From Karma to Continuum:

Shinran suggests that action proceeds out of our experience (we do things because of what we feel, and feeling is not something in our control.) Our experience is determined by what we suffer, from the whole world, so that karma determines the experience that determines our actions. But karma is defined as the result of individual actions, insofar as we receive evil for evil we have done in past lives, or vice versa for good. This is impossible, however, because the basis in action is not of an individual will, but of feeling. Thus, there is simply no room left for the individual actor, and it becomes just another aspect of karma--some feeling we suffer from based on our past lives. Then our past lives also lose their causal aspect.

What we have left over after all of this reduction are flows of feeling over time. But what, then, is karma except this feeling, and how does it act as a causal principle connecting actions to experiences? Action, too, is rolled up into feeling; it can do no other, once we give up a notion of the world as a physical mediation between different selves who act and inflict upon each other certain experiences.

The physical world might also fold away insofar as it is a plane in which matter shows up, to cause feelings for subjects and to serve as bodies, instruments, and scenes in the acts of others. But not so fast. Natural events--events that are not motivated out of an experience at all, but happen by impersonal process-- have a karmic upshot too. This is not abrogated, surely, because it does not proceed out of an individual cause. In fact, it is extended. All action falls out of control and becomes physical; and yet, the individual soul as the bearer of karmic evil or good can no longer serve as the connector between these physical events and events in feeling. There must, instead, be a direct connection--one of karma, which inflicts upon itself as both cause and reception, according to the physicality. We are left with a continuum of matter/feeling, with feeling inseparable at any point from the physicality.