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Updated: May 24, 2025
As an escape from the inexorable fatality of this scheme of thought, the Buddhist faith of the common people has resorted to magic. Magic prayers, consisting of a few mystic syllables of whose meaning the worshiper may be quite ignorant, are the means for overcoming the inexorableness of "ingwa," both for this life and the next.
Servants disputing, ask each other, "By reason of what ingwa must I now dwell with such a one as you?" The incapable or vicious man is reproached with his ingwa; and the misfortunes of the wise or the virtuous are explained by the same Buddhist word. The law-breaker confesses his crime, saying: "That which I did I knew to be wicked when doing; but my ingwa was stronger than my heart."
This idea of Ingwa is the key to most Japanese novels as well as dramas of real life. While Buddhism continually preaches this doctrine of Karma or Ingwa, the law of cause and effect, as being sufficient to explain all things, it shows its insufficiency and emptiness by leaving out the great First Cause of all. In a word, Buddhism is law, but not gospel.
"Ingwa" is the crude idea of fate held by all primitive peoples, stated in somewhat philosophic and scientific form. It became a central element in the thought of Oriental peoples. Each man is born into his caste and class by a law over which neither he nor his parents have any control, and for which they are without responsibility.
Transmigration is universal, the period of life in each world being determined by the merits and demerits of the individual soul. Here we must consider two widely used terms "ingwa" and "mei." The first of these is Buddhistic and the other Confucianistic; though differing much in origin and meaning, yet in the end they amount to much the same thing. "Ingwa" is the law of cause and effect.
Buddhism has so dominated common popular literature, daily life and speech, that all their mental procedure and their utterance is cast in the moulds of Buddhist doctrine. The fatalism of the Moslem world expressed in the idea of Kismet, has its analogue in the Japanese Ingwa, or "cause and effect," the notion of an evolution which is atheistic, but viewed from the ethical side.
His cartoon has been constantly before the busy weavers of legend. It may indeed be said, and said truly, that in its multiplication of sects and in its growth of legend and superstition, Buddhism has but followed every known religion, including traditional Christianity itself. The Seven Gods of Good Fortune. It is to-day suffering from the effect of its own sins. Its ingwa is manifest.
The Buddhist doctrine of karma, or in Japanese, ingwa, of cause and effect, whereby it is taught that each effect in this life springs from a cause in some previous incarnation, and that each act in this life bears its fruit in the next, has grown directly out of the Hindu idea of the transmigration of souls.
It qualifies equally the expression of hate or the speech of affection; and the term ingwa, or innen, meaning karma as inevitable retribution, comes naturally to every lip as an interpretation, as a consolation, or as a reproach. The peasant toiling up some steep road, and feeling the weight of his handcart straining every muscle, murmurs patiently: "Since this is ingwa, it must be suffered."
In their highest thinking, the sincere Christian and Buddhist approach each other in their search after truth. The key-word of Buddhism is Ingwa, which means law or fate, the chain of cause and effect in which man is found, atheistic "evolution applied to ethics," the grinding machinery of a universe in which is no Creator-Father, no love, pity or heart.
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