What still blows me away is how the community of people that have really taken onboard what the Buddha taught, and are making efforts to really understand what the Buddha taught, with all of its beauty and nuance, are such a relatively small number. The Secular Buddhists are packing the house, and hosting costly online courses.
Pick up a recent Lion’s Roar magazine, and if you’re like me, you’ll vomit in your mouth a little bit. It’s a good magazine, with many good articles about mindfulness, and something from Chogyam Trungpa’s ghostwriters, but the magnificence of the Buddha’s historical teachings are really very difficult to find in these tracts. But, this is modern western Buddhism, to a great degree.
Maybe this does go back to
There’s just quite a bit of laziness, or lack of intellectual curiosity, in Buddhism these days. Maybe people feel that these dusty tomes of the Nikayas are just too much to cut through. Maybe there’s some attractiveness to the narcissism of the west when teachers promote instant enlightenment, or “Buddha nature.”
Rebirth is just such a powerful and beautiful expression of the Buddha’s heartwood teachings. It’s a shame that the magnificent and integral understanding of kamma and rebirth has become a metaphysical tennis ball that just keeps getting swatted back and forth over the western dharma net.
Not long ago, I came back from a trip to Thailand, and time in a good wat that was very grounding for me. Upon arrival, in the heart of Billy Graham country (Wheaton, Illinois) I drove past a Xian megachurch and saw what must have been 3000 cars in the parking lot on a Monday night. I think I vomited in my mouth again just a little.
The Dhamma Path can be a lonely path. What the Buddha discovered and then taught so exquisitely has been diluted and confused. The loneliness of this path was only amplified when I saw so many of my neighbors packed into a megachurch listening to ‘g-d knows what.’
Sorry for the rant. Rebirth is just such a powerful and majestic aspect of the Buddha’s Dhamma, and it ends up relegated to debate, much the way Einstein was challenged and abused on his theories concerning general and special relativity.