Poll Question on Rebirth

If this is my last life, that means I am attaining Nirvana, right?

I don’t know. Scholarly opinion appears to differ on that issue.

Wait what… 100% just means you would be twice as happy as the life you have now, not nibbana. There’s plenty of people alive today that are 100% happier than me. I’m not sure you understand how percentages work.

How do you know other people happier than you?
Do you know how happy I am?
What I am saying is if I am happy to the fullest (100%) it is equal to Nibbana.

Yeah but that’s not what being 10% happier means. 10% happier means that however happy you are now, you take 10% of that and add that to it. So if you are 100% happier, that means you take however you happy now, and add that to it again, so you’re twice as happy. 100% happier is not the same as being 100% happy. And as far as people being happier, that was just an example. I was just proving the point that 100% happier isn’t nibbana, 100% happy maybe, but not 100% happier, which is how the poll was phrased. It’s an important distinction, although to be honest, I’m not even sure what the purpose of the poll is in the first place.

Be cool. It is in the Water cooler.
Do not take it serious.
:grinning:

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I believe that this is my final rebirth, and that I will attain Nirvana at the moment of death. Having this assurance results in sincere gratitude.

At the end of life, we will be born in the Pure Land and attain Buddhahood, returning at once to this delusional world to guide people to awakening…

While always reflecting on ourselves, amidst our feelings of regret and joy, we shall live expressing our gratitude without depending on petitionary prayer and superstition.
Teachings | Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha (Nishihongwanji)

Shinran understood the Pure Land to be the realm of Nirvana. This is why he referred to rebirth into the Pure Land as “the birth that is non-birth,” just as the Buddha referred to Nirvana as “the unborn.”

Have you eliminated all your attachments, aversions and ignorance?

I think the implication is that Amitābha is going to do that? I have no “sly grin” emoticon… :frowning_face:

Amida Buddha is a symbolic expression for the Ultimate Truth of Nirvana.

The Supreme Buddha (Dharmakaya) is formless, and because of being formless is called Jinen (Suchness). The Buddha, when appearing with form, is not called the Supreme Nirvana.

In order to make us realize that the true Buddha is formless, it is expressly called Amida Buddha; so I have been taught.

Amida Buddha is the medium (relative truth) through which we are made to realize Jinen (Ultimate Truth). - Shinran Shonin

While Shakyamuni Buddha took great effort to attain Nirvana, Amida Buddha is Nirvana itself reaching out to us, just as we are.

Just out of curiosity, what exactly might this ‘10% betterness’ be made up of for you?

As I run the reflection in my head all I can come up with are some pretty trivial things: slightly nicer stuff, slightly nicer grades, slightly nicer career, and whatever. The most profound thing I could come up with in this line of thinking is slightly nicer relationships and maybe slightly nicer relationship breakdowns…? It’s all very… acquisition oriented; all very materialist (which I hasten to add, in the ‘rebirth Q’ context I don’t have anything against - by preference I’d actually be a materialist, but alas by my best senses I just don’t find the materialist proposition compelling enough to believe in) and, to my own tastes, tedious.

The key difficulty I struggle with in respect to your Q, however, is that it implies an extraordinarily individualistic mode of existing in the world. Now just to be clear, I’m not coming at this with any bodhisatva vow perspective kinda thing, nevertheless, if that proposed ‘10% better’ really had any substance to it, in my view it would necessarily mean the world more broadly would also have to be better-ified. Why? One extremely significant sucky aspect of this life is having to watch how horrifically abusive we people can routinely be to each other (in everyday mundane exchanges through to the big oppression and obliteration stuff), and it is a great misery to be a participant in such a warped social circumstance and witness all the pointless suffering that gets slung around.

Setting aside all the other impossibilities of this hypothetical (and of course, the Buddha’s teaching, as has already been pointed out is necessarily set aside for this thought experiment), as far as I can see it would be impossible to improve my life by 10% in isolation, and in turn I’m pretty intrigued by what the original conception of ‘10% better’ actually looks like.

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It’s up to you. Whatever you personally think would make that other life just a bit better than the one you have now. Maybe it’s life just like the one you have now, but with several more jhana experiences along the way. Or maybe you just get sick less.

Gosh. I’m not quite sure if it was intentional, but that feels like quite a powerful reflection on dukkha. :wink:

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Well said, @Aminah! After all, even a “better” life is still suffering, pain, grief and despair, since it requires being born. So, maybe it would mean that you’re life span would be 10% shorter, thereby experiencing 10% less suffering, which, in a weird way, would be equivocal to a 10% better life. Or perhaps this thought experiment should be filed under the “imponderable” category.

:anjal:

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That’s part of the point of the question. How many people consider their present lives to be so bad that they would prefer not to have any future lives at all over having another life that is a little bit better than their present one.

You’re smiling very cheerfully in our picture. Is your life really that horrible?

Ah - and then are you going to conclude that this means people are inclined to believe in rebirth due to wishful thinking? :grinning:

But one slight problem with that hypothesis would be that Buddhist rebirth can go up or down. There is no guarantee that things keep getting better and better. Naturally, because of greed, we wish that things worked that way. And remember - central to the entire path is to stop the process of being reborn, because in its ultimate sense it is dukkha.

My belief is that most of the people seriously dedicated to the path are doing so because they think it will make their present life better. And I think most people who are seriously dedicated to pursuing the path all the way to nibbana are doing so because they think the attainment of nibbana will be a positively awesome experience, not because they are merely trying to shut down the engine of rebirth. They might not have very definite ideas about what exactly nibbana consists in, but they believe it will be a profoundly transformed state of unsurpassed happiness, bliss, profound wisdom, profound understanding, perfect liberation, perfectly undefiled mental purity, or something similar. They think it will be a state utterly free from every kind of suffering and utterly suffused with something wonderful, a kind of pleasure or happiness that surpasses any kind of sensory happiness, and is untainted with suffering. And that’s why they want to attain it. Who wouldn’t want to attain something that wonderful?

They have good reason for believing this, since there are numerous exclamatory passages in the suttas, both spoken by the Buddha and other arahants, attesting the supreme and perfect happiness of nibbana, the happy state that obtains once the poisons, the defilements and the asavas have been destroyed or extinguished, and all suffering has come to an end. This is a relatively hopeful doctrine, teaching that while worldly samsaric existence is pervaded with pain, the holy life leads in the end to an unsurpassed happiness.

There are others, not very widespread probably in the general Buddhist population, but represented among the orthodox leadership of Theravada Buddhism, who teach a more sour and relatively hopeless doctrine. They believe that nibbana consists entirely in the cessation of the sankharas, the kammic factors that contruct further life and lead to rebirth. They believe human existence is so unrelievedly awful, that not even the successive stages of release - and not even nibbana itself, are capable of making it wonderful. They believe everyone would be perfectly justified in killing themselves immediately and ending it all, if one could do so without merely precipitating oneself into another awful life. But since they think that is not possible, they think one needs to go through a long, challenging spiritual practice so that they can finally pull the plug on a horrible sequence of existences. They might imagine that when they finally succeed in shutting down the kammic factory, they will be a bit happier and more peaceful - but only because they think they will be relieved not to be reborn again, and will not be constructing the worst kinds of suffering . As I said, I don’t know how common this outlook is, but I don’t think it is very common even in the monastic sangha, since it strikes me that most diligent, practicing monks are looking forward to something great that they think happens when nibbana is attained, and are not just looking forward to not being reborn again. And when they see some esteemed sangha member who thy think has reached the goal the emphasis seems to be on the perfect peace and happiness of this realized being, not just, “Well there’s a guy who isn’t getting reborn again.”

I also think that the vast majority of ordinary Buddhists who do believe in rebirth are motivated to follow the path to the extent they do because they think it will help them move on to a “better place” - a life that is either somewhat, or greatly superior to their present life. It’s also quite clear that many ordinary Buddhists, to the extent that they do think of nibbana at all, imagine it also to be a kind of heaven into which the arahant “enters” at death.

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Who are these ‘leaders’? This doesn’t align with the teachings I’ve heard, so I’m curious. The teachers I listen to have joy and laughter and teach the beauty of the path.

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Now I realised that 10% improvement is not enough for some.
10% of one dollar is not much to striving for.
Maximum you have after seven lives could be two dollars in you pocket.
:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: