This is incorrect. Here is the Pali text:
All that karma and rebirth bullshit did not come from Buddha and is not required belief.
None of these things are required beliefs, and are often understood as highly metaphorical anyway, especially in Zen.
There are scores of Pali Suttas where the Buddha talks about karma and rebirth. If you took a time machine to 500 B.C.E northern India and asked Siddhartha Gautama about the subject, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t call it “bullshit.”
The Buddha specifically said it didn’t matter if you believed in rebirth or not. He pretty much did call the Hindu concept of transmigation of souls bullshit, but his teachings really had nothing to do with ideas of the afterlife anyway. He was teaching people how to relieve themselves of unhappiness right now, in this life, and said that all unhappininess was caused by desire you feel right now in this life.
The unique part of Buddhism, IMO, is that it is focused on ending or at least diminishing suffering not only for yourself but for others. It’s part of other religions but not necessarily the focus. I also think the Buddha came up with this idea not just from meditating but through many years of observation and experimentation.
I’d like to add my scientific explanation of what happened to the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. I will include some of my experiences while meditating but I want to caution anyone from putting too much weight into my own experiences (if you meditate, you may have your own).
What I took out of that experience was very dependent on what I brought in to the experience and this is where I think the Buddhist philosophy that includes ending suffering by realizing that everything is empty and impermanent informs your meditation. When I used to meditate a lot, the first thing I would do is focus on something. In zazen, you’re not supposed to do that but I usually ended up doing it accidentally. So if I was counting breaths, I would feel every aspect of the breath or sometimes I would actually see numbers floating in my head like on Sesame Street. Eventually, I’d reach a state in which I heard and felt everything at once, not just the breath. Then I would meld with everything, meaning I wouldn’t feel my arms and legs as something separate. Then there was hugeness. Hard to describe. This brought a feeling of bliss. If I were Christian, I might feel that I was engulfed by Jesus’ love. For me, I just realized that being me is not really such a big deal. Other things are more important.
When Buddha had his first epiphany, he was just a boy and he was watching a man plow the fields. As I recall, he realized after his meditative state that everything was impermanent like crops, the birds and the worms, etc. When he was older, he set out to observe the world with a special interest in suffering. He was also interested in happiness since he seemed unfulfilled even though he was a prince. When he finally sat under the Bodhi tree, his transcendental experience involved a war with Mara (the trickster). This is when he came up with the idea that desires can lead to unhappiness. However, I suspect that he was already informed by his previous experiences so that he didn’t think desires were evil; instead it was clinging and attachment that resulted in dukkha. So he got himself into the transcendent state of mind but it was the issues he was contemplating on previously that made him come up with something unique from even the current Indian religions.
So where did he come up with the notion of rebirth? Well, reincarnation and karma was already around. However, I think he was already starting to think that nothing was permanent so a permanent soul probably didn’t exist either. He already had feelings of no-self through his adventures into the various Indian aesthetics. Plus, he was concerned about suffering and just battled Mara during meditation. This is why he came up with the idea of co-dependent origination which is the cornerstone of the 2nd Noble Truth. Wikipedia puts it nicely: With Ignorance as condition, Mental Formations arise; With Mental Formations as condition, Consciousness arises; With Consciousness as condition, Name and Form arise; With Name & Form as condition, Sense Gates arise; With Sense Gates as condition, Contact arises; With Contact as condition, Feeling arises; With Feeling as condition, Craving arises; With Craving as condition, Clinging arises; With Clinging as condition, Becoming arises; With Becoming as a condition, Birth arises; With Birth as condition, Aging and Dying arise.
My interpretation of this is that once the Buddha turned down activity in 4 areas of his brain, especially the pre-frontal cortex, all the sense gates and mental formations and cravings disappear and he felt like nothing and everything at the same time. So he saw all his “thousands of lives” (ie. One with the universe). Once you’re part of the universe, there is no “you” to be born die or reborn. When you realize that, you stop clinging to things, you’re enlightened and you stop suffering. The trick is to not see it intellectually but to realize it intuitively. The only way to know things intuitively is through practice, just like everything else.
Can I just say, that the key word here is require. You can find many sanghas that don’t require you to accept some meaning of rebirth. Furthermore, I still would like someone to define what is reborn. If we can’t define what is reborn, that what exactly are we required to believe?
That fits well with the “perennial philosophy” view of the essential experience of mysticism (see Aldous Huxley’s book of the same name: Perennial Philosophy: Huxley, Aldous: 9780060901912: Books - Amazon.ca ).
The same insight (again, with the emphasis on intuitive knowledge rather than intellectual understanding) show up again and again in various philosophical and religious traditions - some of which are expressly theistic and some of which are not.
It is of course not in and of itself of necessity a supernatural belief-system, though of course, it can be intepreted that way if the mystic is from a tradition that includes the supernatural. A Christian mystic is likely to interpret the same experience as “oneness with God”, whereas a Taoist mystic will take a more pantheist view.
Traditionally and historically, Buddhism as a religion/philosophy in its Theravada version has usually interpreted the Buddha’s insight in a manner, or rather through a lens, of the supernatural. Though I tend to agree with you that something rather like the typical mystic insight was what the Buddha himself experienced (though of course, I cannot by any means prove it).
Hence my notion that one is likely to get a different answer to the same question, depending on whether one approaches the matter as a historian with a historical, textual and ethnographic approach, or as a Buddhist practioner or mystic with an intuitive approach to what is “essential” (the basic mystic insight being “essential” and all else merely explanatory).
Even from a historical perspective, the Buddha still said supernatural beliefs didn’t matter, and his method had no dependence or necessary reference to them
But really, if the Master of a meditation method has achieved perfect enlightenment and he still believed in gods and angels, isn’t it a little odd to adopt the method if you don’t at least think that’s likely correct?
The worst fundamentalists are always those on the outside looking in.
Samsara has been identified differently by different groups since Siddartha Gautama. Before that too, but within Buddhism there has always been room for different ideas on even the most basic concepts. If you practice what the Buddha taught and prefer to call yourself Buddhist, you are Buddist. You may not care for the title so you can call yourself a student of Buddhism or one who practices Buddhist thought.
You don’t have to believe in any sort of “soul” migration or anything supernatural. But if it helps you to stay on your path, you are welcome to believe in “soul” migration. To be Buddhist or follow Buddhism doesn’t require strict adherence to an writing any more than being a Christian requires one to believe women who commit adultery should be stoned to death. It’s more analogous than you think, but you have to understand the way of Buddhism to see it as a valid comparison. You’d likely say Christianity doesn’t depend on stoning adulterers either, but you know as well as I do that you can take several verses in the Bible and say this is evidence that Christians think adulterers should be executed. You take some words the Buddha said and you say, “See here, this is what he meant!” but you don’t know. It’s so open to interpretation even the Buddha himself would ask the earnest student instead of offering an explanation. And that answer would be accepted. This is the Buddhist approach.
You go in looking for something you’ve already decided on; you’re not interested in a Buddhist’s opinion unless it’s in agreement with your own and you will tell a Buddhist his opinions are not valid, for the sake of your argument. This is not the Buddhist way.
To try and break the circle going on here I have a question that seems to have been ignored
Is the actions and effects beyond scientific understanding and to all of the rules of the natural rules of nature apply to that said action?
If so and if he found the solution to all suffering why did he not just share it?
I know saying “all” of anything is never a realistic question or test but as I am not a thiest I do not see how the solution to suffering could anything but supernatural.
a) found the solution by sitting under a tree where he was tempted by some outside force, which due to him searching enlightenment made it thunder etc…
b) he discovered the solution to end suffering.
c) yet suffering still a human issue in his followers and no one else has found enlightenment.
I would opine by the fact that his experience is not repeatable and there is at the current time no objective measure of enlightenment, that the belief is beyond scientific understanding and supernatural.
With the test being that you believe in his enlightenment, of course you could like his sayings but think he never reached it or even acknowledge such a state.
Well, we know that death and rebirth occurs continuously throughout the day within a person, “16 times in the blink of an eye”, IIRC. But let me continue from a Theravada text quoted in post 98.
What happens when one dies? Does the soul transmigrate to another? No: according to Theravada texts, this does not happen. Two metaphors are offered:
There’s a pretty direct secular interpretation of the above: reincarnation as commonly understood in the West does not happen. But a sort of rebirth occurs, insofar as ideas and stances are transmitted through culture and interpersonal interaction. For those who believe that I am imposing one age’s views on another, answer me why this text didn’t simply say that souls are constantly changing and they move from one place to another after death.
This isn’t some obscure text I quoted: AFAIK, the metaphor of the moving flame is a popular one. Don’t get me wrong: traditional Buddhist presentations are full of supernatural references. But the Buddha was pretty explicit in saying that they weren’t all that important: for example, the Buddha accepted that a heavenly realm existed, but he replied that its inhabitants were incapable of entering Nirvana. It seems reasonable to assert that which the Buddha deemed unimportant is not central to the practice of Buddhism, never mind a necessary component thereof. And indeed, most of the philosophy and meditation concerns itself with anatman, AFAIK.
Even if Buddha believed that sun revolved around the earth, why should I believe the same? Scientists don’t take Newton’s alchemy seriously either, but they all use calculus.
I did some extensive study of mystic techiques as a Religion Major in college (some of it for indpendent study credits), and I was struck by the basic similarity of the experience once it got past the belief systems.
I tried all kinds of things personally, from drugs, to shamanic drumming, to various types of meditation, to fasting to a Lakota smokeout (I had a roomate at time whose father was an NAC Medicine Man at a Lakota reservation. I tried to get in on a peyote ritual too, but was discouraged. My roommate described the ritual to me in deatil, though, and it didn’t sound like as much fun as I’d imagined).
I had varying degrees of success (even an OBE sensation or two), but the only thing that stuck with me long term was Zazen. I liked (and still like) how clean and simple it is. It’s just mindfulness - a kind of disciplined awareness that breaks you out of ego awareness. I’ve even had the “one with the universe” experience (during meditation), which for me was a sensation of my awareness turning “inside out.” It was a complete reorientation of what I experienced as my “self.” Instead of “self” being me inside the universe, I had a sensation of my self really being the universe itself, and my body only being one of the things (and not a very important thing) that was part of it. The identification of myself as my body was (sorry to be trite here) an illusion of the ego. That we mistake our egos for being “us,” when they really just obstruct. A lot of the kinds of metaphors that are commonly used (like the dust on the mirror) made sense to me now. We experience ourselves as our thoughts - as the constant, running commentary that is the expression of our physical needs, desires, emotions, fears, etc. That internal monologue that never shuts up is not really us. The real us is underneath that ego consciousness.
I feel like that realization is what lies behind not only the Buddha story about the trickster god under the bo tree, but also behind Jesus’ metaphorical battle with Satan in the wilderness. Jesus and Buddha both had to get past both physical desires (Jesus’ battle symbolized with food, Buddha with carnal desires), both had to battle feelings of grandiosity for their insights, and both consider letting themselves just go ahead and die fulfilled. It’s really the same war with the ego.
Literalizing supernatural metaphors is missing the point in both cases. I think you’re right that the Buddha experiencing all his other lives and deaths was about his reorientation of self and recognition that all births and deaths were the product of his own ego.
Within the Theravada tradition, (c) is not the case. There are many who have obtained nirvana.
Realistically though, I’d say that the Buddha developed a number of techniques to ameliorate suffering/tedium/dukkha. They involve mediation and philosophical insight.
I’ve been avoiding this thread until now, but seeing Warren being quoted always warms my tiny little heart.
You are an able poster, Measure for Measure.
No because one really has nothing to do with the other. Meditation does not give you any empirical information you don’t already have. It’s a different state of consciousness, a different sensation of how you see and experience things, but it doesn’t tell you what the speed of light is, or whether there is life on other planets. You come out with the same cosmological/scientific knowledge and assumptions you go in with. It’s not magic. It doesn’t impart new knowledge, just insights about your own mind.
I think this seriously evades the point of my question. While the focus of Buddhist meditation is the focus on self, I don’t think it’s outlandish to say that the true goal is to understand the nature of the universe*. If the Buddha had been some complete racist and proscribed this meditation method, I have a feeling a lot of progressive people might not be taking it up. Yet, because the founder of this religion removes himself from your decision to believe in the supernatural, we are supposed to ignore that his mastery of the method left him believing in gods and angels.
eta: I think I answer Diogenes here as well.
*or your relationship with it at least
So do we have access to these people? I am sure there are several scientists who would love to study someone who has become enlightened and knows how to get rid of human suffering.
For it to not be supernatural it would seem that empirical data should be available.
To clarify I am not against the concept of the supernatural or even theism, I just have had no proof, I would convert if you could provide me with empirical data, which should possible if it is only in the natural world.
No, the goal is only to reduce suffering. It’s not, and was never supposed to be, any kind of holistic explanation for the universe.
No, you’re wrong. The removal of suffering has a purpose and it is a holistic one.
eta: In case you think this is some thoughtless contrarian post, it is not
Scientists have indeed studied people in states of samadhi. Here’s a wiki about studies done on the famous Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna, for instance.
I’m not sure what kind of “proof” you’re talking about, but individual in these states do show a number of unusual physiological and neurological characteristics. They are definitely in an altered physiological and psychological state.