I read about a secular Buddhist course being offered online in Tricycle magazine. In the promo-discussion the teachers were discussing if ‘truth’ was an appropriate word to use in connection with the Buddha’s teachings. ‘Why Secular Buddhism is Not True’ is something that secularists may actually endorse? The teachers in the course seemed to believe that seeking the ‘TRUTH’ should not be our concern. Instead, we should just do our practice, enjoy the benefits and leave it at that! I guess the search for truth and ‘finding’ the truth are expressions that are found in religions that may need to be sanitised. A secularist would only deal with facts and fictions not the truth which sets us free. We have to forget about the four noble truths or ‘the truths of the noble ones’ - they are inconvenient relics from an era that did not know better! The ignorance and stupidity of the ancients that missed out on the enlightenment of the modern world. The Buddha would be rolling in his grave - if he had not been cremated!
What I said is that I think that if a Buddhist follower believes in rebirth on the basis of a speculative theory that the Buddha had achieved, thorough an unexplained form of “mental development”, the ability to directly experience all of the realms and places in the cosmos, and the whole vast sequence of rebirths of sentient beings, then that is a belief on their part that is no different in kind from other faith based beliefs. It’s no different kind from the faith-based beliefs of other religions, including the Christian belief in the resurrection, or the Vedic view that the sacrifice keeps the cosmos running, or other views of that kind. And yes, if in some other religion people believed that a deity farted the solar system into existence after a process of “gastric development”, it would be no different than that belief too.
I find this whole area of Buddhist thinking extremely disappointing. All of this hankering after good rebirths, or being scared of bad rebirths, of fretting about heaven and hells, or imagining an endless trail of suffering laid out before one, despite the utter lack of real evidence for such a belief. To me, nothing more epitomizes human minds in slavish bondage to both their own nightmarish fantasies and to the false authority of the mavens of orthodox social control and self-aggrandizement and manipulation, and it is thus the complete opposite of liberation.
And of course, the Buddha said, “Don’t do this!” But who listens?
This is how he attends inappropriately: ‘Was I in the past? Was I not in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? Having been what, what was I in the past? Shall I be in the future? Shall I not be in the future? What shall I be in the future? How shall I be in the future? Having been what, what shall I be in the future?’ Or else he is inwardly perplexed about the immediate present: ‘Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where is it bound?’
Yea but IMO “attending innapropriately” in that way is about discursive thought, fantasy, worry and flurry, planning - in other words, the usual stuff that we do anyway irrespective of our beliefs about rebirth. On the other hand, the Buddha did say that having emerged from a meditative attainment one should ‘direct their mind to the recollection of past lives.’
I guess I don’t see anything particularly wrong with “faith based beliefs.” They can be right or wrong, it all depends on what you have faith in. I guess I’m just not ashamed of having faith in the Buddha - I don’t presume to know as much as he did, not even close. But I’ve only reaped benefits from taking him as a teacher, and I’m not in the market for any other (e.g., Christopher Hitchens or whatever 
).
So you don’t believe in rebirth - no worries! - other people do - fine! We can leave it at that, and wish each other well on the path.
Best,
Brad
Yes I wish you well too.
After months of merely occasional lurking, I jumped in today not to criticize people for their faith, but only because Bhante Sujato decided to pen a diatribe against the supposed arrogance and benighted ignorance of the secular Buddhists. It starts off as a perfectly reasonable and correct complaint about the tendency of some secularists to misrepresent what the texts say. But then it turns into a long ad hominem complaint about the personal deficiencies, and shallowness and arrogance and existential ignorance of the secularists, and descends finally into a pseudo-intellectual jumble.
If someone just me, “Look, I just have faith in the words of the Buddha I find in the texts, the whole thing, all of it, from bhavana to Brahmas and everything in between” then I guess I can dig that kind of faith, and have not much motivation to get into arguments over it. But what I find harder to pass over is a pompous, holy-roller condescension toward and ridicule of people who are scientifically inclined, and are attempting to apply critical reasoning to the texts, and find something valuable in them anyway - not when that ridicule presents itself as coming from some kind of higher plane of awareness and and pseudo-scientific pretension which doesn’t have much to back it up.
Dan, I didn’t read Bhante Sujato’s essay this way at all. Again, I agree with his postion and celebrate the fact that he wrote this essay, but this doesn’t take away from a critical eye that I try to bring to these discussions. I want to get this stuff right, and not be merely a cheering section for the monastics that post here.
I’m not sure where I see the personal attacks, nor do I see any jumble of ideas. Part of what was presented is that there is a demand from secular Buddhists that an empirical/evidentiary approach be brought to the issue of rebirth, and it is pointed out that, in fact, there is an evidentiary analysis brought to bear on the question of rebirth by EBT Buddhists.
I think the above is essentially what Bhante Sujato is arguing. To dismiss rebirth as a purely metaphysical phenomenon short-sells the concept and the evidence. This statement doesn’t attack secular Buddhists, but it does address the approach taken by secular Buddhists, largely.
For my money, we need more voices like Bhante Sujato’s. I am weary of seeing the core teachings of the Buddha relegated to a dustbin in the west, while variants develop that dilute the Dhamma of its power, impact and beauty. The power of this voice doesn’t necessarily take anything away from secular or scientific approaches to Buddhism, and I should hope that folks with a secular bent don’t take these arguments personally.
Apologies for the length of this response…Bhante Sujato certainly doesn’t need me to argue a defense… he’s a more skilled advocate than I could hope to be. But, I hope that you, Dan, and others don’t see these threads as being anything more than an opportunity to examine and provoke spirited thought and discussion…a level of inquiry and discussion much needed these days.
My main problem with secular Buddhism is that if rebirth isn’t true and Nirvana is just a state of mind, what is there left in terms of an ultimate meaning to existence? I feel a strong need for there to be an Ultimate Truth to life and to reality.
One aspect that I think was not touched a lot is that parts of the secular movement not just demand proof of supernatural claims - there is a downright (slightly concealed) hatred against other cultures and the claim of the supremacy of the ‘western’ way of thinking.
A dramatic example of what I mean is there was a debate about the circumcision of Muslim and Jewish kids in Germany a few years ago, and that it’s battery and a criminal offense. While this is a valid position the tone of the debate was very poisonous, leading to “If you don’t like how we do things here, get the hell out to where you can do these idiotic primitive rituals!” The courts were inclined to follow. Finally the parliament wisely passed a law to officially legalize religious circumcision and thus averted a situation that Hitler would have loved - an impossible Jewish (and Muslim) life in Germany.
My point is the secular debate is sometimes politically-correctly restrained but underneath venomous in its attitude. And here’s where I’m fully agreeing with Sujato again, that the ‘western’ secular pseudo-scientific position is often full of unproved metaphysical materialistic assumptions that people use to fuel a feeling of self-important cultural superioriority.
I think this is worth pointing out again. There’s no point speculating wildly about it because there will be no conclusion or consensus but only confusion resulting in it. The only good thing that I can think of is that it might provide some grounds to accept rebirth on faith, which in turn helps practitioners. What the Buddha really said is develop a deep samadhi yourself and see if you can access and if so, accept your past life memories.
With metta
My one adjustment to that would be that there is a big difference between any one else claiming those types of things, and the Buddha claiming them. The profound nature of his teachings are at a level that allows me to trust in him far more than the normal person. And yes, anyone can say this about anyone, but I think even you would agree that the Buddha and his teachings are something quite different. This may be a small adjustment, but to many, it has profound implications. That is, highly empirical people coming to believe in rebirth. This isn’t just someone talking about a mountain they climbed and throwing in some mystical stuff, this is the Buddha we are talking about. And to me at least, that has to make a difference.
@DKervick You wrote: a speculative theory that the Buddha had achieved, thorough [through] an unexplained form of “mental development”. Many of us have heard the teachings: the ‘explained’ form of mental development that is required for the recollection of past lives. You may not be satisfied with these teachings but they certainly do exist. The question is: are you prepared to undertake the training in mental development to get the point where you can understand if rebirth actually happens? It involves a bit more than a speculative opinion with regard to rebirth. The Buddha never said that what we are capable of understanding now is the end of the story. There is much more to learn in the Dharma! It may be an endless journey of discovery? As our practice deepens we may discover many things that we find surprising? That should make the journey more interesting as we don’t know what is around the corner. You seem to be saying that you have ‘understood’ that rebirth does not exist? Is this an established fact or just an opinion you have because of your secular belief system? Show me an empirical study where rebirth has been disproved? I will then believe you have hard evidence that it is false! Until then, I will assume that you are offering an opinion that you find compelling because it fits with your preset conclusions about life, the universe and, everything? The most absurd thing about secular Buddhism is its tendency to express views and opinions that are disguised as facts and foregone conclusions. Secular beliefs or religious beliefs are things that are entertained by believers. Secularism is not a collection of facts and religion a collection of fictions or vice versa. They are both mixed bags of facts, fictions, theories, conjectures and so on … The real question is: how do people come to take themselves so seriously that the little voices in their heads become the final arbiters of truth? We all know that our knowledge is limited and is often a consequence of looking at things from a personal perspective. Our personal perspectives are conditioned by our upbringing, peer groups etc. Our brains may mediate or produce ideas and bend our perceptions but do they reveal the truth of the way things are? The truth which liberates - the 3rd Noble Truth - is not a little voice in our head. It is the greatest discovery ever made for the benefit of sentient beings.
The main problem with trying to understand what the Pali texts are getting at is that I have no idea what the Buddha actually said. I can know what people said he said centuries after the fact, but that’s it. How much of the texts has been added wholesale? How much has been changed to match some later orthodoxy? I can only guess. For all I know, troublesome faith-based concepts like rebirth, merit, gods and godlets, people flying around, and realms of existence were injected at a later date. Or maybe they were always there. All I can do is weigh various concepts against my experience and investigate them. I have no doubt that a serious Pali scholar can guess a lot better than I what to take seriously and what to ignore, since they’ll be able to spot a later style of writing, but that’s a matter of refinement and not a complete solution. What, for example, am I to do with DN 27? Treat it as a fable? Or ignore it as a flight of fancy? I do the latter, but as a documented Sangha member, should I?
If there really are Things I Must Believe before I can practice, then I’ve been wasting my time for over 40 years, and I’ll be sad. 
Lucky for me, the Buddha is recorded as having been skeptical of truth-claims and recommending not doing that. If he really said it, of course.
Here’s my basic difficulty with the rebirth concept: Memory is dependent on physical structures of neurons in the brain. It’s notoriously unreliable in the first place-- I’ve discovered that a lot of things I thought I remembered either didn’t happen or didn’t happen the way I recorded them-- and is subject to erasure by drugs, electroshock therapy, Alzheimer’s, tumors, and so on. So how is it that these fragile structures get transferred across time and space into another person’s brain?
That said, I have affinities I simply can’t explain. A family friend offered me a small prize of my choosing as a reward for writing her a piece of music when I was 14. I chose a statue of the Buddha despite knowing absolutely nothing of Buddhism; I was simply drawn to it somehow. (I was not raised in any religious tradition.) Bagpipes cause an immediate gripping emotional response in me. The first time I heard them, I was electrified and rooted to the spot. My last name is Scots, so does that mean something? I don’t know.
Thank you for your kind reply, @AnagarikaMichael.
There is more to be said about all of this, and about the differences found in different turnings of the wheel. But I think such discussion is best done in a context of kindness and compassion, trying to get right with expanding a practice of nonclinging, which after all is the heart of the dhamma. 
In other traditional Christian metaphysics, there are two faculties of the mind, the intellectual-discursive faculty, and the noetic faculty. I am unfamiliar with this Roman model of the mind, conditioned as it is by engagement in back-and-forth polemic with philosophical perspectives alien to the older way of framing things.
The intellect and nous (noetic faculty) are identical and perfectly aligned in their “natural” state, but the intellect becomes bespeckled and muddied by entanglement with the lower passions: pride, lust, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, and the intellect becomes disaligned from the nous and the nous prevented from its intended function. The intellect draws from the senses exclusively.
The relation between the intellect and the nous is reflected in the first words of Jesus in the canonical gospels, when he urges those around to purify their nous (which is translated as “repent” in English). Christian orthodoxy maintains that the perfect alignment of the nous and the intellect is prefigured in the conformity of the two natures of the personhood of Christ: God and man identical without contradiction. Nous is like átman, because it is the unchanging “image of God” that Christians believe humanity was created with.
This “sensism” is the very same thing your OP is against, as it specifically discounts the contemplative experience that is at the heart of essentially all contemplative traditions. It does this by assuming that contemplative experiences are essentially wrong and delusion, or at the very least that nothing can be established from them. “Consciousness” is not considered a “sense” traditionally in the West, and as such, this definition of “sensism” being used expressly excludes discursive thought and nondiscursive contemplation as sense information alike, rending no one’s experiences as a valid source of truth at all.
Point-and-case, one can easily re-write this passage from the Catholic encyclopedia to be about the OP:
Sensism destroys the foundations of Buddhist morality and right-view. For, as sensists and positivists admit, their theories leave no proof of cyclical transmigration and the inheritance of karma between lives, of the existence of moral law determining rebirth, its obligation and manifestation in a future life, of the existence of the unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned and its relation to the born, the become, the made, the conditioned. Now history bears witness that these truths are fundamental for man’s religious and moral life.
Christians point to the figure of Jesus because of his testimony of “the Father”, which none have seen but him (John 6:46), even the ancient Jews allegedly, whose visions of “the Father” were all actually of Jesus-as-Logos (John 5:39), since the Father does not interact with humanity at all, save for creating them, in the Old Testament (or any part of the Bible) as interpreted by Christians traditionally.
As such, the only connection ‘anyone’ has to this “Father” is Jesus’s testaments, preserved well or poorly, and the personal experiences of Christians be them laity, clergy, or monastic contemplatives.
Similarly, in Buddhism, we have an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. The only connection we have to that, or the only ‘substantiation’ of that, is the word of the Buddha, the words of Buddhists, and the experiences of practitioners, be them laity or contemplatives.
How does the Buddha “prove” the unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned?
If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned.
(Ud 8.3)
This isn’t the kind of proof that a “sensist” wants to hear, because that perspective rests on discounting and ignoring the efficacy of mental training. If an untrained worldling cannot “sense” it, no one can, is the message I get from this perspective. With this in mind, it is no wonder why this perspective looks at rebirth, or the existence of devāḥ, or nāgāḥ for example, with an eyebrow raised. These are not things that “normal people” ‘see’.
The “sensist” perspective that is outlined discounts this because it discounts the efficacy of mental development (not seeing it as something verifiable) and thereby the empiricism of the Buddhadharma. It all rests on the words of the Buddha and the experiences of the contemplatives who have achieved similar things.
Speaking of this quote, though,
This could easily be a Buddhist quote. For example, one could say that Nibbāna is unseen. One could say that cessation is unseen. Even dependent origination is ‘unseen’ depending on the perspective of who is ‘seeing’.
Yes and I think both these are part of the same parcel of practices.
Outsiders debated with the Buddha. He was particularly unhappy when his own followers misrepresented him. I don’t think secular Buddhists are Buddhists, actually. I’m not certain they are followers of the Buddha:
“Venerable sir, in what way is one a lay follower?”
.
“Mahanama, inasmuch as one has gone to the Buddha for refuge, has gone to the Dhamma for refuge, has gone to the Sangha for refuge; in that way, Mahanama, one is a lay follower.” AN8.25
If anyone state that the Buddha was mistaken (or lying) about rebirth, rather than having some doubt, they essentially do not have faith saddha in the Buddha. Therefore they cannot be called Buddhists, but perhaps Buddhaphiles.
I think many people misunderstand (misrepresent?) science! Scientists never claim to have understood the final truth. Scientific findings are only valid until they are disproven by further findings. It is a continually evolving field. Newtonian physics giving way to Qunatum physics is a good example. If people then dogmatically hold on to current knowledge as final then it is only an expression of ego or ignorance. I think the universe is actually stranger than what the Buddha taught us -he didn’t teach somethings as it wasn’t helpful with the path. Quantum strangeness is only going to become more strange. This is a clear trend as science progresses and understands more about how the universe works, it requires stranger theories beyond what can be easily sensed by the sense organs.
I also understand that many people think that science is impartial and certainly better than religion, in this regard. This maybe true regarding some religions and no doubt against some circumstances in Buddhism as well where some individuals have behaved in unacceptable ways. However science has its own biases. For example to become published in peer reviewed journal one’s research must rest on what came before it. In other words the peer review process eliminates work which would otherwise diminish the field. This means that research that gets recognition is typically railroaded down a certain direction. Anything that is outside the current frame of understanding has little chance, other than to be published in a fringe publication. I really doubt there will be further mainstream research into this following Ian Stevenson’s work, unless Quantum mechanics finds evidence, essentially through the ‘back door’.
with metta
Yes. I provisionally take the Buddha’s teaching on Rebirth as something one shall encounter along the road map of awakening as and when we develop to that level of understanding. I appreciate Bhante Sujato’s exposé of the Secular take on Buddhism as it appears this is something that is becoming quite mainstream, if not already so, although personally I have not detected a lot of it in the Buddhist circles I move in.
I can’t speak for others but I rather enjoy reading about the manifold realms of existence out there as per the EBTs. Furthermore, it would be quite an undermining revelation for my practice if there were no round of rebirth to put an end to. So I can’t reconcile the Secular position on it in relation to what the Buddha actually repeatedly says.
That’s the dilemma a critical approach is pointing at: There is no way to determine if there is a round of rebirth or not. The Buddha said so i basta. If you don’t experience it, it only means ‘you’re not there yet’. And let’s say you come to realize your last births, it might come not necessarily as a verifiable experience but rather as a deep knowledge. Meaning, others will have to take your word for it. It will be very difficult to determine if one really was the cleaning lady of Nofretete back in the days…
But isn’t it fairly obvious that ‘Secular Buddhism’ (what a pompous title !) ultimately can’t explain the suffering in this world ? Nothing is explained at all - the sordid inequality in people’s lives, the burning question of whether there is justice in existence etc. - after all, lots of people get away with heinous crimes. And it can’t give any answer that doesn’t resemble tortured sophistry to a simple question like: what justifies the struggle to stay alive, fighting diseases and a thousand other forms of misery ? It seems like this diluted doctrine appeals to the opinionated who haven’t realized the harrowing reach of the very first Noble Truth…
Hi Michael. Yes, I read that section with interest, and looked on for his further attempt to evaluate rebirth as an empirical theory, but there was nothing of substance to be found. He offered not a single piece of empirical evidence for rebirth. Instead he offered the pure speculation that maybe the Buddha was in the possession of such evidence because, through a completely unexplained process of “mental development”, the Buddha had developed the capacity to observe way more things than other people can observe, things that apparently include the history of birth and death in throughout the whole cosmos. That’s not empirical evidence. It’s mere speculation.
There was also the somewhat different idea offered, that based on his direct meditative experience and heightened insight into the world of experience, where paticcasumuppada can be directly observed to operate, the Buddha had extrapolated and developed the theory of paticcasamuppada as a kind of overarching natural cosmological hypothesis, analogous to Democritus’s atomic theory, from which rebirth follows in some way as a consequence. This makes it sound like belief in rebirth is merely an application of the “hypothetico-deductive method” in science.
The problem with this is that if paticcasamuppada is interpreted in the conventional three lives approach - where birth (understood as rebirth) is simply one of the basic links - then the argument reduces to the claim that on the basis of his direct experience, the Buddha saw that rebirth occurs, and he extrapolated from there. So this is just a version of the previous argument. They only way one could scientifically confirm patticcasamuppada would be to confirm the existence of rebirth independently.
On the other hand, if paticcasumuppada is understood according to one of the purely psychological one-life models, then rebirth does not follow from it. So if one only claims, more plausibly than before, that on the basis of his direct experience, the Buddha developed an insight into the moment-by-moment dependent constructions of ongoing mental phenomena, nothing will follow about death and rebirth.
The whole issue, as he set it up, is a red herring, because most informed secularists do not simply say that the problem with traditional, rebirth-oriented Buddhism is “metaphysics”. They say exactly what Bhante Sujato is saying - that rebirth is an empirical claim about the natural world - and then they go on to say that it is an empirical claim for which there is no compelling evidence, and thus one should refrain from believing it if one is interest conforming one’s beliefs to the evidence.
But of course, many people believe in rebirth anyway, despite the lack of evidence, and that’s why I said that belief is in almost all cases a faith-based belief. One can’t get out of this conclusion by claiming that maybe, some day, the evidence for it will exist; or that maybe, some people have super-normal evidence-gathering capacities, and they have the evidence. Every proposition we can consider that is not logically or conceptually impossible is amenable to this speculative “maybe” treatment. But the faith-based speculation that there may someday be empirical evidence for a hypothesis, of that such evidence exists already, but is confined to a few super-normal minds, is not the same thing as actually having evidence. So any attempt here to say that traditional Buddhism, which includes all this business about rebirth, and heavens, and hells, and devas and Brahmas, is superior as a rational belief system to other faith-based belief systems is completely misguided. The future resurrection of the dead, and the existence of the holy spirit, for example, could be regarded as empirical hypotheses for which, maybe, someday there will be empirical evidence, or for which maybe, empirical evidence already exists in the minds of a few specially cultivated or gifted saints and seers.
Yes, it is the usual stuff. The Buddha recommended that we stop doing it. And as you say, that advice is applicable whether my lifespan is 75 years long or 75 kalpas long.
Yes - I also have the feeling that those who make the ‘breakthrough’ and see their past lives in the context of the NEP aren’t likely to be publicising that they were once a high priestess of the Incas and such like. It goes without saying that the rules for monks & nuns forbids such disclosures in any case.