12.3 Of Sound as Result of Karma (KV12.3)

Controverted Point: That sound is a result of karma.

Theravādin: Now what can rightly be predicated of a “result of karma”? Such a result is a matter of feeling, pleasant, painful, or neutral; it is conjoined with feeling of these three kinds; it is conjoined with mental contact, feeling, perception, volition, thought; it goes with a mental object; with it go adverting, ideating, co-ordinated application, attention, volition, anticipation, aiming. Is sound anything of this kind? Is it not rather the opposite?

Now mental contact is result of karma, and of mental contact it is right to predicate any of the foregoing characteristics, and wrong not to. But the opposite holds with regard to sound.

Mahāsaṅghikas: But if I am wrong, was it not said by the Exalted One:

“He through having wrought, having accumulated, having piled up, having increased such karma, becomes reborn with the voice of a Brahma god, like that of the karavīka bird”?

Hence surely sound is a specific result of karma.

The Points of Controversy, an English translation of the Pali Abhidhamma Kathāvatthu. Translated by Shwe Zan Aung and C.A.F. Rhys Davids. First published by Pali Text Society, 1915.

This SuttaCentral edition was prepared by Manfred Wierich and Ven. Vimala and proofread by Josephine Tobin. Some changes were introduced:

Abbreviations, i.e., those of cited works and the participants in the controversies, were expanded.

Cross-references were linked.

Some typographic changes were introduced, among others, i.e.: the phonetic symbol “ŋ” was changed to the Pāli diacritical letter “ṃ”, “ô” to “o”, single quotes to double quotes, and “:—” to “:”.

Letter-spacing with fixed spaces was replaced with bold font.

The corrigenda were merged into the text. Some could not be resolved, though.

This electronic version is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC 3.0) as found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

All copyright is owned by the Pali Text Society. See also the statement under http://www.palitext.com/ → Publications → Copyright Announcement. For non-commercial use only.