Did you come to your view before reading Ajahn Buddhadasa or after? Simple question with only 2 possible answers.
Mmmm, and more tasty Deeele ad-homs. You deserve a Michelin star for your tasty ad homs! 
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Naughty. Engaging ad-homs by ad-homing another is ad-homing.
My view came via vipassana & via appropriate faith in the Dhamma, which includes not believing the Buddha “inferred”. If you have ever lived in a monastery, each morning homage to the Dhamma is chanted. Can you post what this homage is? Thanks
Ajahn Buddhadasa is completely irrelevant. Ajahn Buddhadasa, in my opinion, taught many wrong things in his teaching career. If I generally agree with what he taught about D.O., it is unrelated to him. I am not a disciple of Ajahn Buddhadasa (although I often heard him speak when he was alive).
You’re just too much fun! 
Another evasion. I’ll ask for the 3rd and final time, this time adding hearing because you’ve said you’ve heard him while he was alive.
Did you come to your view before reading or hearing Ajahn Buddhadasa or after?
Non-sequitur.
Buddhadasa is part of a guru era. For example, did Ajahn Sumedho under Ajahn Chah ever read the suttas? Probably not.
Nanavira studied the suttas and came to similar views.
The simplicity of the suttas is testament to the perfection of the Buddha’s teaching.
No.
The Buddha declared his teaching was open, clear, free of patchwork.
It is not a laughing matter to follow the view of Tiltbillings & other poets rather than discern the Buddha’s words.
The teachings are overt. It is not required of a Buddhadasa to explain these things once the suttas are read.
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OK then, I’ll assume you came to your view afterwards. You’d be proud instead of evasive if you’d come to it all on your own.
Oh yes you are, yes you are! 
I sincerely advised your mode of inquiry in non-sequitur. it is illogical. It has no realisticness.
I listened to Buddhadasa for while but once I started reading suttas (for example, I paid pre-print for the 1st edition of the MN) Buddhadasa fell away.
Since I heard Buddhadasa before I ever read a sutta, it is not possible to come to the unknowable correlation & conclusion you are seeking to make.
All I can say is as soon as I read suttas such as SN 23.2, SN 5.10 and MN 98, the meaning of ‘jati’ in SN 12.2 became literally clear.
If I read this as a school boy, the literal scholarly meaning would be exactly the same.
The word ‘jati’ today in India means exactly what it has always meant.
Therefore, your inferences are that which are not funny at all.
Jāti (in Tamil:ஜாதி, Devanagari: जाति, Bengali: জাতি, Telugu:జాతి, Kannada:ಜಾತಿ, Malayalam: ജാതി, literally “birth”) is a group of clans, tribes, communities and sub-communities, and religions in India. Each jāti typically has an association with a traditional job function or tribe. Religious beliefs (e.g. Sri Vaishnavism or Veera Shaivism) or linguistic groupings may define some jatis.[citation needed] Among the Muslims, the equivalent category is Qom or Biradri.
A person’s surname typically reflects a community (jati) association: thus Gandhi = perfume seller, Dhobi = washerman, Srivastava = military scribe, etc. In any given location in India 500 or more jatis may co-exist, although the exact composition will differ from district to district.
Well I had a good time. Sorry it wasn’t good for you too, baby. 
The Buddha said:
Dhp 318. Those who imagine good where there is none, and do not see good where it is — upholding false views, they go to states of woe.
Best wishes with that inferred dukkha & future lives that are not your own. 
“All beings are the owners of their actions, heir to their actions… Whatever they do, for good or for evil, to that will they fall heir.”
Hi Venerable Brahmali,
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply, it is deeply appreciated as even though some may take it the wrong way, the question I put forward is pure and all I want to do is understand.
What you have written (in the way you put it) makes sense to me and fits very well into the way I currently understand and see Buddhism. To be honest, I need to ponder your words for a while as they have made me rethink my understanding of non-self (it’ll go on my Buddhist note board).
I don’t actually have much more to put forward (for now :)) except that I guess the issue that created this question in the first place ‘was’ the way nearly every Buddhist teacher I have read, listened to, or watched makes past lives such a very, very, very ‘personal’ thing and certainly don’t describe the part of me that appears to be the self as a continuity of habits combined with annata as no ever-present essential core.
With Metta.
P.S. I am adding this 5 minutes after I posted the above, so I hope you see it. Do we know in Buddhism know how memories work, how is it that one can remember let us say; ‘past habits’ (not past lives)?
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I must apologise or the arrogant statement ‘the Buddha said quite clearly’. I should have said something like ‘it is recorded that the Buddha said quite clearly’. In that way I would be speaking according to truth, not simply my opinion and cherished dogma.
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I hope this is one, though not one paragraph 
:
Doubting the existence of self – ahaṃ (‘Am I/Do I exist?’ - ‘ahaṃ nu khosmi?’ and ‘Am I not/Do I not exist’ - ‘No nu khosmi?’) is said to be unwise reflection and leads to various wrong views about soul – attā (‘Atthi me attā’ti’, or ‘Natthi me attā’ti’) - SuttaCentral. I think because it is based on ‘asmi-māna’, ‘the conceit “I am”’, not ‘I making’, ‘ahaṃ-kāra’. Note that the questions use aham not attā. I think the Buddha’s teaching is subtle, therefore we should be careful about the use of these terms.
So in this sutta, it seems, we should not think 'there is or is not self’ as well as 'there is or there is not soul’.
The Buddha could have easily and precisely taught ‘no self’ with the phrase ‘anahaṃ’ which I have not found in the Pāli texts, even commentaries and sub-commentaries. As we see above ‘n’atthi ahaṃ’ would not be used by the Buddha or promoted by him, being unwise reflection.
The first time I know of that we come across the idea ‘there is no doer’ which matches well the Hindu idea there is no (true) self, as separation from other is only an illusion, is in the commentaries where Bh. Buddhaghosa says: ‘There is no doer of a deed Or one who reaps the deed’s result; Phenomena alone flow on— No other view than this is right.’ http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nanamoli/PathofPurification2011.pdf page 627
Hi Gabiel
Thanks for pointing that out. I believe the first part with attā (soul) is a later addition, as I have read elsewhere that the Buddha said he took Dhamma as a refuge alone, there is no equivalent statement with that, that he took attā as a refuge.
I believe the attā section was added by monks under Brahmin philosophy, like the commentator Bh. Buddhaghosa and later the Buddhist tradition developed the alternate meaning of attā as self, maybe due to this very quote, to try to show how they were not following Brahmin philosophy. That’s probably much easier to do and more easily accepted than criticising the transmission of the text.
best wishes
I think we can go back a little further than that — specifically to the Purisakārānuyoga section of the Third Council’s Puggala debate (Kvu. 45-55).
Link
(scroll down to “Ethical Goodness: Examination continued by Reference to Human Action”)
Puggalavādin: Are ethically good and bad actions known to exist?
Theravādin: Yes.
Puggalavādin: Are both the doer of ethically good and bad deeds, and he who causes them to be done known to exist?
Theravādin: No, that cannot truly be said …
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Thanks Bhante for your explanation. Since I believe in a life-long changing ‘me’ (that is, ego - the Five Clinging Aggregates until full enlightenment, then simply the Five Aggregates - self), that is sufficient connection for personal memories in this very life and I don’t need to believe that claimed past life memories are actually that.
By looking at what the Buddha supposedly said about his relationship to the Dhamma.
Oh, how wonderful!
That’s the second time!
That is very well possible. But it would not have been an simple insertion - we have the attadīpavagga in the Snp, and there the attadīpasutta, both named after the atta-dipa, we have it in the SN and the DN, not just in one isolated sutta.
It seems the influences on transmission were complex and/or early. Personally I see neither an atta- nor an anatta-doctrine, more a consequential neti-neti which is very aware of the consequences of an atta-ditthi (eternalism) or an anatta-ditthi (nihilism).
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[quote=“Brother_Joe, post:86, topic:5041”][quote=Shaun]
The problem is that past lives can be remembered, pointing towards “personal” memory/memories that are passed on. Or there are institutions such as the Dalai Lama of which we are now at the “14th" Dalai Lama, again a very “personal” or “self” memory that seems to be passed on. It appears as though “B" does not extinguish “A”, hence there is a form of “self" that goes forth.
[/quote]
I heard that one of the tests to identify the new Dalai Lama is placing various objects (some belonging to the last Dalai Lama) in front of the candidate and seeing if they choose the right ones.
Since I believe ‘mind reading’ is possible, there is the possibility, especially with younger people who are so easily influenced, that because there are people present at the test who know which are the belongings of the previous DL, they could influence the choice of the candidate. Thus the test would be unintentionally rigged.
[/quote]Some possible context for the Dalai Lama’s rebirths: the Gelug sects that the Dalai Lama belongs to advocates for the ālayavijñāna, which is a form of relinking consciousness which persists after death, sometimes called the “subtle mind” I think, so the Dalai Lama’s rebirths are quite literally “reincarnations”, of a sort, according to their tradition of what they believe the Buddha taught.
Or, paradoxically, in addition to this there is the possibility of the Mahāyāna doctrine of the tathāgatagarbha, a difficult and sometimes-called convoluted concept of a sort of postulated “unchanging quality” that is sometimes outtrightly called a “true self” (see: Mahāyānamahāparinirvāṇasūtra) and sometimes not (see: Tathāgatagarbhasūtra) which refers an innate and universal potentiality for Buddhahood in some Mahāyāna schools) being in play here
Where it gets difficult is that as far as I know there is not believed to be any “Dalai Lama” soul really, what appears as the Dalai Lama is believed to be the manifestation of an emanation of Avalokiteśvara, a bodhisattva mahāsattva on a avaivartika [non-retrograding] bodhisattva bhūmi , so there is no “Dalai Lama” soul really to choose to be reincarnated, there is only the undying Avalokiteśvara, and a particular series of seperate but connected created manifestations, all of which are the Dalai Lama, but not all of which are the same “person”. The Dalai Lama himself, I believe, has said that he does not remember his past lives, and that he did not think that he might have attained stream-entry until he was 35, and this from someone who is supposed to be allegedly ineffably enlightened since birth, so clearly the institution of reincarnating Lamas works differently than we think, in Tibet, because his words did not cause a great deal of scandal. I believe that there is a discourse in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra, XXV, that states that Avalokiteśvara’s emanations do not always appear or understand themselves to be bodhisattva.
Anyways, I hope this offers some potential contextualization of this other tradition of Buddhism that is not well represented on this forum, for obvious reasons. And this is only what I am able to put together from reading and talking with Tibetan Buddhist, it may well be wrong. I am sure a certain very prominent poster on DharmaWheel would object to much of the terminology and descriptions I used.
Furthermore, as @Shaun rightly pointed out, the Dalai Lama is as much of an institution as he is an individual, now that the old Tibetan structures of institutionalized and monarchial Buddhism transforming and modernizing, the Dalai Lama has even speculated that he may not be reborn at all, as the Dalai Lama.
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Yes. For me the Snp, being in the fifth nikaya is probably commentarial/later. Possibly the attadipavagga and attadipa sentence arose in a single editing event, that I think was very early and would therefore be found in various language sources of the First Four Nikayas.
Sorry, I don’t quite understand your point.
Sorry for not being clear. The understanding I have these days (others had it before me of course) is that the Buddha neither confirmed nor negated the existence of atta. Rather that it is not beneficial to have any view about it - because both confirming and negating view of atta leads to unbeneficial consequences and is thus a wrong view.
DN 15 after denying the atta-view goes on:
Anyone who says: “Feeling is not my self, my self is impercipient” should be asked: “If, friend, no feelings at all were to be experienced, would there be the thought: ‘I am’?
No, Lord.
Therefore it is not fitting to maintain: “Feeling is not my self, my self is impercipient.”