SuttaCentral
As I said above, the five aggregates.
I’m sorry if this answer isn’t satisfactory for you, but I’m afraid I have spoken on this issue at great length on very many occasions, and I don’t have time right now to do it any more justice. Hopefully some of our lovely Discoursers can help!
Indeed, thank you for your answer Bhante. And the EBTs show that the Buddha taught that rebirth belief kept us from acting in unethical ways. That is, if we didn’t believe in rebirth we would commit unethical acts. The argument is the same made by theists who claim that without a belief in God we would all go around killing one another.
Nevertheless it seems many nonbelievers are ethical, upright citizens, and indeed more than a few believers are not. So what are we to make of that circumstance? If we are able to live ethical lives without these beliefs (as for example Steven Batchelor is), are they really necessary? The Buddha never really answers that question in the EBTs. Rebirth is only mundane right view, after all.
Thanks, yes. Secular Buddhists take the EBTs as word of the Buddha as well. The question is whether these Mahāyāna practitioners are Buddhist by your definition. It would seem not.
With metta. 
Try thinking of EBT rebirth with this analogy:
You’ve got homo erectus, and then homo sapiens. Imagine a stack of photos of each new parent in this evolutionary chronology.
The starting point is defined for the sake of the illustration; the photos go back much farther of course.
Each photo isn’t necessarily H. erectus or H. sapiens at all. The photos record a transition from a set of features here to a set of features there; what anthropology has done is taken a few preserved photos out of the stack, and we’re seeing bits of the process & giving names to the photos we have.
So, I can now try to wrap these concepts up in a phrase. Just to give it a try, I’ll call this stack of photos a ‘species-happening’. This isn’t an out-there thing but a mental thing, a concept to describe the out-there thing: a communal development over time of a set of living beings, the undulating time-worm of a species within changing environments.
The mechanism that underlies the transition from one photo to another here is DNA, itself a concept referring to the complex & ongoing development of the basic species blueprint (another stack of photos here, etc.).
The Buddhist claim is that rebirth is an “individual-happening”, an undulating single-being time-worm with the gandhabba as the mechanism of action for transitions between photos (lifespans). Nibbana is the cessation of the undulation, which otherwise doesn’t cease while also not being a lasting thing (self).
Of course, demonstrating this is a rather tall order…
(and of course, maybe the analogy is altogether off-base - but, it’s how I grok its presentation)
Hi to you too! 
The role of research isn’t to be Dhammic in nature, it would be an imperfect approximation at best. My point is just that it is possible to study some of the claims of the Buddha using the same techniques and standards we do for other sciences.
For me it’s that I expect the end of suffering to entail a lack mental pain like depression, anxiety, fear etc.
Well by practicing the Buddha’s teachings we can test the method (N8P) in our own experience, a much higher standard of evidence than contemporary science
Edit: As in, an end of suffering can be directly experienced, so we don’t need a peer-reviewed, double blind study to tell us if we are suffering or not.
Some understand patticcasamuppada to be an intricate psycho-physical process whose operation can be fully understood by clearly observing it taking place within relatively limited periods of time. For example, some believe all twelve of the standard links can be understood to be occurring concurrently and atemporally, within a single moment of time. More commonly, some believe the entire twelve nidana sequence is a genuinely temporal process, but one that can occur in its entirety with a very, very short period of time – maybe a few seconds, or even less. There are passages from Ajahn Chah that indicate he understood patticcasamuppada in this way, and this is a very common approach among many Buddhist meditation teachers.
On the other hand, there is an orthodox commentarial interpretation of patticcasamuppada that sees it as a process that is far more spread out in time, and necessarily requires three consecutive lives of a single individual for even a single twelve nidana sequence to occur. On this reading, jati literally and exclusively refers to the birth of an entire individual, the birth that occurs at the beginning of that individual’s life, and cannot be understood analogically as the arising of various kinds of transitory phenomena or phases in the life of that single individual. Instead, in the context of patticcasamuppada, it must be the rebirth of that one, identical individual at the start of a new life. Similarly, jara-marana cannot be understood analogically as the relatively rapid decay and destruction of those transitory arisen phenomena, but must always be understood as old age and death in the more conventional, literal sense.
Clearly, if the stream enterer has understood and come to know the reality of patticcasamuppada under the orthodox interpretation, then they must understand and know the reality of rebirth. But logically speaking, that’s only to say that if they know rebirth, then they know rebirth. If the very concept of patticasammupada basically includes rebirth analytically, or as a matter of definition, then certainly one cannot know patticcasamuppada occurs without knowing rebirth occurs. But then the question becomes how it is that the practitioner, mindfully attending to and contemplating the processes of her ongoing life, ever comes to know that such extended three-life processes occur.
On the other hand, if patticcasamuppada is understood in one of the previous senses, as a process whose twelve components occur completely in a very short period of time, then it seems very unlikely that simply understanding in detail those minute processes making up one’s ongoing mental life could lead to the knowledge of the origination of another entirely new individual organized life form that is the “reborn” successor of that individual.
I can’t see how Bhante Sujato’s television analogy helps very much at all here, even in a limited way. No matter how much knowledge a person has of the components and functioning of a television, there is no way of concluding from that knowledge that after the aging corrosion and destruction of a television, some new television - or new toaster, or new cell phone or new anything else - will come into existence and be the specially designated successor and continuation of the original television.
I think that’s probably true, but it seems unclear, since the teachings don’t seem to draw sharp distinctions between the mental and physical , or at least not in the same manner we tend to draw these distinctions now.
You mentioned Nagel and Chalmers. One possibility Chalmers considers is the “new physics” account. Suppose one becomes convinced from reflection on the “hard problem” of consciousness that there exists a category of conscious mental phenomena that cannot be reduced to, or understood in terms of, any of the fundamental phenomena, entities and processes that are studied in contemporary physics. Would that show that these mental phenomena were non-physical? Or is it perhaps possible that these are actually physical phenomena that contemporary physics has so-far not discovered, or figured out how to study and integrate with the rest of physics? And what would be the difference exactly? If it turns out these phenomena interact with physical phenomena in a systematic and law-like way, wouldn’t that be a sufficient condition for classifying them as physical?
You would only have to know, or be able to infer, that the process isn’t stopped by the death of the body 
I think if they interacted with physical phenomena in a law-like way they would be classified as physical phenomena. They would also be detectable by violations of conservation of energy in physical systems, which AFAIK has never been observed. (IIRC this was largely the point behind Gilbert Ryle’s “Ghost in the Machine” paper, though contrasted with Cartesian notions of substance dualism).
There is a lot to think about in your post Kay! But I do want to say that this is a part I can’t quite agree with. The extinguishment of nibbana is the extinguishment of the fires of greed, hatred and bewilderment. It might also be thought to involve the extinguishment of the illusion of an ongoing substantial self that is manufactured by the I-making and my-making process, and the illusion of a personal territory defined by a self-other distinction.
But then that leaves open the question of what is present when these other phenomena have come to an end. And I don’t think we can say that the state of the arahant upon the attainment of nibbana is the same of the state the materialist thinks obtains after death. Because the materialist thinks there is nothing at all left of the mental life of the person who has died. But we are told that after the Buddha attained nibbana he sat for a long time enjoying the bliss of release. So the extinguishment characterizing the Buddha’s final release does not entail his entire mental life had been extinguished all the way to a mere blank.
But I also think we can say that since there is no concept of self, or sense of self, or illusion of self present in that state, then the Buddha’s enjoyment of bliss was not accompanied by any thought or awareness of the form “I am enjoying the bliss of release." What was present was bliss, not a constructed self thinking about its bliss.
I have been reading the book The Island, by Ajahns Passano and Amaro, which is a useful and very comprehensive compendium of almost all of the Sutta passages where the goal is characterized and discussed. This has helped me understand the errors I fell into earlier by focusing to much on the negative characterizations of the goal - what comes to an end and is extinguished when the goal is attained - while ignoring the many positive, but more difficult to understand characterizations of the goal.
How could one know that just from observing the processes? And more to the point how could one know that the continuation of those elementary processes in some way results in another whole living being?
I think the point is generally that pari-nibbana is equivalent to the materialist post-death account; the possibility of a nibbana re: greed/hate/delusion/dukkha/‘the suck’ (and those states leading up to & supporting that) as a lived experience is the motive for the secular practitioner, in general.
That is the after effects .
Yes I have heard Daniel Dennett, who was a Ryle student, make the same argument.
Possible escape hatches: It could be that the amounts of mass-energy involved in these phenomena and interactions are so small that they are at present hard or impossible to detect. It could also be that in the future the conservation of mass-energy will be disconfirmed, and replaced by some more compressive conservation law, just as the older conservation of mass law was disconfirmed and replaced by the conservation of mass-energy law.
This is all just speculation. I’m just saying I’m hesitant about any claims that Buddhist doctrine definitely requires such and such a non-physical ontology, because physics is an ongoing and developing science and the definition of “physical” ontology is subject to change.
Yes, I’m sure Dennett says the same. You make good points, but physicist Sean Carroll is pretty strongly on record that physics has nailed down fundamental forces for all broadly observable phenomena to a very very high degree of accuracy. That is, he argues that if there were any even quite insignificant non-physical effects on the observable world (e.g., enough to manipulate grey matter) we would be able to detect them with current technology.
Not a totally knock-down argument, there could be some future revolution in physics of which we are currently unaware. But it’s pretty strong.
Yep seems strong.
This is just speculation on my part, but consider if you thought the mind didn’t need the body to survive, and you also saw the most deep rooted tendency of the mind was the desire to exist and to experience things.
Imagine if that desire to exist and experience was the very fuel that drove the mind-process in the first place.
Then you could conclude that, with the death of the body, since the process has fuel, it will just go somewhere else and try to be and experience, it will carve out an existence in whatever raw material it has access to. If it has access to matter, it will try to be matter (like taking a blob of moist organs covered in skin and saying “this is me”). If it has access only to perception, it will try to be perception, and so on.
This is just speculation obviously, but at least giving up materialism leads to some interesting scenarios 
Beautiful! Knowing what you don’t know is a sign of a lack of confusion. A lack of confusion is a sign of clarity. Clarity is a prerequisite for liberating insight. Through your condition of not-knowing you may have discovered something significant but failed to recognise it? Nibbana is unknown and unknowable - it is completely ‘inconceivable’ (achintya). While many of us are trying to fill the ‘vacuum’ when we discover a state of unknowing - awakened beings just enjoy the open space. The more empty that space is the closer we are to extinction - the blowing-out of the flame. A flame goes out when there is no fuel. The mind becomes empty when there is no movement - when it is free from content. When the mind has no contents that can be observed there is peace. In that peace - with awareness - something new has an opportunity to arise. That new some-thing is a unique joy. In the presence of that unique joy the subject of experience finds perfect rest - a homecoming. In that homecoming the subject completely lets-go - in that complete relaxation of grasping the subject vanishes. In that vanishing there is a shift from the unique joy - the beautiful - into formlessness, boundlessness, new and unprecedented freedom. When formless and boundless freedom ceases everything stops. When everything stops there is no more coming or going or standing still. There is no more here or there nor in-between. There is no more becoming - with no becoming there is no more being. When there is no more being there is no possibility of rebecoming. The best is yet to come!
The dependent origination’ that leads out of being and becoming is that which needs to be realised through direct knowledge and vision. The rest is for the birds!
Tweet tweet 
This thread is IMO a fairly healthy conversation that probably needed to be had (the other recent thread had seemed to me to have gotten a bit too “meta” and away from discussing the core points before it was closed).
I’m not on any particular side, given that I consider myself an agnostic (albeit one with a serious spiritual practice). At this point I don’t feel I can call myself a Buddhist (though I’ve no issues with how people use this label) because I’m agnostic (but open-minded) about some key doctrinal points like rebirth. I might stretch to using “Buddhist” as an adjective, i.e. as in “Buddhist agnostic”, but I’d not be comfortable using it as a noun, i.e. as in “agnostic Buddhist”. I’ve been deeply impressed by the EBTs. The Buddha was surely one of humanity’s great thinkers/philosophers, but that has not been enough in itself convince me that he was necessarily right about everything.
I can definitely respect the argument made by Ajahn Brahmali in the OP. There’s a lot to be said for clearly and respectfully setting out one’s stall and calling a spade a spade (even if some others may think it’s a lawnmower! 
). The Buddha did give prominence of place to rebirth (no doubt for good reasons). It can’t be a surprise if a prominent and long-standing monk working with the EBTs is passionately arguing for an approach taking the EBTs pretty much at face value!
However, I also identify a lot with, let’s say, the more philosophical wings of this argument (represented by people like DKervick). It’s quite possible I may continue not have any solid belief in rebirth and some other doctrinal issues until/if I get to the stage of the path where I can see them directly myself. I’d hope that solid faith in rebirth is not a prerequisite. DKervick does make the valid point that the Buddha didn’t see the reality of rebirth until his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. Of course, Ajahn Brahmali makes the counter-point that the Buddha was an exceptional individual who may not have needed faith (that is as it may be, but I can’t manufacture faith to order! ).
Either way, regardless of the reality of rebirth, I hope following the steps of the path leads me to increasing freedom from suffering (the same direction both the author of the OP and DKervick are heading, it seems to me, despite the somewhat different enveloping contextual frameworks of both). Of course, arguments can certainly be had over which doctrinal/belief framework is better/more useful, which I’m sure this thread will argue over!
I think that for rebirth, in the sense as described by the Buddha, to exist, some kind of non-physical non-material component to the universe is necessary. I have a science background myself. I don’t see any plausible mechanisms within the framework of our current scientific understanding for this (even via the usual appeals to some kind of vague fuzzy quantum theory “magic”). Certainly not the fine-grained availability of past-life memories. IMO something more is needed, some kind of psychical dimension to the universe.
The fruits of para-psychological field over many decades are far from impressive or convincing, e.g. continual arguments up to the present day over Ganzfeld experiments and like (sensory leakage, methodology, reproducibility etc. etc.). You’d think the field would have been able to come up with something better by now. That’s, unsurprisingly, enough to convince many that such phenomenon probably don’t exist. I remain more open-minded than that. I’ve had some “spooky” personal experiences over the years and heard allegorical accounts from family members and friends to give me pause for thought. A certain amount of that is to be expected either way, but IMO it’s at a level that makes me wonder (I acknowledge this is going to convince no one! ).
There are, though, more general public accounts of this nature, e.g. the accounts of iddhis that are supposed to have been developed and exhibited by Dipa Ma (something she herself didn’t deny, e.g. in the interview transcript here). Again, allegorical, but there seem to have been quite a lot of witness to these powers (in living memory also with many still alive). It’s understandable if some people opt to be convinced by such accounts. I’m not fully convinced, but such things put me in a place where I don’t rule such things out.
I think there’s plenty room for various approaches and beliefs. That’s going to be inevitable if Buddhism takes solid root in the West. Anyway, I liked the robust and passionate argument made in the OP (even if at this point I have yet to gain faith in rebirth and some related doctrines).
If I may be so bold, I’d say that you can call yourself a Buddhist and remain agnostic about rebirth.
The Buddha of the EBTs wasn’t a Catholic priest, there is no Nicene Creed of Dhamma or statement of faith, rather we take refuge in the liberative power of the three jewels, not particular ontological views.
Respectable teachers such as Thanissaro and Analayo have pointed out again and again that it is not necessary to have the belief in rebirth to engage with the practice, as long as one does not have some strong dogmatic view of annihilationism or eternalism. For example:
“I definitely do not think that it is necessary to believe in rebirth in order to engage fully in the practice up until the attainment of stream entry. That is really not necessary and if you look at Kalama sutta it gives you that sense of engaging in practice and letting certain aspects of the teaching be without immediately taking them on board…
Simply let be as it is and take that part that is meaningful” - Analayo
from lecture 02 at http://agamaresearch.ddbc.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/lectures2013.htm
And this is coming from a well respected scholar with a deep understanding of the EBTs.
Like I said before, the importance of the rebirth view is how it affects one’s intentions, for example one’s sense of samvega or ethical sense. In this sense then, it really doesn’t matter how one sees rebirth as long as it has the proper effect on our intention. I know this is a bit controversial but imagine that someone starting out on the path has a view of rebirth that is more metaphorical, psychological or phenomenological (for example, in the modernist sense that Ajahn Buddhadasa uses it). As long as this helps establish in them a strong sense of samvega and ethical attentiveness, I really cannot see how this is much different in its effect than believing in ‘literal’ rebirth.
I think ultimately it depends on the individual person how they relate to the teaching of rebirth (like all Buddhist teachings). Some teachings and practices resonate with some personalities stronger than with others. For some folks the teaching of rebirth as an ontological reality is absolutely central with how they relate to the Dhamma. But for others, this is not so. The same could be said for example with meditation practices, some resonate more with anapanasati, but others prefer other avenues. This is totally fine and I think speaks to the flexibility of the Dhamma. I think it is a disservice to this flexibility and hence strength of the teachings to make them rigid and say that one must hold them in a certain way and in that way only.
So yea, call yourself a Buddhist. I have done so for years while holding varying views on rebirth. What matters though was that I took refuge in the triple gem.