Karma as Token Causation, Pratītyasamutpāda as Structural Model

Modern causal inference has built a formal machinery — interventions, counterfactuals, structural equations — for asking what causes what. Buddhist philosophy built a machinery of its own far earlier: dependent origination for the structure by which events generate events, karma for the moral weight of individual ones. This working paper maps the claim that these are the same formal object seen at two resolutions — and catalogs what breaks when the map is drawn carelessly.

I. The Two Causal Questions

The essay opens by separating token causation — this event caused that event — from structural causation — the pattern by which events of a kind generate events of a kind. The distinction comes first because the paper’s whole architecture hangs on it: karma will be read as a doctrine of token causation, dependent origination as a doctrine of structure, and conflating the two is the standard Western misreading.

II. Karma as Token Causation

Karmic claims are singular causal claims: this act produced that fruit. This section will state the doctrine at its strongest — causation individuated down to the moral quality of the event — and its hardest problem: the causal chains are unobservable in principle, which is either the doctrine’s depth or its immunity to refutation.

III. Pratītyasamutpāda as Structural Model

The chain of dependent origination will be read as a dependency graph: when this is, that is; from the arising of this, that arises. The section will press the parallel as far as it honestly goes — cessation as intervention, the absence of a first cause as a model with no exogenous prime mover — using the technical vocabulary of causal modeling only where the doctrine itself is technical.

IV. The Modern Machinery

Pearl’s structural causal models and Woodward’s interventionism are then stated on their own terms: what a structural equation asserts, what an intervention test establishes, what counterfactuals add. This section must be credible to a reader who knows the formalism, or the comparison is propaganda.

V. Where the Parallel Holds

The convergences are real and worth naming: conditionality without a creator variable, cyclic dependencies treated as ordinary, the refusal of causal relata with intrinsic natures. The essay will argue the Buddhist machinery anticipates positions the modern literature reached independently — and that the priority is part of the Institute’s larger recovery project.

VI. Where the Parallel Breaks

The break section is mandatory, not decorative. Karma’s moral valence has no analog in a structural equation; the rebirth frame exceeds any interventionist ontology; and the doctrine’s purpose is soteriological, not predictive — it exists to end suffering, not to forecast. A formalization that deletes the purpose has not translated the doctrine; it has discarded it.

VII. Method of the Essay

Textual work on the primary sources in established translation, formal work in the standard notation, and a running audit of each against the other. The essay refuses both directions of condescension: Buddhism as proto-science, and causal inference as Western noise.

Counter-case

The strongest opposing view is the Buddhist-modernism critique itself. The standard scholarly caution holds that reading ancient doctrines as anticipations of current science is a construction, not a discovery — that dependent origination is a soteriological teaching whose formalization flattens it, that causal inference requires interventions in a world the doctrine brackets, and that the parallel tells us about the modern reader’s hunger for scientific sanction, not about the Buddha’s analytics. This position has a century of sloppy dharma-meets-physics writing on its side, and the essay must survive it or join the pile.

Sources to verify

• Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, in Jay Garfield’s translation — UNVERIFIED, confirm before citing in the finished essay
• The Pali canon formula of dependent arising and the twelve-link chain — UNVERIFIED, confirm before citing in the finished essay
• Judea Pearl, Causality — UNVERIFIED, confirm before citing in the finished essay
• James Woodward, Making Things Happen — UNVERIFIED, confirm before citing in the finished essay
• Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy — UNVERIFIED, confirm before citing in the finished essay
• Donald Lopez on Buddhist modernism and the science discourse — UNVERIFIED, confirm before citing in the finished essay
• David Kalupahana on causality in early Buddhism — UNVERIFIED, confirm before citing in the finished essay

Stakes

The Institute’s comparative work insists that dharmic traditions be engaged at their own resolution before being translated into Western vocabularies — and then insists the translation be done honestly anyway. This paper is the method’s hardest test case, because the temptation to overclaim is maximal on both sides. It feeds the Institute’s maya thread directly: if causation itself is structure rather than substance, the doctrine of the world’s conditionality stops being mysticism and becomes a research program.