SuttaCentral
You’re not wrong, Sabbamitta. It does indeed refer to the four noble truths. A quick search shows that this specific way of referring to the four noble truths occurs 404 times in the Tipitaka. And the truths are referred to in many other ways as well.
I think most people don’t realize what incredible work you’re doing in translating the Suttas!
that’s for sure. Just we can check the illogical absence of conversations between the Buddha or his senior disciples with the nuns. I’m not any modern feminist or similar but this is an obviety.
The people who probably thought in some things were inconvenient or absurd at those past times, they had the same type of heads than those people who today believe there are things which are inconvenient or absurd. Issues can be different but the heads too trapped in their own times are similar.
Thanks V.Sujato for this remembering of this logical part of the Buddha teaching. The arising of the individuation is a depth issue. Maybe it will be more affordable for the reason in some future time.
That is an excellent methodological point, indeed. As somebody trained in religious studies and the anthropology of religion, I have often seen how skepticism is used to just dismiss others’ views.
At the same time, we must remember that even text criticism methodologies and the results we get from them, are still fabrication of our minds (our neurological system). This is very easily tested by asking a person to interact with a text while undertaking an fMRI scan. We cannot bypass our minds, convictions and latent influences -emotion processes and so on-on whatever we engage.
This is why Lord Buddha has such an approach to concepts, ideas, and opinions.
This includes, inevitably, the opinion on rebirth when debated.
In my experience, one can understand rebirth not within the process of concepts and opinions (albeit it might be useful for the game of research and academic knowledge) but only through two processes, the first, faith (something contemporary people have a bigger and bigger problem with) and the second a phenomenological personal experience that can be reached during meditation practices. Rebirth is something you can actually “see”, both as moment to moment consciousness process and as an experience of actual past lives.
No external evidence can fully convince you of such natural law (nothing magic there) other than your experience of it. That is why our Lord Buddha always said to take what is useful and discard what we are not ready to accept. He knew that only experience as a process of knowledge gives the most crucial final foundation. Before such an epiphany, we can only have faith or doubts. Yet I must say, the more I study the suttas, the more I see the reasons and incredible wisdom about the Buddha’s approach to concepts, ideas, and theories.
That’s interesting, can you tell us more about your background?
Absolutely, method is only a helper, nothing more. We’re still thrown back on our own fallible consciousness. No map is perfect, but when we’re lost in the wilderness, who would throw away even an imperfect map?
I agree that faith and experience are as important, maybe even more important, than concepts when it comes to something like rebirth. But it’s also true that different people have different tendencies. In the suttas, they speak of the “Dhamma follower” who arrives at their convictions by inquiry into the teachings, and a “faith-follower” who is moved primarily by faith. For myself, I’m a Dhamma follower (obviously!), but I also have a lot of faith, I’m not quite sure why. It just happened.
Obviously in practice, both these things are important. And nothing is certain until we have the direct experience.
See the thing is, I have a lot of sympathy for people who don’t believe in rebirth. I mean, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical! Medically, we see that life and consciousness are overwhelmingly dependent on the physical body. Any evidence for life after death is debatable. And religions have a long history of selling silliness as truth. I get it!
One of my problems is that I see people from a skeptical background, who are quite rightly insisting on evidence and reason. Great, that’s super-important, and it can be a valuable contribution to traditions that sometimes over-value deference to authority.
But when they step into my area of expertise, AKA the Suttas, they fall into such bad mistakes again and again. And when this is pointed out, which it has been, many times, by many people, they don’t seem to change their tune. To me this is really the litmus test of genuine rationality: will you change your beliefs if the facts change?
Fronsdal’s characterization of Zen is indeed inaccurate. Not only is rebirth asserted in a number of Sutras that they rely on (for instance, the Lankavatara Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Surangama Sutra, etc), foundational teachers posit it as well.
For example, in his earliest known writing in Japanese, Dogen says:
You may imagine the twelvefold causation of rebirth, or the twenty-five existences, and have such views as the Three or Five Vehicles, and whether the Buddha exists or not. But do not take up these views and regard them as the correct way of practicing buddha dharma.
Later, in “Identifying with cause and effect”, he says:
There is no shortage of locations for rebirth. But those outside the buddha way mistakenly believe that sentient beings return to the ocean of permanence or to the great self after death.
In Orategama 1, Hakuin says:
There are so many instances of people who have come into this world with a substantial amount of merit, but have then recklessly sought after pointless glory, produced a heavy burden of crime, and thus doomed themselves to rebirth in the evil ways.
There are various such examples. Dogen’s Shobogenzo, Keizan’s Record of the Transmission, Hakuin’s Orategama, Enni Ben’en’s Shoichikokushi kana hogo, etc. support the view that, conventionally, there is such a phenomenon as rebirth. Nothing indicates that it is but to be taken literally.
Thanks so much for that. I have heard these claims before by western teachers, but I don’t know enough to properly assess them.
Bhante, to give som examples of how we live steeped in myth at present (IMO): at the start of the Covid pandemic, several US politicians were calling out for people to sacrifice themselves for the wellbeing of “the economy”.
“The economy” is one of the big mythic beings of our time IMO. We did not always view ourselves as subject to this strange entity with invisible hands, that demands human sacrifice to keep blessing us with material wealth.
“The economy” is a Mount Sineru of modern cosmology. It’s this many trillion (yojanas) in size, and it grows, and it will keep growing forever!
Another one is money. It’s literally pieces of paper we made up, and now we can’t stop destroying the planet because it would make the amount of the small pieces of paper be less maybe. We have deep, profound, magical faith in the power of small pieces of paper, to the extent that we have organized our society, our personal lives and our thinking around it.
Edit: As in, money isn’t literally true, it’s an artifact that has power because of our shared belief system (or shared myths if you will). There are many times in human history where “my house is worth X dollars” wouldn’t make any sense and people would not understand you if you said it.
Or like, when we say something like “compete in the marketplace of ideas”, this is just as mythic as the Agaññasutta, we just all understand what it means because it is part of the culture we are from. However, it would be nonsense to e.g. twelfth century European political radicals who were immersed in the thoughtworld of medieval Catholicism.
I guess I just want to echo how important myth is as a common language for a society rather than literal truth, and argue that we today also live in an enchanted and mythical world, we’re just too used to it to see it 
Thanks dorje.
Sadly it seems like a lot of western zen folks have really carved out this weird new secular zen path which puts aside many classic elements of zen buddhism. The same thing is happening in western insight meditation with folks like Gil.
The only thing to be done is to point out how much of a radical break with the Buddha dharma their new path is.
Anyways, welcome to suttacentral!
An interesting read. In relation to the above however, which I’ve heard this many times over the years, I’m somewhat sceptical. How would one detect humour in a text as old as that? Reading the text it could be read as satire, but it can also be read as mythology or it could be read literal, as in the Buddha really thought those things. Personally I suspect it’s mythology, but I have nothing to back that up with at the moment. Satire though? That seems more difficult to establish after so many centuries down the line.
I don’t have much to add to the scholarship here on this thread, nor to the excellent comments, but I can say that in the light of FFW, and now the essay from Gil Fronsdal (and I am not suggesting Gil’s essay is on a par with the serious issues surrounding FFW) , the existence and illumination of Sutta Central is all the more important. Gil has a large number of articles posted on his website and I am guessing that many are sound and beneficial. But, the discounting of Dhammic rebirth has the same malfeasant quality that FFW and other themes in western Buddhisms have: the dilution and distortion of the Buddha’s Dhamma, and that of his disciples.
Rebirth is a difficult issue, because the truth of rebirth is difficult to test scientifically. Tested with a scientific method, the Four Noble Truths, and most all of the Dhamma itself, appeals to our scientific sense. The Dhamma rings true; when much of it is tested, it produces the results that the Buddha said that it would. Yet, while rebirth is a very identifiable consequence of kamma, of cause and effect, these successive samsaric lives can’t be readily observed or tested. To me, rebirth is integral to my perception of life insofar as rebirth was so integral to the Buddha’s teachings about human life. I trust the Buddha.
And so, it seems to me careless and dangerous for a skilled teacher to try to advocate for a theory that the Buddha did not teach rebirth, or that Dhammic rebirth is not integral to this Dhammic practice and this process driven life. To me, embracing rebirth, knowing that the wisest man who ever lived on this pale blue dot embraced it, is beautiful and compelling.
And then there’s: * Stevenson, Ian (1974). Twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation second (revised and enlarged) edition, University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-0872-4 See also Division of Perceptual Studies | University of Virginia School of Medicine and Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics? - Scientific American Blog Network by way of example…
Dr. Stevenson’s work, and that being done at U.Va is just another log on the fire. But it seems to me that when we really invest ourselves in the Dhamma, and look at the evidence (something Dr. Fronsdal claims does not exist), it’s just a very serious error to be dismissive of the Dhamma of rebirth.
Because it’s human. There’s plenty of humor in the Pali canon, some broad and obvious, others more subtle. Ancient humor is not limited to Pali either: there are jokes in ancient Greek, in Babylon, in old graffitos, and many other places.
In Pali there’s also, as you might have guessed, Vinaya rules that govern inappropriate humor, so we have actual examples of things that were considered funny.
I cannot figure out from the context what FFW means, can you clarify please? Thank you!
The acronym puzzled me too, but I think he means the “First Free Women” controversy.
Thanks Mike! I can now stop looking for three word concepts in Buddhism that start with FFW (it wasn’t going well)
IMO, the reason that most rational people do not accept Rebirth is because they automatically think of it in terms of “Soul” or “Consciousness” or some such permanent entity being reborn. Now, this is a concept the Buddha explicitly rejected with plenty of logical proof (which BTW is usually well accepted by the very same people who reject Rebirth), yet people just cannot conceptualize Rebirth without a permanent Entity. To be fair, the fault may also lie in the baggage that comes with the popular idea of what the word “Rebirth” means.
We should rather focus on Linkage and Causation. Asking the question “What links one life to another?” leads us into more fruitful territory. A view of sentient experience as being a dependently originated process within a closed quasi - recurrent cosmos is the key to understanding how lives can be linked without any Thing actually being reborn. If we think in this manner, we can see how any Sentient experience does not begin from a universal point zero, but comes pre-loaded with various unique traits and tendencies… the more prosaic ones being Talents and the more unusual ones being Past Life memories. And as long as there is cause, the process will continue…
Quite often, yes! This is also evident from how people define the “types” of rebirth they do accept. People who are resistant to rebirth often divide it into “literal” and “metaphorical” rebirth, accepting only the latter. When you ask them to define metaphorical rebirth, you usually get something about worms eating your dead body. So there’s clearly this idea of something having to go from one body into another. It seems strongly influenced by Western cultural understanding of rebirth. We hear “rebirth” and we think we know what it means, so we don’t look further into it. But of course, its very hard to arrive at any semblance of understanding without dropping the cultural baggage.
Phew! I am relieved …
(In case this hasn’t been clear enough, my comment above was meant to be ironic … 
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… says the one without who’s English translation this would not be possible! 
In fact, having the opportunity to study the Suttas by translating them makes it just so crystal clear that they are pervaded by references to the four noble truths—and to rebirth, for that matter—every- every- everywhere! Reading that there should be only five mentions of the four noble truths is just so … I have no word for this!
I’m pretty sure that’s why the “research” paper turned into essays. His claims are not supportable and would be ripped apart in a real peer-reviewed research paper.
I hope it won’t happen with Theravada…
Great essay, Bhante!
That’s a great wish.
Thanks for joining the conversation, welcome!