I have faith that the Buddha found a path to the end of suffering, and managed to communicate to others how to follow that path and achieve the same thing. That path involves certain kinds of self-discipline and self-restraint, the cultivation of mindfulness and concentration, and a gradual increase in certain kinds of understanding pertaining mainly to the mental factors that cause us to suffer. These factors are directly observable when one turns one’s attention in a disciplined way toward one’s own mind and fathom-long body, and don’t depend on anything taking place at any time earlier in the past or far in the future.
This path is not worldly common-sense. It is not cherry-picking. It is a strenuous and arduous path against the grain of worldly life and its standard goals.
My view is that all of that business bout the “knowledges” are additions incorporated by deluded followers who wanted their teacher to be an awe-inspiring magus or god-like super-terrestrial, and who were not satisfied with the practice itself, but needed a worldly religion with a lot of bowing, sacrificing, worshiping, merit-making, praying - and procrastinating on the path by delaying most of it to future lives.
If you want to call the latter “the dhamma” because the suttas seem tell you so, then great. But it’s not for me. I’m going to rely on the guide of my own deepest experiences and critical judgement, not fundamentalist text-worship. I’m not going to toss my life away on such superstitions, or try to first convince myself that there are hells awaiting me so that I can then try to escape from the figments of my imagination! And frankly, I think these superstitions are harmful for others, because they in many cases intensify suffering rather than eradicating it.
The followers don’t seem deluded, at least the ones from ancient times. They were quite clear about their paths and the fruition that they realized. Like this one from the Therigatha (Sona: Mother of Ten):
Ten children I bore from this physical heap. Then weak from that, aged, I went to a nun. She taught me the Dhamma: aggregates, sense spheres, & elements. Hearing her Dhamma, I cut off my hair & ordained. Having purified the divine eye while still a probationer, I know my previous lives, where I lived in the past. I develop the theme-less meditation, well-focused oneness. I gain the liberation of immediacy - from lack of clinging, unbound. The five aggregates, comprehended, stand like a tree with its root cut through. I spit on old age. There is now no further becoming.
I realize that in this age, the argument for rebirth is mostly just quoting from various suttas, but it becomes compelling when we read about the personal experiences of ancient Arahants…
But according to this view, the Buddha was not the only one who found the path to end suffering, right? Not only him, but every person who has ever died - they found the path to the end of suffering! So all of us are bound to encounter the end of suffering, and it won’t be long! And we don’t even have to seek - we just wait it out! What is special about the Buddha, according to this view, is that he found the end of suffering while he was still alive, right? But then, to keep things congruent, we have to redefine suffering - we can’t use the Buddha’s definition (which included kamma and rebirth).
Dhp 317. Those who see something to fear where there is nothing to fear, and see nothing to fear where there is something to fear — upholding false views, they go to states of woe.
To me, this is like saying that a person who dies in agony from lung cancer has found the path to the end of cancer.
Surely, even if we live only one life, it would be better for the person afflicted with lung cancer to find a cure for it, and live many more years with some happiness, than to die miserably from it. The same is true of all the other forms of suffering we can bring to an end.
We know from the texts that the state of liberation the Buddha achieved was not simply a blank state of mental nothingness in which there was no suffering, and not even any experience, but was rather an experiential state of peace and blissful joy, involving a pleasure that is unlike any bodily or sensory pleasure, and undefiled with any tincture of misery. Apparently this state of mind is so wonderful that the Buddha spent many weeks just enjoying it, before he finally decided to leave his spot and start teaching others. He could have called the path, “the eightfold path to pure and perfect happiness” and it would have amounted to the same thing. The reason for stressing the end of suffering rather than the arising of happiness is that suffering is ever-present and gooey and tangible in our present experience, and so it always provides something for the mediator to attend to, work with, understand and let go of. The increasingly perfect happiness that arises when suffering is let go of is hard to grasp or imagine until it arises, so a meditation practice consisting of the instruction “imagine happiness, and make it arise” wouldn’t work, and would probably lead people into blind alleys where they ended up cultivating inferior states of worldly pleasure mixed with pain.
There’s another reason to practice toward nibbana in our one life. The goodness we realize in our own lives through our practice can benefit all of the beings who live around us and even benefit others after we are gone.
It sounds very nice! (though I remain unconvinced). One of the things I find problematic is that if you define Nibbana as a positive mental experience/state that one experiences only in this life, and loses at death - then it turns out it was also impermanent, and hence suffering. Any thoughts?
That’s an interesting problem, but it’s a problem that arises whether you accept a one-life or many-life picture of samsara.
For example, Sariputta attained nibbana, lived many years as an arahant, and then died. After that, it appears, Sariputta no longer existed, nor did there exist any person who was Sariputta reborn. This is true whether you believe Sariputta had no previous lives or you believe Sariputta had millions of previous lives. Thus it appears Sariputta’s attainment of nibbana and his arahantship were both impermanent. The arahant Sariputta no longer exists, and the event or state of Sariputta-experiencing-nibbana is no longer occurring.
If you think that there is some additional independent reality - the deathless, or the unconditioned, or the nibbana element - which abides without causes and conditions and is not impermanent or dukkha, and which is the plane or sphere or reality or what-have-you that the liberated person “reaches” or “attains” when they become an arahant, then it seems that both the one-life view and the many-previous-lives view of arahantship can make use of that hypothesis.
But what are those fruits? Did this bhikkhuni actually directly know all of her previous lives while still a probationer?
One thing that is notable about the Therigatha is that, while the commentator Dharmapala often tells elaborate stories about the previous lives of the nuns, and how they accumulated efficacious merit that allowed them to be reborn as the nuns in the stories, the nuns themselves rarely describe such lives in their own poems. So if they had somehow come to learn about them, they don’t seem to have thought they were very important. Nor do the poems describe dazzling visions of these ancient pasts. One would think that if people came to possess such marvelous experiences, they wouldn’t be able to resist talking about them.
What the poems do often express is the poet’s conviction that they will have no more births. I interpret this conviction as similar to the psychological phenomenon of “assurance of salvation” in reformed (protestant) Christianity. Since these theras and theris believed on the basis of received doctrine that the attainment of complete liberation from suffering carried with it an end to the round of rebirths, they interpreted their attainment of cetovimutti - something they could experience directly, as a sure sign that their sequence of rebirths had come to an end.
But, all the suttas aside, the key problem that faces our minds is the fact that rebirth is not empirically observable immediately. If we restrict our perspective to a rigid materialistic view that life is a span between well-defined boundaries of birth and death, then memory is a function that arises with birth, is developed during the process of growing up and comes to an end with death. It is not evident how the faculty of memory can recollect something that happened before a point that we have marked as the origin of the faculty itself.
Maybe some exploration into such views can help. After all, as MN 9 shows, there are many ways by which one can attain full confidence in the Dhamma.
I see no reason to indulge in doctrinal anxieties about whether one has full confidence in the dhamma, if “the dhamma” refers to the totality of views at any one time held by the Buddha. Religious orthodoxy is not an attractive value for me.
And while people have tried over the months to convince me that possessing orthodox views about rebirth is an important part of the path, the arguments have been less than persuasive. Maybe people have reasons for thinking this that they are not sharing, or can’t articluate. But I can’t shake the impression that the whole issue is a distraction.
With this view (without acceptance and understanding of kamma), the world is reduced to a hellhole with no justice at all. One can get away with anything as long as craftiness and a spirited determination to game the system is used to get through life - the trap that pessimistic philosophers like Schopenhauer fell into. And all the millions who struggled and fought and failed and were subject to indignities, misery and died pitiful deaths have to be seen as disposable pawns, with no explanations for their lives.
The Buddha gives an explanation, bleak as it may be.
Covered with darkness, slaves to craving, led on, they swell the terrible charnel ground, they grab at further becoming.
Well since the world is not governed and organized by any fair and wise ruler dispensing justice, I don’t see why we should expect justice to prevail in the world. Our sense of justice is forged out of our human preferences and instincts for the best organization of society, for the ways we would like to be treated ourselves, and for consistent adherence to rules. Since the universe as a whole has no sense of justice, it seems like anthropomorphism to project a just ordering of human affairs into the workings of the universe at large.
The innocent sometimes suffer, sometimes due to the careless or vicious actions of other people, sometimes due to nothing other than happenstance. There is no good reason why they suffer, no hidden cause that makes it the case that they were not actually innocent after all.
Because the world is frequently such a rotten, crazy, cruel and pointlessly savage place, we need to seek liberation from its agonies, if that is possible. The Buddha described a path to that escape.
The Buddha recognized that there is something in us that doesn’t want to kill, to injure, to harm or to hate, and that experiences aggressive mind states as painful. By falling into the world’s snares, and engaging in these kinds of actions, and even just by forming cruel intentions, we injure ourselves in this very life, even when it seems superficially like we have achieved some short term benefit. That’s why the sage refrains from harming others. It’s not a matter of avoiding some delayed kammic punishments in later lives, but avoiding the punishments that immediately start to take fruit as soon as we plant the seeds of hatred in our own hearts.
Nearly every religion speaks of heaven (s) and hell (s). The way I look at it is that if these realms exist, my practicing well and keeping the precepts will help me avoid them. Likewise, if they do not exist, my keeping the precepts will benefit me and otgers I encounter in this lifetime.
However, I suggest and open mind as I have had experience of communication and signs that must be from other realms. The “synchronicities” and visual signs have accompanied meditation. It is as though the Devas are saying, “Yes, meditate, we support you and see you.” I can describe it no other way, but of course I could not convince another by my own experience. I do not see these messengers and so they must be in some other dimension.
I have come to Buddhism because I can find not fault in his teachings in the Pali Canon. I have not read anything that does not lead to increased peace and reduction of suffering if practiced honestly.
The Buddha’s teachings on whether or not to believe in kamma and rebirth are a good view. The practice guarantees a good outcome for this life and the hereafter, whether or not it exists.
I am sorry. I am no longer concerned about how to have a fortunate rebirth, because I am not able to know or experience in the present what my next rebirth will be.
Instead, I am concerned about my conduct in this life and the consequences in this life that my actions cause.
This is perfectly in accord with the Buddha’s teachings. Belief is not necessary, but can support additional faith and motivation. However, this is not to say that one cannot have the same amount of motivation and faith for one’s own life and for the benefit of others in their current life. Your view is wise and it is supporting you and benefiting all of the rest of us and so is noble.
There are traditionally six realms of rebirth in Buddhism, each resulting from the karma of past lives. These realms can also be seen as states of mind in the present life:
The world of heaven. This is the world of enjoyment, pleasure or pleasant things. The condition of heaven is impermanent, and this state of mind will also change.
The world of humans. (Human beings) In the world of humans, sometimes we are happy, sometimes we are sad, sometimes we are laughing, sometimes we are crying.
The world of asuras. This is the world of fighting, or strife. The realm or state of mind of fighting.
The world of hungry spirits. This is the realm of dissatisfaction, not being content. The state of having endless unsatisfied desires, or greed. Figuratively speaking, always being hungry.
The world of animals. It is the realm lacking reason. The state without reason. Without reason, mistakes are made, causing hardships or suffering to self, and at times others. Without reason, being dominated by one’s desires.
The world of hell. Hell refers to the realm of suffering. The state of suffering and pain, which through cause and condition people will enter. The Six Realms of Existence
Since Buddhism is primarily a way of life, rather than a belief system, we’re not discouraged from taking a metaphorical interpretation of the six realms:
The Kālāma Sutta is a discourse of the Buddha contained in the Aṅguttara Nikaya of the Tipiṭaka.[1] It is often cited by those of the Theravada and Mahayana traditions alike as the Buddha’s “charter of free inquiry.”[2]
The Kālāma Sutta is also used for advocating prudence by the use of sound logical reasoning arguments for inquiries in the practice that relates to the discipline of seeking truth, wisdom and knowledge whether it is religious or not. In short, the Kālāma Sutta is opposed to blind faith, dogmatism and belief spawned from specious reasoning.[3] Kesamutti Sutta - Wikipedia
