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Notes
Where applicable, I will follow a key term in English with the relevant Sanskrit and Pali words in brackets. A single word in brackets means that the Sanskrit and Pali words coincide.
For an affirmation of this interpretation see Reichenbach (1990: 158) and Finnigan (2022). For a denial see Rahula (1974: 860) and Gowans (2015: 13) who says: “The Buddha … did not think of karma as a form of desert. There is no suggestion that morally good people deserve to be happy and morally bad people deserve to be unhappy. Rather, karma and rebirth are regarded as natural causal processes in the world”.
For example, after rejecting the moral desert interpretation of karma, Gowans (2015: 15) says: “Buddha taught that we live in a morally ordered universe: there is a causal relationship between a person’s morality and that person’s happiness”.
As with any appeal to intuition, it cannot be expected that these intuitions about “artificiality” and “unfairness” will be universally shared. Perhaps some, especially some of those who are committed to the practice of merit transference, will not find merit inflation counterintuitive. The discussion in Sect. 3.2 will further elaborate on this. At this point, I merely wish to emphasize that even though the intuition may not be universal, a significant number of people both inside and outside traditions that practice merit transference will have this intuitive reaction.
See also Gowans (2013: 444) who speaks of merit transference in the Mahāyāna tradition as “… an example of what, from the standpoint of common sense, might appear to be the deeply paradoxical nature of much Mahāyāna Buddhist moral discourse”.
Although Gombrich’s proposal eliminates any “real” merit transference, it is not clear that it escapes merit inflation. For a network of people could make repeated symbolic transfers of merit to each other, building up everyone’s merit stores. However, the lack of any “real” merit transference makes it much easier for some of the restrictions discussed in Sect. 3.3 to be applied to this proposal, thereby avoiding problematic merit inflation.
For example, Schopen (1997) finds textual evidence in early Indian Buddhism for such an interpretation. Likewise, Pemaratana (2013) finds evidence for this interpretation in both key texts and documented cultural practices of Sri Lankan Buddhist communities. Note that it is beyond the scope of this article to analyze canonical Buddhist texts or review the evidence of cultural practices in various Buddhist communities in order to justify the broad interpretation of merit transference articulated here. There are a large number of scholarly works (cited above) that do this work and support the broad interpretation of merit transference. The fact that many scholarly works adopt this interpretation is enough to justify an inquiry into whether this interpretation of merit transference leads to paradox.
See also Williams (2000: 268), who says: “I doubt that the theory of karman in Buddhism was ever in ancient times and in practice (and probably even in theory) held to be so rigid (i.e. as a law) that the transference of merit was thought to be impossible”.
For example, see Harvey’s (2000: 130) description of the eighth (of ten) perfections.
In any case, a possible response to this concern is to argue that bringing everyone closer to salvation, even those who have committed acts of significant demerit, is a positive thing overall. In such a context, we should not be concerned that bad acts have a diminished effect on the overall merit of the agent as that agent approaches salvation. I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this response.
See Lehtonen (2000) for detailed discussion.
For example, see Holt (1981).
See the entry “Indulgences” in Cross (2005). According to this view, good works produce both merit (which increases grace and heavenly glory) and satisfaction (which can be paid as debt against sins). When an indulgence is issued, it is only “satisfaction” that is transferred from the treasury of merit. However, this has the appearance of a mere linguistic move. “Merit”, in its standard, everyday use, is something that both increases moral desert and can pay moral “debts”, and there is no additional concept playing the role that “satisfaction” plays. Thus, if we use “merit” in its ordinary sense, rather than as a theological term of art, it seems fair to describe the Catholic doctrine as one where one of the goods produced by merit (the paying of moral “debts”) is transferred from the treasury of merit to the sinner. But this looks like a form of (partial) merit transference.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ben Blumsen, Steven Burik, Melvin Chen, Ryan Cox, Devin Joshi, Ijlal Naqvi, Daniel Nolan, Sovan Patra, Neil Sinhababu, and Brandon Yip for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Hammerton, M. Merit Transference and the Paradox of Merit Inflation. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09960-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09960-7