No you didn’t. You don’t understand what you’re reading. You are confused about the difference between rebirth and transmigration of souls, but both of those things can be rendered in English as “reincarnation.”
The Eightfold Path is about relieving dukkha, which is often translated as “suffering,” but (so I was told by Eastern Religion prof actually versed in Pali) as "dissatisfaction. The First Noble Truth is that life is inherently unsatisfactory. The Path relives this dischord/unhappiness/suffering. It has fuck all to do with samsara instead of the most metpahorical sense in which samsara - constinuous death and rebirth - is going on constantly in this life.
It’s about relieving dukkha, not rebirth. You don’t know what you’re talking about. The Four Noble Truths don’t say shit about rebirth ot a permanent soul.
By the way, did you read the sutra where Buddhs explicitly said it doesn’t matter if you believe in rebirth or not?
Buddhism makes no effort to deny whatever cultural, ambient supernatural beliefs it finds itself among. It does not make any of those beliefs mandatory, though. You can believe in them or not. It doesn’t matter. I said early on that supernatural beliefs (and even god beliefs) are ubiquitous in Buddhism, but none of them are required, and that includes any belief in a literal samasara.
This is true, and, I think, ultimately what **Bricker **is driving at.
In the original, the supernatural was irrelevant. Buddha saw that question as irrelevant and said so. He explicitly said it didn’t matter if you believed in a literal version of samsara (which is actually a Hindu concept). What mattered was using the Path to relieve dukkha RIGHT NOW.
You must be the Buddha because he said basically the exact same thing! 
It’s worth returning back to this definition of “require,” because it points to what seems a key difference:
-Jesus was really clear about the necessity of a belief in his divinity: You wanna talk with Dad, you go through Me, he said.
-Buddha was really clear that he didn’t care about rebirth: if you’re thinking about the supernatural theories and stuff, you’re totally missing the point, he said.
So if you’re looking at Christianity, it makes sense to say that a belief in Jesus’s divinity is key, since that’s what Jesus himself said. The fact that many people believe in it is immaterial: many other beliefs people have had about Jesus (the Holy Grail, belief in Mary’s divinity, the belief that prayer brings prosperity) are cultural flotsam that follows Christianity, but it wouldn’t make sense to say that Christianity requires these beliefs. Even if you look at Christianity during periods or in cultures in which a particular belief is nearly universal among Christians (the Pope is God’s representative on earth or whatever, and yes, I know that’s sloppily phrased), someone who rejects that belief may still be a Christian if they believe in Jesus’s unique divinity.
If you’re looking at Buddhism, though, all the supernatural stuff appears to be cultural flotsam, given Buddha’s own remarks about not wasting time theorizing about those beliefs. He doesn’t say, “Nobody reaches enlightenment except through belief in reincarnation”; quite the opposite.
So someone that doesn’t believe in reincarnation isn’t like a Christian who rejects Jesus’s divinity, something sine qua non of Christianity; they’re more like a 15th-century Christian who rejects the Pope’s authority, something nearly universal but nevertheless not emphasized by the religion’s founder.
That’s how it looks to me, anyway.
FWIW, DtC and Bricker, the sniping y’all have done at and the bickering y’all have done with each other in this thread has made your comments about the least interesting ones in the thread. I much prefer Measure for Measure and heatmiserfl and MrDibble and Malthus, who are actually providing a fairly decent education in the relevant issues.
I agree.
To my mind, the real problem lies in the attempt to get at what is “essential” to the nature of Buddhism.
There are two ways of going about that analysis:
(1) From a historical, ethnographic and descriptive analysis; and
(2) From a philosophical/intuitive analysis.
From the first perspective, it is pretty clear that the supernatural is an integral part of Theravada Buddhism from its beginning. The Buddha’s own sayings, in the Pali canon, simply assume that stuff like reincarnation is true, and that liberation from the cycle is the goal. Some suttas state this expressly, like the one quoted above about monks having shed an ocean of tears through various lifetimes. And certainly, most historic sects of Buddhism understood it to mean just that.
From the second perspective, it is perfectly possible to construct a coherent set of beliefs that emphasize enlightment being something that occurs in this life alone, or even in brief flashes or moments. Certainly, several Mahayana sects believe that (mind you several others are purely devotional), though to my mind it requires some redefining of terms and changing of meanings to make sense. Someone following one of those Mahayana sects may indeed re-examine the Pali texts and find what they need in there - though it would take ignoring or redefining what doesn’t fit, by way of declaring that those bits are not “essential” from a ‘true, intuitive knowledge of Buddhism’.
Hence, you are likely to get Western historians of Buddhism and Western Buddhists saying different things.
It seems to me, then, if you can get two different educated people making defensible arguments in either direction, it doesn’t make sense to call a belief in the supernatural required. Claiming it’s required appears to be far too cut-and-dry.
From a historical perspectoive, Buddha thought supernatural beliefs were irrelevant and said so. Buddhism is not bound by the cultural milieu it sprang from. It if were, it would be Hinduism.
Jesus was a practicing, kosher keeping Jew. That doesn’t mean you have to observe Jewish law to be Christian (and don’t bother telling me what Paul said, because Paul wasn’t Jesus, and Jesus said to keep following the Law).
Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are filled with archaic and incorrect assumptions about the physical universe, that doesn’t mean you have to think the sky is a solid dome or that stars can literally fall to the earth to be either Christian or Jewish.
Supernatural beliefs are not, and never have been an essential or required part of Buddhist practice, any more than YEC beliefs are required to be Christian.
Another thing to consider is the insidious passive voice in “required.” Who’s doing the requiring?
I think other synonyms might make the issue clearer. Instead of saying, “required,” you could say, “mainstream,” or “normal,” or even “recognizeable.” These words might lead to different results. Non-supernatural theravada Buddhism might not be mainstream and it might not be normal–but would people still recognize it as Theravada? Which people?
If, say, 95% of self-identified Theravada Buddhists wouldn’t recognize it as Theravada, that’s pretty significant.
They wouldn’t tell you you weren’t practicing Theravada.
Can you describe to me, precisely, the process of rebirth and what is being reborn?
What makes you believe that?
Because you would would be practicing Theravada.
That’s a circular argument and not what I asked at all. I asked why you think they wouldn’t tell you that you weren’t. Given that Theravada Buddhism has no central authority to declare who is and who isn’t practicing it, an answer should either refer to external cites of what self-identified Theravada Buddhists believe constitutes Theravada Buddhism, or to some supernatural inner source you possess.
Therevada is about practice, not belief. If you are practicing the Theravadic disciplines (none of which involve anything supernatural), then you are, by definition, practicing Theravada. Therevadic practice is (obviously) defined by practicing Therevadic disciplines. If you’re practicing, you’re practicing, if you aren’t you aren’t. Belief plays no role in it. Practice is supposed to be about getting beyond beliefs anyway. If you believe anything, you’re doing it wrong.
It’s worthwhile to point out that there’s no such thing as a Buddhist Pope to authoritatively declare Buddhist Orthdoxy. The Buddha explicitly declined to appoint a leader to replace him. So any renegade Buddhist who proclaims he doesn’t believe in the supernatural isn’t going to be excommunicated for doing so.
However, belief in Karma and Rebirth are listed as part of Right View, which is the first thing listed in the Noble Eightfold Path.
Both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism believe in Paticcasamuppāda, or Dependent Arising, a description of the proccess of samsara that includes death and rebirth.