Another major point in which Madhva differs from the traditional scholars of India is on his views on Karma & rebirth.The general view on this subject is karma is the cause of bondage and rebirth is result of karma.And the way to escape rebirth is to perform disinterested action , working without attachment to the fruits of action and thereby be untouched by karma and remain unbound even while performing action.
Madhva on the other hand does not consider karma as the cause for bondage.Karma is jada , insentient , and as such incapable of having any sort of influence on the sentient soul which is a higher grade of reality.So karma does not bind us to this world.It is the ignorance of the soul that is the cause of bondage.Because of its ignorance it is attracted to matter and revels in sense enjoyment , using the senses as the primary source of pleasure instead of discovering the bliss within the soul.It develops a close association with the body as a result of its ignorance which leads to ego and a separative and disjointed understanding of its surroundings.Out of this ego and separative understanding is born all misery.The soul thus attracted to matter is repeatedly born to enjoy what it wants.Karma has no role to play here , it is the desire of the soul to enjoy the eartly life which brings it back.Those souls who worships Yakshas and others Rajasic deities go to their worlds naturally and those that wish for the company of ghouls and ghosts go to those worlds.Souls which are attracted to Shiva and Skandha go to their respective worlds.Thsoe that are devoted to Narayana reach Him.
Madhva is in full agreement with the Seer of the Isha Upanishad when he declares "na karma lipyate nare" , work does not bind man.
The full verse says:
kurvanneveha karmani jijivisecchatam samah |
evam tvayi nanyatheto'sti na karma lipyate nare
Thus the process of ending rebirth according Madhva lies in what he calls nishkamyam jnanottaram karma or enlightened action born of devotion.Madhva does not accept separate paths like karma yoga , jnana yoga and bhakthi yoga but enunciates a path that has come to be called as Integral Yoga.One first has proper knowledge regarding who he is , his relation to the Supreme who is the actual doer and the field of knoweldge.This proper knowledge leads to bhakthi , or love for the Lord.The sadhaka then performs actions as an offering to the lord and this leads to gradual enlightenment.
Even after enlightenment one performs actions , muktasya karma ,but this does not bind.The liberated soul may even be sent back to earth to guide others even after his salvation and this karma after enlightenment actually enhances the bliss in salvation.
Since it was Vishnu who first put the souls into the created worlds to attain their destination , and He can command a soul to enter these worlds once again to act as the guiding light for other sadhakas or the whole of humanity , He is sometimes , by rigorous logic , considered the source of both bondage and liberation.
Sri Aurobindo is perhaps the only other philosopher to hold similar views on karma , bondage and salvation :
Not action but our past soul-states are the womb of our future; not action but desire, attachment and self-immersion of the individualized Soul in mind in a limited stream of tbe workings of its own executive Nature form the knot in the bondage of rebirth; action, whetber of the thought, the speech or tbe body, is only by an outward mechanical process by which the soul-state shadows out or symbolizes itself in material life. It has no essential value of its own, but only the value of what it expresses; it can therefore have no binding power upon tbe soul which originates and determines it. What it does and can help to alter, are merely the mental and emotional values and terms in which soul-state expresses itself and even this function it performs as a partial agent and not as the real determining factor.
and ,
lf that be true, then we have been grossly exaggerating the power of our actions over our souls, grossly and wilfully accepting in our mental and outward life the tyranny claimed over us by our individual nature, when our hidden relation to it and God's open ultimate intention in us is the very opposite of such a submission to the despotic control of Matter. The relation of the Swarat to his being, of the Samrat to his environment is our secret and true [illegible word]. To conquer one's own nature and fulfil God in world-nature, standing back from her in the soul, free and desireless, but not turning utterly away from her, is the true divine impulse of God in humanity. Life of Nature is intended to be to the soul of man as the Indian wife to her husband, not all in all, for it is to God that he should turn supremely and live in God perpetually, but yet always the half of himself through whose help alone as his sahadharmini, his comrade in works, he can fulfil the divine purpose of his living. The soul to Prakriti is intended to be as the Indian husband to his wife, the image of God in life, for whom she lives and through whom she arrives at the Divinity. We should seek first and live always in God beyond Nature, but God as Nature we should also cherish and enjoy as His symbol of that which is beyond and the appointed means of His active self-manifestation.
[In] Vedanta, therefore, the true and early Vedanta, the practical freedom of the soul is not to be gained as in Buddhism by self-abolition, -for the ego alone can be abolished, the soul is eternal, began not and cannot end, -nor, as in Mayavada, only by extinction of its activities in actionless self-knowledge, -for God expresses Himself in action no less than in rest; -but rather the soul is eternally free in its nature and its freedom has only to be entirely realised by the mind in all its parts in order to be possessed, whether in action or in inaction, in withdrawal from life or possession and mastery of life, by this outer consciousness which we call our waking self as it is eternally possessed in our wide and true effulgent spiritual being, which lives concealed behind the clouded or twilit shiftings of our mental nature and our bodily existence.
(Chapter IV , Isha Upanishad)
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