it remains entangled in saṃsāra: every volition, even ethical volition, sustains the cycle of birth and death. In Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, this is formulated with clarity. Vasubandhu distinguishes between actions performed with wisdom (prajñā) and those without. The former—acts undertaken in freedom from self-delusion—do not generate karmic residue; they are “non-producing” (akāraka) and leave no trace.[7] But actions done under ignorance, even if outwardly wholesome, give rise to new karmic seeds and reinforce the latent dispositions (saṃskāras) that project future rebirths.[8] Karma, then, is not primarily a law of cosmic justice but the machinery of bondage: it binds beings to saṃsāra through the inertia of volition itself. No activism, insofar as it presupposes a continuing self, can thus make saṃsāra “great again.” As the Saṁyutta Nikāya (12.66) warns,
Whatever ascetics and brahmins in the future will regard that in the world with a pleasant and agreeable nature as permanent, as happiness, as self, as healthy, as secure: they will nurture craving. In nurturing craving they will nurture acquisition. In nurturing acquisition they will nurture suffering. In nurturing suffering they will not be freed from birth, aging, and death; they will not be freed from sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair; they will not be freed from suffering, I say.[9]
In other words, even the most ethical volitions, if rooted in attachment to identity, permanence, or conventional value schemes, remain karmically entangling. As long as action is propelled by desire or self-delusion, it perpetuates the cycle of becoming. Only acts of renunciation—gestures that sacrifice continued existence rather than revindicating it—fail to generate new bonds. They alone interrupt the momentum of craving (tṛṣṇā), bringing the karmic economy to cessation.
1.2.1 The Abhidharma Problem of Continuity
Within Abhidharma scholasticism,[10] the definition of karma as intention sharpened a profound philosophical dilemma: if all phenomena are impermanent and momentary (kṣaṇika), how can an action performed at one time generate fruit in another, even in another life? This is not a peripheral puzzle but a test of coherence for the entire Buddhist project. If the causal link between action (karma) and fruit (phala) cannot be explained, then the moral law collapses into incoherence.
Several schools offered solutions. The Vaibhāṣikas (e.g. Sarvāstivādins) maintained that dharma-s exist in the past, present, and future; hence, an action, though past, continues to subsist until its fruit ripens. The Sautrāntikas instead posited the seed hypothesis: an act implants a karmic seed that persists as a causal series of traces (vāsanā) until conditions mature. The analogy, often rehearsed, is that of a mango seed: though the seed perishes, the causal continuum it began—sprout, sapling, tree—eventually yields fruit. So too does karma operate through a succession of momentary traces.[11] The Pudgalavādins and some Abhidharmikas advanced a different view: the action leaves behind an avipraṇāśa, an “unperishing” residue, like a debt recorded in writing. This karmic record persists until repaid by fruition, ensuring continuity across lifetimes.
Both strategies sought to navigate between the Scylla of annihilationism (if an act perishes utterly, its fruit would have no cause) and the Charybdis of eternalism (if the act endures unchanged, it becomes a permanent entity). Their common aim was to preserve moral order without conceding a self.
1.2.2 Nāgārjuna’s Deconstruction of Karma
Nāgārjuna, in the seventeenth chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), subjects these scholastic hypotheses to ruthless critique. His strategy is not to deny causality on the conventional plane but to dismantle the assumption that karma and its fruits possess intrinsic nature (svabhāva).
If an action had intrinsic nature, he argues (17.22), it would be eternal and incapable of being “done,” since an eternal entity cannot undergo transformation. If, conversely, actions lacked intrinsic nature, then fruits could arise from non-actions, collapsing all distinctions between merit and fault (17.23–24). Furthermore, if the determinacy of an act rested in its essence, it would generate endless fruits, even after the first fruit has ripened (17.25). And since actions are rooted in defilements (kleśa), which themselves lack ultimate reality, the claim that actions are ultimately real is incoherent (17.26–27).[12]
The consequence is devastating: neither action, agent, fruit, nor enjoyer ultimately exists. They are like illusions conjured by a magician, a mirage shimmering in the desert, or a city of the gandharvas glimpsed in the sky (17.31–33). Their efficacy in the conventional domain is not denied, but their ultimate status is void. In the Madhyamaka vision, karma is not a cosmic law but a conventional construct that functions only within the domain of ignorance.
1.2.3 Philosophical Consequences: Karma as Emptiness
What does this mean for Buddhist soteriology? On the one hand, the refutation of intrinsic karma secures the coherence of emptiness (śūnyatā): if all dharmas lack svabhāva, then karma cannot be an exception. On the other hand, this undermines any attempt to treat karma as a metaphysical guarantor of justice. There is no cosmic storehouse of deeds, no metaphysical ledger of moral debts. There are only dependently arisen series of volitions and results, provisionally designated as “person,” “agent,” or “fruit.”
The Buddha’s own words are here radicalised :
He who does the deed and he who experiences the result are one and the same’: this is one extreme, brahmin. […]
He who does the deed is one, and he who experiences the result is another’: this is the second extreme. […]
Avoiding these two extremes, the Realised One teaches by the middle way: ‘Ignorance is a requirement for choices.[13]
Nāgārjuna reads this not as evidence of a subtle metaphysical relation but as a negation of both sameness and difference, a denial of ultimate identity altogether. Choice (saṅkhāra), the taking up of one course over another, grounded in expectations shaped by a constructed self, as the Saṃyutta Nikāya (12.66) suggests, belongs wholly to ignorance. For the deluded, choice appears as freedom, the power to decide and act. From the Buddhist standpoint, such choosing is bondage: it renews ignorance, craving, and aversion, and thus sustains saṃsāra. The equanimous one does not choose but abandons.
1.2.4 Practical Consequences: Karma and Renunciation
At the practical level, the Madhyamaka critique underwrites an ethos of renunciation. If karma is not a cosmic mechanism of justice but a circuit of bondage sustained by ignorance, then the task is not to amass merit or secure a more favourable rebirth, but to withdraw identification from the very process of karmic accumulation. Renunciation thus entails not merely abstaining from the unwholesome or cultivating the wholesome, but seeing through the very moral economy that binds both alike.
This is why Nāgārjuna insists that the true escape from karma is not through abandonment in the ordinary sense (simply ceasing certain actions), nor through death and rebirth, but through a radical transformation of vision: meditation and insight into emptiness. Once the practitioner perceives that actions, agents, and fruits are as insubstantial as dreams, the binding force of volition is broken. One may still act, but without clinging, without the delusive appropriation that converts choice into bondage. Here Nāgāṛjuna meets Vasubandhu.
In this way, Nāgārjuna’s philosophy sustains the soteriological orientation of renunciation at two levels:
- Philosophical: By showing that karmic causality is empty, he prevents it from becoming reified into a metaphysical principle that would entangle the practitioner in endless cycles of moral calculus.
- Practical: By urging disidentification from action and fruit, name and form (nāma-rūpa) he clears the way for the cultivation of detachment and serenity.
1.2.5 Summary
From the Buddha’s redefinition of karma as intention, through the Abhidharma’s theories of continuity, to Nāgārjuna’s dismantling of the notions of deed and fruit, a consistent theme emerges: karma is not a principle of justice but a mechanism of bondage. Its coherence depends on ignorance; its dissolution requires insight. To recognise karma as empty is to disidentify from the entire economy of action and result, a renunciation enacted both in thought and in practice.
Within this vision, the task is not to improve saṃsāra but to unmask its very logic. The idea of “making saṃsāra great again” — the impulse to redeem or save the world through further action — is incoherent, for saṃsāra is a process without foundation. It cannot be repaired precisely because it is unreal, a collective hallucination. One does not reform a mirage; one ceases to chase it.
The philosophical deconstruction of karma thus sets the ground for renunciation. If action is structurally incapable of yielding liberation, then persisting in cycles of good and bad deeds can only perpetuate bondage. Renunciation is thus not merely a stoic attitude but the most genuine form of Buddhist activism. It is a final act of cessation, a withdrawal from the karmic economy, spelling out the apolitics of liberation: the refusal to participate in ignorance.
Part Two: Ascetic Resistance: The Apolitics of Renunciation
Renunciation as Ascetic Resistance
The negative evaluation of karma in classical Indian traditions gave rise to the ideal of renunciation. As Romila Thapar emphasised, the renouncer was never merely a marginal figure but a paradoxical one, at once rejecting social order and embodying an alternative authority.
Far from being life-negating, the techniques adopted by ascetics and renouncers […] have, as axiomatic, the belief that life can be the means of discovering immortality and freedom. […] To the extent that the two societies were kept distinct, there was a tacit recognition of the futility of changing the larger society; that the renouncers had links with this society however, also indicates that there was an equally tacit recognition of osmosis as a process of social change.[14]
In this light, renunciation appears not as an evasion of responsibility but as its radical reconfiguration: a way of embodying transformation, of teaching through being.
The renouncer does not seek to reform society through political action but to step outside it altogether. The householder’s rituals, duties, and property bind one to karmic accumulation; the ascetic’s refusal dissolves those bonds. Caste rules are ignored, property relinquished along with sexuality and family obligations, food taboos broken, and identities dissolved. This is not activism—an effort to improve the world through righteous action—but what may be called ascetic resistance: the refusal of the very ritual and karmic economy that holds society together. The renunciate’s authority derives precisely from detachment, the apolitics of liberation.
Modern Activist Reuses of Karma
Against this backdrop, modern activist reinterpretations of karma appear as profound reversals. Jin Y. Park,[15] for example, reclaims karma as intentional action and agency, aligning it with Hannah Arendt’s notion of action as natality and José Medina’s “epistemic resistance.”[16] For Park, karma is not passive acceptance but a creative practice of resistance: meditation, ethical cultivation, and mindful living become political acts that resist ignorance and injustice. This resonates with strands of Engaged Buddhism,[17] as well as with Black American Buddhist voices such as Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Lama Rod Owens, who frame karma as a resource for mindful struggle against systemic racism and oppression.[18]
There is undeniable force in such readings. They resist fatalism, empower the marginalised, and show how Buddhist categories can inspire collective transformation. Yet from the vantage of classical renunciatory traditions, they risk reinscribing the very karmic logic they aim to overcome. By valorising agency, resistance, and creativity, they reaffirm the primacy of action—the very mechanism of bondage. For the renouncer, karma was never a resource to be mobilised but a contaminant to be exhausted, dissolved. Activist inversions, by contrast, cultivate the very disease they seek to cure, treating saṃsāra as a problem to be fixed through political means. In so doing, they collapse reality into the flat plane of conventional truth—a ritual game without cessation (as in the Frankfurt School, where critique has no final resting place)—in which the perspective of nirvāṇa has no purchase. The renunciatory critique is thereby neutralised: the cycle of misery is no longer to be broken, but managed—made equitable, bearable, even aestheticised.
Toward the Anthropocene: Learning from the Renouncer
This contrast is not only historical but urgently contemporary. In an age of climate collapse, political polarisation, and existential unrest, the constant imperative to “fix” the world risks reproducing the very logics of accumulation, identity, and competition that generated the crisis. Activism, however well-intentioned, can unwittingly mirror the structures it resists, deepening cycles of reaction and exhaustion—the logic of “us against them.” For within saṃsāra, every solution already carries the seed of a new problem.
Here, the renunciatory traditions offer a different resource: not a politics of resistance, but an apolitics of renunciation. They remind us that not every problem is solved by more action. Fundamental issues require stepping back from the very frameworks that perpetuate them. The method is not quietism but refusal: the recognition that the karmic economy, like the consumer economy, is not redeemable on its own terms. As the Acintita Sutta (AN 4.77) warns, the precise results of karma belong to the “inconceivable” (acinteyya), beyond the reach of speculation or calculation—much like questions about the ultimate nature of the world itself.
To paraphrase a contemporary slogan, the renunciatory traditions warn us: we cannot “make saṃsāra great again.” The cycle of karmic action is not a site of repair or redemption but of perpetual entanglement. What they offer instead is a transfigured resistance—ascetic rather than activist, apolitical rather than political—in which life is revalued not as accumulation or identity but as the possibility of peace in equanimity. In this sense, the renouncer speaks even to the Anthropocene[19]: not by attempting to mend a delusional system, but by disclosing another mode of living altogether, one freed from competitive striving, identitarian divisions, and moral self-assertion, where freedom is measured not by remaking the world in one’s image, but by relinquishing it, letting it be as it truly is (yathābhūtam).
Author Brief Bio: Dr. Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette obtained his PhD (2018) in Indian Philosophies from the Institute for Indology and Tibetology of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, in Munich, Germany. He is now Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy (DoP) at MAHE. He published extensively on the early developments of Sanskrit philosophical doxography and now researches on the phenomena of list-making and taxonomy within the spiritual exercises of South-Asian gnostic yogas. In general, he is exploring the ancient South-Asian intellectual dimensions of spiritual life, especially in the scholastic and ascetic aspects of their expression. In brief, he has taken interest in what he describes as the ‘yoga of reason’, or the ‘path of knowledge’ (jnana-yoga) pursued by Gnostics belonging either to the Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain traditions.
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References:
[1] This tendency is by no means confined to Buddhism. Across the global marketplace of modern spirituality, one repeatedly finds the claim that spirituality and politics are not merely compatible but inseparable. Benjamin Riggs ( 2017), for instance, insists that “spirituality is not an other-worldly affair” but a principled orientation toward the world in which politics, far from being a distraction, becomes an integral field of practice. In a similar vein, AnaLouise Keating ( 2005, 242) defines “spiritual activism” as both an epistemology and an ethics grounded in interconnectedness, one that explicitly directs spiritual practice toward social transformation by challenging racism, sexism, homophobia, and systemic injustice. Such formulations exemplify the activist reframing of spirituality as a call to world-reform.
[2] See Baier, Maas, and Preisendanz 2018; Diamond-Lenow 2023; A. Foxen and Kuberry 2021; A.P. Foxen 2020; Godrej 2017; Goldberg 2016; Hauser 2013; Jordan 2020; Pacheo 2015; Shearer 2020; Sood 2020; Strube 2021
[3] Dorje 2013.
[4] Bronkhorst 2011, 2016, 2000.
[5] Johnson 1995, 25.
[6] Translation from Sujato 2018b. Insertions in parentheses are mine.
[7] Richard P. Hayes ( 1989, 10) explains: “an act that is motivated by wisdom can never be accompanied by a desire for continued existence, for wisdom is the very realization that nothing endures. In the absence of a desire for continued existence, the root cause for continued existence does not exist, and therefore an act that stems from a wise motivation does not have the consequence of continued existence.”
[8] According to Hayes ( 1989, 10): “An intention to act that is not associated with wisdom is bound to be associated with the belief in a continuing self. Such an unwise intention is bound to be accompanied by such conditioning characteristics as selfish desire or anger, and it becomes either an unprofitable intention, in case it is accompanied by a desire to bring harm to another, or a profitable intention, in case it is accompanied by a desire to bring benefit to another. Therefore, an unwise intention becomes profitable or unprofitable owing to its association with profitable or unprofitable conditioning characteristics.”
[9] Translation from Bodhi 2000, 605-606
[10] On Abhidharma, see e.g. Anālayo 2014; Bronkhorst 1985; Coghlan 2018; Cox 2004; Dhammajoti 2015; Frauwallner 1995.
[11] See the Milindapañha (Questions of King Milinda) 2.1.6, in the standard Pali Text Society edition translated by Rhys Davids ( 1890, 132).
[12] For translations of Nāgārjuna’s MMK, see e.g. Kalupahana 1991; Siderits and Katsura 2013.
[13] Aññatarabrāhmaṇasutta (A Certain Brahmin), in Saṁyuttanikāya 12.46, Sujato 2018a.
[14] Thapar 2000, 876.
[15] Park 2025.
[16] Arendt’s notion of action as “natality” (the capacity to begin anew through political action) and Medina’s idea of “epistemic resistance” (challenging injustice by disrupting dominant interpretive frameworks) both revalue action as creative and transformative. From the perspective of classical Jaina and Buddhist thought, however, this represents a reversal: karma is not resource but bondage, and liberation lies not in multiplying action but in renouncing the karmic economy altogether.
[17] For further discussion of Engaged Buddhism and Humanistic Buddhism, see, e.g., Duc 2025; Guruge 2002; Hanh 2008; Ives 1992; King 2009; Krause 2024; Queen 1999; Queen and King 1996; Laliberté 2024; Lintner 2009; Pittman 2001; Sivaraksa 1989; Stanley and Loy 2009; Subrahmanyan 2019; Sukala 2024; Yun 1994, 1995, 2000, 2003.
[18] For further discussion of Buddhism in relation to karma, systemic racism, and oppression, see, e.g., the following works: Giles and Yetunde 2020; Starlyte 2024; Owens 2020; Ward 2020; Yancy and McRae 2021.
[19] For further discussion of Buddhism, environmentalism, and the Anthropocene, see, e.g., Callicott 2017; Carvalho 2014; Chae 2022; Dorzhigushaeva and Kiplyuks 2020; Holohan 2022; Ives 2025; James 2004; Lim 2019; Loy 2019, 2015, 2008, 2003; Shiu 2023; Simonds 2025; Stanley, Loy, and Dorje 2009.
