I suppose it is a problem if one thinks that the other religions are completely wrong, rather than just incomplete.
As Bhikkhu Bodhi says in this essay:
To the extent that a religion proposes sound ethical principles and can promote to some degree the development of wholesome qualities such as love, generosity, detachment and compassion, it will merit in this respect the approbation of Buddhists. These principles advocated by outside religious systems will also conduce to rebirth in the realms of bliss — the heavens and the divine abodes. Buddhism by no means claims to have unique access to these realms, but holds that the paths that lead to them have been articulated, with varying degrees of clarity, in many of the great spiritual traditions of humanity. … Tolerance and Diversity
Of course, there will also be different opinions on how the Buddhist, and other, heavens and hells, should be interpreted…
For those claiming that one or another is True, yes it is.
That’s Perennialism; I find it flawed, primarily because it ignores how the actual holders of those religions & spiritualities view/ed themselves. It’s colonialism.
Sure, that’s another way of saying it. Another possibility is that the common thread here isn’t a spiritual thing, but a biological thing.
Iron Age peoples hearing these teachings took them as fully real; modern opinions may differ, but it’s not a legitimate view of how they were seen, taught & described in the original context. Consistency demands a matching conviction about these things when one commits to Buddhist rebirth.
I disagree. It’s quite the opposite, actually. I (and Bhikkhu Bodhi) are not saying that all religions are the same. Clearly the ultimate goal of the Buddhist religions is quite different. However, there are a number of issues that almost all religions agree on.
There are many different kinds of views people have proposed about the nature of death and what happens at death. Rebirth views and reincarnation views are among them. But those are clearly not the only views people have had about death.
Surely the most important question about these views is not how and where they have arisen, but whether they are true. One approach to the issue, then, is to treat it as a philosophical question like others, one that can be addressed rationally, and thus to ask whether there are any good arguments for the view that rebirth occurs. The arguments might or might not appeal to empirical evidence. If they don’t appear to empirical evidence, they would have to appeal to some other kind of evidence.
If two people disagree about the issue of rebirth, it is possible that one possesses some form of evidence or rational justification that the other lacks. It is also possible that one person simply is prejudiced or bigoted, and fails to grasp the wisdom or basis for the other person’s view. Charges that the belief or lack of belief in some proposition P are based on bigotry, prejudice or bias can be backed up by adequately defending the contrary attitude, and showing that the refusal to accept the demonstration is grounded in mere stubbornness, and not reason.
You will hear story of the many stories already have . Not going to make any differences but fulfill some people curiosity .
Ps . I knew saying something like this going to meet with trouble not to mention if you say something more !
By the way , I apologize for the above statements , I just “believes” past life not really some memories . You can throw my statements in the bins ! It was my mistakes !
I think that this simile was referring to the program on the television, such that while one television may be destroyed or degraded beyond functionality, another television can be tuned to the same channel, and the program may resume, even if it were a 60 inch ultra HD LCD, while the previous TV was a 40 inch plasma screen. The point being that the program is analogous to the five aggregates, and can be viewed from any TV as long as the program is being aired. @sujato, is this close to what you were implying?
Well, I wasn’t really considering the continuity aspect, for which see the famous fax simile. But yes, something like that works (apart from the obvious difference that in rebirth its a one-to-one relation.)
Note that comparable similes, based on the transfer of information, were used in ancient times; for example, the impression made by a seal in wax. No doubt they would have used IT similes if they had the tech!
I wasn’t referring to anybody else’s simile. I was using televisions, but you may use any large size complex system you want: human organisms, televisions, elephants, television programs, computers, whatever. The problem is explaining how any of those systems stay intact, or are “copied” and survive in some way, rather than simply falling apart and dissipating when the physical structures they seem to depend on fall apart and break up.
yep, we is all gonna’s! if rebirth takes place it is definitely not-us in this life passing over into a new life. maybe rebirth is not the best word for it? the notion is more like giving birth! when we become parents we are not reborn in our new-born child. that child has their own existence - we have just contributed a few ingredients that has given rise to their being and becoming. in the act of giving birth to the next stream of consciousness this stream of consciousness dies. we die and a key-ingredient - a momentary chitta - begins a new stream of chittas. The new-being has their life, their Dasein, after this one. the one that went before was like a mother who dies but the baby survives. just as we are not our parents and our children we are not the being that went before or the one that comes after. what makes this seem paradoxical is the ‘belief’ that the stream of consciousness is an emergent property of the nervous system. if that is a mistaken belief and, in fact, the stream of consciousness merely finds expression through the nervous system - it may be affected by it - then, we could ask, what happens when the nervous system can no longer function as a conduit of the stream? rebirth is one possibility - Pari-Nibbana is another possibility?? There may be other possibilities? i believe light or radio-waves can travel through space from a long-dead star and we can still receive that light or radio-waves on Earth even though the source has ceased to exist.
The rebirth theory would require a form of transmission from a ‘now-dead source’ that has an effect on - or seeds - a newly emergent process. a process that takes place at a later time in a different place. in physics, this kind of effect has a name: action at a distance! With action at a distance there is no apparent connection between a cause and its effect - nothing can be observed passing in-between. No light, no radio-waves, no matter, no energy, no nuffin! Action at a distance is still a mystery in science - and rebirth is still a mystery to most of us. mysteries are not myths!
Hard science does not provide us with a ‘rational’ explanation of ‘action at a distance’. Without this understanding ‘quantum entanglement’ cannot be fully understood - it can only be observed and may have applications. A conventional frame of reference does not provide us with the means to understand rebirth, kamma and, some aspects of quantum mechanics. Transpersonal insight is required for a clear understanding of kamma and rebirth - this is a consequence of developments in ‘applied’ contemplative science.
With ‘action at a distance’ there is no apparent connection between a cause and its effect - nothing can be observed passing in-between - materially or energetically. Action at a distance may be involved in the rebirth process? If so, the question: what is being transmitted from one life to another? Is redundant! Nothing passes between this life and the next life - that’s not how it happens.
In dependent origination nothing can be seen to pass-over/in-between a preceding chitta and the next one. There is ‘nothing’ between consecutive chittas in a sequence. One chitta is nibbana’d and then the next one appears. There is a ‘family resemblance’ between a preceding chitta and the one that follows but no physical connection. Every chitta in the stream of consciousness is a new and reconfigured momentary happening. If, there is no material or energetic connection between consecutive chittas it follows that rebirth is happening all the time - on a momentary basis. There is a ‘gap’ between one chitta and the next one. Hence, the ‘granular’ nature of consciousness.
We are like students of ‘Isaac Newton’ in a bygone age trying to understand ‘Niels Bohr’ and Werner Heisenberg. With the latest findings in quantum entanglement we may have to leave Niels and Werner behind. Rebirth is a finding in contemplative science not hard science. Again, this is a form of confusion that leads to a lot of misunderstanding. As a fully self-awakened wheel-turning Buddha - a knower of the worlds - the Buddha was leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else in his direct knowledge and vision. The Buddha was a genius in contemplative science and Einstein was a genius in Physics. We need to turn to the adepts in contemplative science to get a clear description of the rebirth process. We need to go to university - or study online - if we want to get a degree in Physics. Any questions?
Context is important in this discussion. Like everyone else on these pages I constantly review what I once thought to be a reasonable response to an issue like rebirth by better understanding of what developments have brought us to where we are now. By context, I’m thinking about our own time in relation to the earlier mid-19th century Victorian burst of interest in Buddhist textual material. Those earlier translations including the work of missionaries, such as Spence Hardy, whose agenda was to understand Pali textual material in order to discredit Buddhism, and former colonial official, T.W. Rhys Davids, whose scholarship, and that of his wife, Caroline, established the Pali Text Society helped give rise to academic Buddhist studies. Critically, for our own understanding of where we are as practitioners and students of Dhamma now, this early work (at least, according to some academics and translators) led to the seeds of a secular Buddhism in the West. Of course, also of critical importance is the further development of a much wider audience in the West than could ever have been envisioned even in the mid 20th century, and one which is more willing to engage with notions of rebirth through study and guidance and, most importantly, through their own reflection than was evidently the case in the mid-19th century. Now, perhaps, there is a reasoned, intelligent and critical notion among many of us that a purely secular Buddhism offers nothing more than any other system of secular ethics. If I might make use of a metaphor: a bird needs two wings to fly. We humble, lay practitioners come to our temples, leave our shoes at the door but, most certainly, not our intelligence, offer our devotion in our practice within the temple, if that is our preference, and engage in pursuit of further knowledge of Dhamma through discussion and study. At this point in my own spiritual growth, I consider that must be where my own kamma has brought me. For all the occasional puzzlement I consider myself to be blessed.
and yes I largely concur with your conjectures! While I’m reticent to muddy the clear waters of the sublimely meditative buddha dhamma, I rather enjoy using it to help clarify the opaquely muddy waters of the Occidental philosophies. And precisely for me the fulcrum here is the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, where anglo-philosophy is finally coming to grips with the problem of what, how and why phenomena are what they self-evidently give themselves to be!
The problem of phenomenal experience is I think the last unknown frontier of science, and scientifically speaking it is becoming increasingly obvious that we have absolutely no clue what we are talking about when it comes to ‘subjective experience’ and its presumed provenance in physical (neurochemical) processes. As a phenomenologist this is rather exciting, for analytic philosophy is finally approaching the question of being, of the phenomenal world, and Heidegger’s Seinsfrage. And it remains very much an open question.
But the residue of the belief in physicalist answers to the hard problem remains rather stubborn so I’ve decided to turn the problem on its head… what if phenomenal experience is ‘objective’? Not an emergent property of the nervous system, or something accomplished by one’s own body, and not an individual’s ‘internal experience’, like a VR movie playing ‘in the head’? What if the phenomenal world is outside of our physical bodies, animating them by way of their associated physical phenomena (light’s electromagnetism exciting the retina, sound’s acoustic waves impacting the tympanum etc), but the phenomenal experiences associated with these physical phenomena occur in the apparently objective phenomenal world.
If phenomenal process is something objective or ‘external’ that happens to us, animating our physical bodies, driving our bodily responses in thought, speech and action (as kamma process becoming), then it’s possible the phenomenal process precedes and proceeds the physical organism … ala rebirth without a soul.
ÔThe “hard problem” of consciousness is indeed a hard and serious philosophical problem. But I don’t think there is anything present in that philosophical problem - which is all about trying to account for the intrinsic quality of conscious experience - that provides the slightest basis for believing that conscious mental phenomena “animate” our bodies. Nor does the hard problem of consciousness point toward any particular view about what happens to the successive conscious events that have arisen during the course of a person’s life, and have made up the mental life of that person, after the time at which those events have passed.
Consider my conscious experience of looking at my house, as that experience occurred 10 years ago. Doesn’t the most straightforward understanding of that experience consist in accepting that it arose in the past, due to various conditioning factors, but that, being impermanent, it is now completely gone? Or should one think that the experience is still stored up somewhere? Did the Buddha teach anything like that?
This whole issue about whether conscious experience is composed of physical factors and is caused by physical conditions, or is composed of some kind of “mindstuff” and conditioned by non-physical conditions is a bit of a red herring. Either way, the events of conscious life seem fleeting, transient, impermanent. The long flow of your conscious life will be comprised of future events that haven’t yet arisen, and was comprised of past events that are now completely gone. What you actually possess is always, ever only a thin sliver of present mental experience. And even the idea that, in addition to the experiences themselves, there is an abiding “me” that possesses those experiences -that’s an illusion. So what is it that could be “reborn” exactly? All of our craving for future experiences, or grief over, and desire to resurrect, our past experiences, is just a further source of suffering.
As I understand it the hard problem is about uncovering the what, how and why of phenomena, in the most basic sense possible. What is the basis of your apparent belief that phenomenal experiences do not “animate” our physical bodies? Surely one sees, hears and feels, thus one reacts to this phenomenal world?
Or do you suppose that phenomena are the epiphenomenal (useless) byproducts of rather simple neurochemical processes, the magic dust of biological alchemy?
The question of physical or phenomenal causality is at the heart of the hard problem of consciousness don’t you think?
You could say that it is the propensity to take things as a self that is “reborn”. The only difference between ‘now’, ‘10 minutes from now’ and the next life is that the things taken as self between ‘now’ and ‘10 minutes from now’ are much more similar than the things that will be taken as self in the next life.
If the feeling of ‘me-ness’ comes from delusion and not from the objects themselves, then all you need to be reborn is delusion and some objects to call ‘me’… and there you are!
