Situating Children in the Medieval Chinese Karmic LandscapeA Lecture by Kelly M. Carlton, Columbia University

24 April 2026

Donnerstag, 30.04.2026, 18 Uhr. Asien-Afrika-Institut, Raum 123, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 – Flügel Ost.

In Buddhism, karma is generally understood as a disinterested force that applies uniformly to all sentient beings. While karmic fruitions vary depending on the intention and conditions under which an action is performed, karma does not operate differently on the basis of any particular path of rebirth or stage of life. This understanding of karma, however, creates tension within a medieval Chinese sociocultural framework in which children were believed to lack full moral capacities until a certain age. How did medieval Chinese Buddhists reconcile karmic causality with age-dependent moral awareness, and how might shifting attention to the child illuminate points of negotiation and innovation in medieval Chinese Buddhist thought?

This talk examines these questions through the lens of medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales from the fourth to tenth centuries. Reflecting wider assumptions about young children’s physiomental development, surviving collections of miracle tales evince an age-dependent notion of moral capacity: children younger than roughly seven or eight years of age, who have yet to acquire moral discernment, do not bear the consequences of their negative karma. This agedependent model, however, was only one thread in an expanding web of ideas concerning personal and collective karma in medieval China, held in tension with notions of children’s filial indebtedness and their susceptibility to inherited karmic burdens. By centering the overlooked figure of the child in Buddhist discourses, this talk shows how karmic principles are culturally defined rather than universal, and in the case of medieval China, followed sociocultural assumptions about physio-mental development and familial obligation.

Thomas Fröhlich, Julia Schneider, Kai Vogelsang

Hamburger Sinologische Gesellschaft e.V.
Abteilung für Sprache und Kultur Chinas
Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg