Hello everyone, I want to ask about ānantarika kamma. Some time ago I was reading about these serious bad deeds.
One of them is about hurting the Buddha (sheding the blood of the Tathāgata). The meaning of the text is understandable like this but… I also found a text, where even intentional damaging of thing related to the Buddha is also ānantarika kamma. Later I found it wasn’t thēravāda text.
Does anyone know about commentary or something of how it is understood in thēravāda tradition?
Maybe it as simple as it is written = sheding the blood is just sheding the blood of the physical body, nothing else.
Exaple…
How could for example intentional damaging of the page in Dhamma book have the same resault as hurting the Buddha, like Devadatta did?
Yeah, I don’t think we’d consider that ānantarika kamma in Theravada… however, we do believe that intentional violence against the religion is extremely bad karma. If you prevent others from making spiritual progress this is obviously really bad and even symbolic violence will condition your mind to reject the Dharma… possibly turning you away from the path for a long time…
Books weren’t a thing those days. As far as the suttas go, shedding blood is shedding blood. But only with the intention to harm. There is a commentary story where I believe it was Jīvaka performs a minor surgery on the Buddha.
There is also a story of a man burning down a previous Buddha’s kuti. He went to hell in his next life, but not because it was an anantarika kamma. Just cause it was super bad to do. It’s a lovely story, though. In a Theravada kind of way.
Nicely explained why shedding blood is just shedding blood
I think, the later interpretation, which I described may be because the Buddha began to be considered as a kind of the god maybe?
Maybe in sense like: The Buddha is still living in all things related to him.
Interestingly, in Sri Lanka at least, the concept of relic/dhātu has expanded to include things the Buddha used and even Buddha statues. And since the Buddha used the Bodhi tree, that also seems to fall under the concept of dhātu. I’m not 100% on all that, though.
But even then, I have never heard that damaging any of those things falls under the anantarika kamma.
