Hi Ayya,
Lovely to see you here!
With all due deference to the cultural sensitivities of northern Californians, that would perhaps not be the greatest endorsement! Why? Because it’s all about eternalism, which is, so I’ve heard, quite popular in those circles …
It’s normal for insiders in a linguistic community to develop their own jargon. In religion, words evolve a Formal and Deep Meaning by Using Capitals and Deploying Individuated Precursor Verbalizations Cognizant of Inscrutability. In Pali, they call it gomaya. Not all jargon is gomaya, of course, but a lot of it is. Just saying, the mere fact that a term is used in a community doesn’t mean that it should be. In this case I would suggest that the term “becoming”, adopted from translations that are outdated, persists because it allows us to keep the same kinds of comforting illusions that the translators had. You say:
Is this really true? In secular Buddhist circles, it is quite normal to say that the four noble truths and dependent origination do not mention rebirth, and therefore that it could not be a central Buddhist teaching. But that idea falls apart as soon as you realize that taṇhā ponobbhavikā does not mean “The craving that makes for further becoming …” but “the craving that leads to rebirth”.
Allow me to develop these ideas a little further.
Looking over some of the past translators, I see that “becoming” has been used as far back as TW Rhys Davids in his Digha, and as recently as Walshe and Thanissaro. In the PTS Dictionary the entry on bhava begins:
becoming, (form of) rebirth, (state of) existence, a “life.”
So it’s clear what the word means, but not how “becoming” relates to that. No-one says, “In my next becoming I want to be rich!” You say, “In my next life I want to be rich.” If people are using “becoming” in Buddhist circles, I would wonder what they mean by it. Can you give me a sample sentence or two?
Based on my imperfect recollections, the use of “becoming” was based on an understanding of how the “is” words work in the Indic languages. It was argued that atthi has a connotation of “eternally and essentially exists”, while hoti means “comes to be, emerges, arrives at such a state”.
In the Upaniṣads, for example, we find tad tvam asi, not tad tvam bhavasi. A good example of the difference is in Brihadaranyaka 1.4.10:
ya evaṃ vedāhaṃ brahmāsmīti sa idaṃ sarvaṃ bhavati
One who knows that “I am Brahmā” becomes all this.
That is: your true, essential nature is always and eternally (asmi) that of the divine, but not until you actualize this knowledge do you “become” the cosmos, fully realizing the nature that you had all along.
This is well and good in the context of the Upaniṣads.
However, as is well known, many of the early translators—Caroline Rhys Davids being the most prominent example—aggressively read Upanishadic eternalism into the Pali texts, and deployed “becoming” as a term to distinguish temporal from eternal existence. That is, the Buddha said we should let go of “becoming”, of the ongoing process of change and evolution in samsara, in favor of an eternal existence in Nibbana. This is precisely the Upanishadic doctrine, except it uses nibbāna instead of brahman. Walshe puts it succinctly in his introduction to the Digha:
(Nibbana) does not exist (relatively), but IS.
The fact that Walshe has to use capital letters is a sure sign that gomaya is lurking nearby!
This usage is conventionally defended by quoting the famous Udana passage; but that simply says that a series of negations exist, and cannot sustain a metaphysical interpretation. In the suttas, while the purely linguistic connotations of hoti and atthi are felt to some extent, they carry no metaphysical burden.
If we return to meaning of bhava in doctrinal contexts, bhavataṇhā clearly cannot mean, “craving to be trapped in an ever-changing process of becoming something else”. It must mean, “craving to be born in a future state of existence”. By far the most common form of that is to be reborn in a state of permanent, eternal bliss.
The Buddha’s response is not that you need to aim for a more subtle form of eternal existence, but that all existence is becoming, i.e. all conditions are impermanent, and there is no such thing as eternal existence. To introduce the Upanishadic ontology is to open a door to eternalist interpretations. And I can’t see how it’s necessary, or solves any problems. I’ve been writing and teaching on early Buddhism for a long time now, and I’ve never felt a need to use this kind of terminology.