SuttaCentral
Right, I mean it’s not like it’s pretending to be historical. It would be trivially easy to describe a king of the past and simply make him sound like those of the present.
If you compare with a lot of the Jatakas, they often have a much more realistic grounded feel. Not all of them, obviously, but there are plenty that sound like realistic tales.
I am sure Hugh Hefner will believe this.
Wife does not mean that you have to marry her or have some intimacy.
It is just available if the person want it.
I fully grasp the purpose and power of myths. I also know and appreciate the differences between myths, fairy tales and legends. They each have their distinct features and origins and they have long served humankind to make sense of experience and explain the unexplainable.
I don’t feel like anyone is shoving rebirth down my throat. I actually fall on the side of accepting rebirth, as to why, I can’t say exactly. I guess because, as someone said in this thread, the Buddha is trustworthy and if he said it is so, I need to investigate and see for myself. I guess I still am investigating. I want to practice what is real because it’s the best way, not because it lines up with my logic or what I’ve been taught.
I can easily see how secular Buddhists can lump rebirth, gods, devas, heavens and hells under the heading of cultural myth of old. It does sound pretty outrageous. But I’m not willing to jump to that conclusion until I’ve been to the other side of Bundadoon, wherever that is.
The four noble truths is super powerful to me, yet I haven’t made the leap where rebirth is explicit or implicit in it. I don’t feel driven but I’m open and listening. Should I be driven? Is it that important?
I thought about it a lot and I came to the conclusion that the Four Noble Truths without rebirth would be just plain stupid. One doesn’t believe in rebirth and doesn’t want to suffer? Well, the solution to their predicament seems pretty obvious, then. Compared to this final solution any possible Dhamma practice is just self-cooing until a comfortable numbness of one’s mind is achieved - and I don’t see much if any difference between the Dhamma and drinking whiskey with your buddies every Friday night or an occasional joint every now and then.
This is a most interesting thread. So many wonderful observations! So many thoughts that are deep.
Might I offer a slightly different tack?
It is often stated in the EBT that the Buddha taught to people in all walks of life, and that according to their station and understanding, just so did he teach. Thus, we have clear-sighted admonitions on the final ending of all defilements; we have instructions on the taming of arisen thoughts; and we also have basic motivations for the seeking of enlightenment - even, occasionally, with the reward of a heaven, or heavens, as its goal.
The EBT’s as a whole make perfect sense when one understands that they are a net cast wide, with the intention of appealing to beings with vastly different proclivities and conditions.
However, in all cases, what is most important is that the core of the teaching - the one central truth - remains unchanged. To desire what is impermanent will cause suffering. The further one progresses on this path, the more one will be uplifted toward enlightenment. In truth it is an education into the nature of things as they are. When a being finally knows the nature of things as they truly are, then most certainly that being can be called ‘enlightened’.
From this perspective, I see no problem with secular Buddhism at all. If it can appeal to scientists and psychologists, if it can appeal to agnostics and atheists, or even for that matter to religionists or fantasists, it is all marvellous work done. So long as it teaches a path of taming one’s errant desires. This way, people embark on the great path according to their own ideals. They start on the great journey. They begin to make an effort.
The wonder of the Buddha’s compassion is in his showing the way to enlightenment for all beings. And for a certainty we know that there is nothing to which we should cling. Ultimately, not even to the teachings themselves.
But for this one truth: To desire what is impermanent is the cause of suffering.
There are two types of right view, and the longer I think about it, the more I think both are necessary, the deeper the practice:
"And what is the right view with effluents, siding with merit, resulting in acquisitions? ‘There is what is given, what is offered, what is sacrificed. There are fruits & results of good & bad actions. There is this world & the next world. There is mother & father. There are spontaneously reborn beings; there are contemplatives & brahmans who, faring rightly & practicing rightly, proclaim this world & the next after having directly known & realized it for themselves.’ This is the right view with effluents, siding with merit, resulting in acquisitions. MN117
In a nut-shell, this is all the immediately unverifiable teachings there is in the dhamma, AFAIK (giving, mother and father having particular karmic effects). Belief in these things are conducive to morality and wholesome behaviour, reduction in narcissism, belief that enlightenment is possible for us, and good for society as a whole.
Having said that during the Buddha’s time (and even now in Asian countries) there were large numbers of people who wanted to do merit and live a good lay life. The Buddha didn’t exclude them from his teachings, but rather saw them as those in a sort of reception, before entering the school proper. In the West the equivalent population now, I think are the secular Buddhists and other Buddhisms floating about.
I used to conduct Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course in the National Health Service in London and have been Teacher trained. The research trials which made mindfulness ‘scientific’ and evidence based made meditation much more acceptable to many who were skeptics. The popularity has been amazing. So I think it has its advantages. After a while I found myself drifting away from it, possibly because it was unsatisfying long term and had to be forced. There was not much depth, no chance of transformation. It was just another method in a sea of methods. More worryingly one of my friends who did a Masters in Mindfulness (in a University in Wales) found it hard to distinguish between Mindfulness and Buddhism (EBT). I hope my insistence that they were two different things, his own explorations may have lead him to ‘deeper waters’ than just swimming in the shallows. People often need a pretty concrete, in-your-face reason to note a difference, more than subtle hard to grasp doctrinal differences. Could mundane right view be it- or will it only serve to distance the two groups?
with metta
Compare also this article:
My ‘everyone’ was overly broad; I nevertheless see mystical experience conveyed from such religions via empirical description. Please remember my reference to e.g. Amerindian rebirth ideas, instead of the Abrahamic focus.
I know some Secular Buddhists who are not materialist, so I made the comment I did. All I wanted to point out was the possibility of exceptions here. I’d like to hear some Secular dogma experiences you’ve had which insist on materialism, rather than a “so far it’s all I’ve met, therefore probably all”. My point here is, Secular Buddhism can take specific criticism. Blanket bombing the whole lot is alienating.
Thanks for unpacking AN 3.134, on that note. I’m still sloppy with some ideas, of course. But I said “so far”; there are beings, and suffering, and that chain of effort… so far. Will it always work? Is nibbana forever? If yes/no, metaphysics.
Sure; mystical experiences are often said to be the result of various practices. Again, Buddhism fails to distinguish itself from other such experiences.
I fully agree, also with your assessment that it’s a core element of the dhamma and can’t possibly be explained away.
It’s definitely not in-your-face in the Rgveda, but much clearer already in the Atharvaveda, see for example: Bodewitz, Yonder World in the Atharvaveda, 1999.
But it’s a fact that basically all of them had some position on rebirth (of course not the Buddhist one, but they didn’t get it from the Buddha either). The only rejection I could find was the materialistic nihilism of Ajita Kesakambali - but he rejected everything anyway.
The Brahmins believed in rebirth, the Niganthas, the Ajivikas - and hence the three biggest pre-Buddhist groups in the suttas. Purana Kassapa and Pakudha Kaccayana were rather quiet about it, and Sañjaya Belatthaputta refused any claim.
Often true (e.g. rituals and sacrfices), but not invariably. Ethics was also a concern of pre-Buddhist brahmins, also in some places the old rishis are spoken of by the Buddha with respect. The 32 signs, even though of questionable authenticity, are signs of brahmins that the EBT agree with.
I would still like to see a sutta-based treatment that shows that rebirth was not the common paradigm, that the Buddha introduced it as a game-changer into the spiritual discourse of his time. To be clear, he was very different in how he conceptualized the mechanics of rebirth, but he didn’t have to establish that people are reborn.
Me too. I hope Bhante Sujato has more mornings off. 
Are you saying that being a living arahat or a fully enlightened Buddha is just self-cooing to a comfortable numbness?
His sila was known to society at the time. As for samadhi the Jains were practicing up to second jhana. Immaterial attainments were known. The samana way of the Bhikkhu’s was already in existence. While I believe he exceeded in each of them compared to his contemporaries what he was known was for his wisdom and the innovative practice of vipassana (Satipatthana?) which lead to the complete ending of suffering.
With metta
What I mean is, take two people embracing and practicing the dhamma in exactly the same way, one “believes” in rebirth, one isn’t sure or doesn’t. They both die. What happens?
I guess that’s the core of the issue - most people can be told about rebirth, but we don’t know for sure until we experience something for ourselves that changes our view on this.
Or we can trust in the buddha.
Or we can be open minded, and admit that we don’t know.
And I won’t go any further than this, like denying rebirth, because, hey, who am I to say the buddha got it wrong?
Come on, yeah, arahants don’t believe in rebirth, I get it, but this is obviously not what I meant 
To be fair, if I may, bhante, these religions don’t see themselves as doing that. There is definitely an idea of empirically verifiable, that is, experienceable, salvation in-this-life in any religion that is going to present itself as something worthy of attention to the human race (regardless of if such an idea is true or not).
In fact, this is the “usual” religious answer to atheistic/secular critiques (or, simply the critiques of other religions): try it out yourself and verify and see. The idea being that, if you practice the religion (which involves “having” faith), and you don’t have the results you want, you simply aren’t practicing “hard” enough, with everything that entails.
Of course, I think the quote that I quoted from you was intending to speak moreso to some particular fundamentalisms, wherein one is expected to believe that Jesus ran around hiding fossils to put people in hell with later for believing in, if you will forgive my levity in putting it that way. Apologies if I misquoted you here and changed your context with my possible misunderstanding.
Point-and-case, if there isn’t one of these already present, or sufficiently perceived as or believed in as ‘present’, ‘humanity’ will produce an innovation to make one, IMO. Consider the ancient Egyptian peasants revolting against the clergy for a spot in the afterlife when before there had never been a believe, necessarily, that anyone other than the Pharaoh lived forever amongst mankind. They revolted, essentially, for a kind of immortality, something that salvation has been framed as before in a Buddhist context, interpretation (important interpretation!) aside.
Consider the development of Christian monasticism out of a largely non-monastic religion. It was so that these people could strive to “live” Christ’s life in a very literal way of trying to get to a state of “salvation in this life”.
The “in-this-life-ness” of “salvation-in-this-life” is often considered, by religious people, to be a form of empirical verification of their religion, just as lived Buddhist practice is considered an empirical process of verifying Buddhism.
I only want to say, I do hope that I meet someone someday who has advanced their practice to the level that they have experienced these things for themselves. That would be pretty cool to hear about firsthand.
Most contemplative experience is fascinating to me. It’s an amazing field of inquiry, with many intense & sincere individuals.
This professor is the one who teaches the “Buddhism and Modern Psychology” course at Princeton and which is available on coursera : https://www.class-central.com/mooc/1355/coursera-buddhism-and-modern-psychology
This book is based off the course and is now the official book of the course. I took this course on coursera years back when it was first live, before I was a monastic and living at the monastery. I found it to be quite interesting and informative. I found the professor to be very respectful of Buddhism.
He does not consider himself a buddhist, but he is a mediator and has attended retreats, and I thought his understanding of Buddhist doctrine was pretty good for the average secular/non buddhist person, usually they botch a lot. The course also featured him having interviews with Bhikkhu Bodhi and well known teachers from various Buddhist traditions.
I have this book up next for my reading, once I get through Bhante Analayo’s Satipatthana book, which has been amazing.