Does karma explain suffering better than the Fall?

The doctrine of the Fall and the doctrine of karma are both, at bottom, attempts to answer the same uncomfortable question: why does undeserved suffering exist in a world that is supposed to make moral sense? They arrive at very different places. The Fall locates the origin of suffering in a single historical act, inherited rather than chosen by each subsequent person who suffers for it. Karma distributes the explanation across an unbroken chain of individual actions, stretching back further than memory can reach.

Both accounts share a structural feature that is easy to miss: they trade one mystery for another. The Fall explains present suffering by appeal to a past act, but leaves open why a good creator would permit the possibility of that act, or allow its consequences to fall on those who did not commit it. Karma explains present suffering by appeal to a prior life, but leaves open why the moral ledger should be carried by a self that has no memory of accruing it, and whether such a self can meaningfully be called the same person being punished or rewarded.

If I don't remember the life in which I supposedly earned this, in what sense is it still justice rather than just weather?

Guest · 31:05

What the conversation kept circling back to was not which system is true, but which kind of unfairness a person finds easier to live with: unfairness by inheritance, or unfairness by forgetting. Neither guest was willing to concede that their own tradition had fully resolved the tension, which made for a more interesting exchange than either side simply defending home turf.

Inherited guilt is strange, but inherited consequence without inherited guilt is what karma asks you to accept, and I'm not sure it's stranger.

Guest · 44:18

There is also a quieter disagreement underneath the metaphysics, about what suffering is even for. A doctrine of the Fall tends to treat suffering as a consequence to be endured en route to restoration. A doctrine of karma tends to treat it as a consequence to be worked through, actively, as part of the moral accounting itself. That difference in orientation, more than the cosmology, may be where the traditions actually diverge in practice.