Expert: Alex Wilding - 5/18/2011

Question
Hi Mr. Wilding,
I'm currently doing research to write an expository essay on xentransplatation and Buddhism beliefs. If you could answer the following opinions based on your understandings of Buddhism, it would be a great help. Thanks.

1. Where do Buddhists stand when it comes to the advancing technologies within our society and how do they gain a perspective on the subject (such as Buddhist teachings, etc.#?

2. How do Buddhists view organ transplantation as a whole? What about animal to human organ transplantation #xenotransplantation)?

3. I understand that Buddhism teaches the theory of reincarnation. If someone is said to be ignorant in their human life, it is said that they will come back as an animal, enduring many acts of suffering. As xenotransplantation is the taking of animal organs and placing them into a human, would this not affect their rebirth cycle? Would it produce good karma for the soul in that animal as it is giving its life to save another, even though they had no choice in the act?

4. Would the person receiving the animal organ gain bad karma as it came from someone who produced bad karma in their past life or would it not affect them at all?

Thank-you for your time,
Maxine.

Answer
Hi Maxine,
Interesting questions – I'll try to give a bit of an answer to them in order.
1. Buddhism is not a substitute for science, so on the majority of technological questions it has no position, and has no reason to take a position. There is one, simple, overarching rule: does something tend to reduce suffering and increase happiness? Are the acts compassionate? Individual Buddhists, of course, will then have individual ideas in any particular case about how much suffering may or may not be reduced by a given course of action, and those ideas may very well not agree with one another. The only fundamental question, however, is whether a given action is kind and compassionate or not.
2. The answer is the same as above. There may, I suppose, be strange "psychic" effects from transplantation, but there is no particular doctrinal position on those.
3. What you describe as reincarnation may perhaps be literally true, but that is not really the point. The point, rather, is that someone who indulges in ignorance, who wilfully pays no attention to what is going on in their own minds and in the lives of others will inevitably end up, even in this life, as a victim of circumstances, with a narrow horizon, unable to see their way to dealing with life's problems.
4. It is our own actions that leave traces in our own minds (sometimes people talk about "in the stream of our own being"); those traces in turn draw us to circumstances that resonate with the habitual actions that formed them. That is how karma is supposed to work. If there is any bad karma involved in this transplantation process, it would not be "transferred" from the donor, but would revolve around the actions done to the donor in order to obtain the organ. There is indeed an ethical question there, but I don't think it has anything to do with absorbing anybody else's karma.
I hope that helps a bit!