Becoming Animal: Karma and the Animal Realm Envisioned through an Early Yogācāra Lens

Summary

The Buddha observed that the animal realm contains an extraordinary diversity of beings, which he attributed to an even greater diversity of the mind. This paper traces how that early idea develops across a millennium of Buddhist thought, centering on the third-century Sanskrit text Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra. That text bridges early theories of mind and karma with later elaborated doctrines by psychologizing animal behavior and placing it on a continuum with human and divine conduct. Exploring animal embodiments and their karmic limitations becomes a way to examine all beings, inseparable from the human mind. The analysis connects Buddhist philosophy of mind with contemporary embodied cognition theories.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm.” This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of Buddhist discourse during a millennium of historical development. I focus in particular on a middle period Buddhist sūtra, the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra, which serves as a bridge between early Buddhist theories of mind and karma, and later more developed theories. This third-century South Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text on meditation practice, karma theory, and cosmology psychologizes animal behavior and places it on a spectrum with the behavior of humans and divine beings. It allows for an exploration of the conceptual interstices of Buddhist philosophy of mind and contemporary theories of embodied cognition. Exploring animal embodiments—and their karmic limitations—becomes a means to exploring all beings, an exploration that can’t be separated from the human mind among beings.