If…Christians recognize that there is no contradiction between the Buddhist teaching of pratitya samutpada and the Christian teaching of a loving God, then the practice of Buddhist meditation and the deep realization of the nature of reality to which that leads need not draw one away from Christian faith. Instead, it can be a rich complement that can gradually be integrated into a fully biblical faith. One can realize that both God and oneself are instances of pratitya samutpada without in any way losing one’s confidence in God’s love and acceptance or becoming less sensitive to God’s call to act for justice and inclusivity.

John Cobb, “Deep Pluralism,” The Pluralist, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 63-73

I’m always a little confused at the way this term is used positively to mean “interdependence” (more Mahayana usage) as opposed to referring to the whole causal chain of suffering, ignorance and rebirth (more Theravadan usage), but, if we assume Cobb to mean awakening to, or understanding the truth of dependent origination (Pali: patticasamupadda), then I’m on board.

(see also: dependent origination)

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  • 2012-05/08 Group B#4 - Question on RebirthSayadaw U Tejaniya

Sayadaw U Tejaniya responds to a question about karma and rebirth during a reporting session at the IMS Dhamma Everywhere Retreat (full audio here).

This is the first time I heard him speak directly to this issue and I found his reply very confirming. Though he doesn’t explicitly speak to the literal interpretation and leaves open a range of interpretations on this issue, I asked him to clarify my own understanding later and questioned him if what was really important in the concept of rebirth was the moment to moment arising and passing away as opposed to what happens when this body dies, and he said yes.

The transcription is my own, I have not included every word and I ask that you forgive me for any discrepancy in the audio recording. The run time of the audio clip is just under 7 minutes, translation and all.

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Translation: MaThet (Moushumi) Ghosh

The questioner (Q) is a yogi/retreatant and the respondent (A) is Sayadaw U Tejaniya as translated by MaThet. Steve Armstrong, an American teacher in the insight meditation tradition, also a student of SUT, comments.

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Q: How does bad karma follow you, how does it know to attach to you? How does your bad karma in this life follow you in the next life if there is no self to identify to?

A: I’ll try to explain. You know that because of wrong view, there is nama-rupa. Yes? We know that. And this nama-rupa continues because of the wrong view. So wrong view is the cause for the nama-rupa to continue existing, yes? So, now, each nama-rupa arises to pass away. So the nama-rupa is gone. But because delusion is still present, the next nama-rupa arises. But where does this next nama-rupa get its qualities from? It gets it from the previous one which disappeared. 

[Translator: So there’s an example of a lighted candle, where the fire is given to the next candle. Where you know this candle is not that candle, but the qualities are passed on so there’s a chain of causation. So although the father nama-rupa lives and dies and then the son comes up, the son takes qualities from that father and then passes those qualities on to his son when he dies.]

Q: So it takes a “life of its own” and just follows you?

A: It has its feeling itself, so long as delusion (avija) is present. So that’s why an arhant no longer has that avija, and there is no longer cause and effect, nobody there, nobody who goes to nibbana. 

[Translator: I mean he’s explained about the avija in the other sessions, how dependent origination doesn’t happen one by one, it’s simultaneous. So you’re given a whole chain from avija to nama-rupa. And the moment avija is there, there’s already nama-rupa. It’s a cause and effect chain. It’s sort of like when the sun rises there’s light. It’s simultaneous. You cannot take one away without the other.]

Q: I thought it was a chain of cause and effect. It’s simultaneous?

S.A. It’s a chain of cause and effect but not a time change.

[Translator: All together.]

A: So there are two wrong views associated with this chain of cause and effect, this nama-rupa. 1) Thinking that the form—the conceptual form it takes in a lifetime, a person who is carrying this nama-rupa—carries on in another form after this lifetime and is a completely different person. That’s a kind of wrong view, that everything ends in this life. That this nama-rupa ends and it has nothing to do with the next. That’s one kind of wrong view. 2) The other wrong view is to think that the first nama-rupa is the last nama-rupa, that this person in this lifetime continues in different names for the rest of his lifetimes until he’s enlightened. It’s Joe who changed names to Nancy and so on … that’s wrong view … that there’s a soul so to speak.

Q: But the consciousness has a kind of ID marker that the karma can find and follow?

A: So, it’s like this: although this nama-rupa is not the next nama-rupa, the next nama-rupa still bears the effects of the last nama-rupa. So if this nama-rupa has a lot of kusala, then the next nama-rupa will inherit it, and depending on what this nama-rupa does with it, it will pass it on to the next one. So, you know, all this can change. Sometimes it’s going up, sometimes going down. Because each one has a minuscule part to play in the whole chain.  

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Quick glossary

Arhant: One who has attained liberation from suffering and the cycle of birth and death.

Kusala: wholesome, skillful, good, meritorious. 

Nama-rupa: (lit. ‘name and form’). Mind-and-Body, mentality and corporeality.

Nibbana (Skt: nirvana): liberation, the ending of suffering.

Paticca samuppada: dependent origination, dependent arising and so on is a key doctrine in early Buddhist thought and can be understood most simply as the process that leads from ignorance to rebirth.
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See also

Right attitude or right view (the opposite of wrong view) in Sayadaw U Tejaniya’s teachings - available in 11 languages on his site, free for downloading as “23 Points”

Posts on this Tumblr tagged with dependent origination

A progressive view on rebirth with link to Buddhadasa Bhikkhu essay on anatta and rebirth

Being upright in the midst of whatever is happening is the way to understand Buddha’s teaching of dependent co-arising. In being upright, you let your selfishness just be selfishness and your suffering be suffering. You don’t try to change yourself or others. You don’t try to improve yourself or others. You don’t turn away from or lean into your suffering. You don’t even prefer happiness over suffering. Then you discover that not meddling with the world of suffering is freedom from the world of suffering.
Reb Anderson, Being Upright
“I have said: ‘Consciousness conditions mind-and-body.’ … If consciousness were not to come into the mother’s womb, would mind-and-body develop there?” “No, Lord.” “Or if consciousness, having entered the mother’s womb, were to be deflected, would mind-and-body come to birth in this life?” “No, Lord.” “And if the consciousness of such a tender young being, boy or girl, were thus cut off, would mind-and-body grow, develop and mature?” “No, Lord.” “Therefore, Ananda, just this, namely consciousness, is the root, the cause, the origin, the condition of mind-and-body. “I have said: ‘Mind-and-body conditions consciousness.’ … If consciousness did not find a resting-place in mind-and-body, would there subsequently be an arising and coming-to-be of birth, aging, death and suffering?” “No, Lord.” “Therefore, Ananda, just this, namely mind-and-body, is the root, the cause, the origin, the condition of consciousness. Thus far then, Ananda, we can trace birth and decay, death and falling into other states and being reborn, thus far extends the way of designation, of concepts, thus far is the sphere of understanding, thus far the round goes as far as can be discerned in this life, namely to mind-and-body together with consciousness.” From “On Origination” excerpted from The Long Discourses of the Buddha, translated by Maurice Walshe (Wisdom Publications)
View Separately

“I have said: ‘Consciousness conditions mind-and-body.’ … If consciousness were not to come into the mother’s womb, would mind-and-body develop there?” “No, Lord.”

“Or if consciousness, having entered the mother’s womb, were to be deflected, would mind-and-body come to birth in this life?” “No, Lord.” “And if the consciousness of such a tender young being, boy or girl, were thus cut off, would mind-and-body grow, develop and mature?” “No, Lord.” “Therefore, Ananda, just this, namely consciousness, is the root, the cause, the origin, the condition of mind-and-body.

“I have said: ‘Mind-and-body conditions consciousness.’ … If consciousness did not find a resting-place in mind-and-body, would there subsequently be an arising and coming-to-be of birth, aging, death and suffering?” “No, Lord.” “Therefore, Ananda, just this, namely mind-and-body, is the root, the cause, the origin, the condition of consciousness. Thus far then, Ananda, we can trace birth and decay, death and falling into other states and being reborn, thus far extends the way of designation, of concepts, thus far is the sphere of understanding, thus far the round goes as far as can be discerned in this life, namely to mind-and-body together with consciousness.”

From “On Origination” excerpted from The Long Discourses of the Buddha, translated by Maurice Walshe (Wisdom Publications)

Source: tricycle.com

A progressive Buddhist view on rebirth

commondense:

sharanam replied to your post: Overview of Reincarnation

there are also far more progressive interpretations of “rebirth” (e.g., it’s all energy and process and movement—there’s nothing to really be born or die)—than this one which sort of refutes the whole concept of no-self.

Hey K, I would love for you to start me up on some essential reading in regards to ‘rebirth’. I do understand your interpretation of Self which never dies and that the process of life and death is just a transformation of energy. Shoot me some material. I’m still learning every damn day and I’m grateful that you’re versed in what I am still growing into. =)

Again, thanks so much for the invitation to dialogue D. There are of course wildly divergent views on the topic of rebirth and reincarnation and I can really only offer that which speaks most to me. I cannot provide much in the way of Hindu views on the matter because I’m just not well-versed in Hinduism other than some of the Advaita teachings and in as much as it serves as a foundational worldview for the Buddha’s teaching. In terms of Buddhism’s take on this topic, it varies tremendously from school, to country, and so on. However, on the whole, reincarnation or rebirth is a central part of all traditional Buddhist cultures.

If the only interpretation available were one that was literal, i.e., that there is some essential aspect of this consciousness/mind/self which transmigrates to another life form after the body breaks up (a carry-over from the earlier Brahmanic philosophy/cosmology), or if I felt that adoption of the theory of rebirth were essential to Buddhist practice, I would have trouble identifying with Buddhism at all. Fortunately there are more progressive ways of looking at it, which I will go into a bit below. You may also want to check the archives.

On the one hand, rebirth can be viewed within the context of dependent origination, as the birth of the “I”, which happens mind moment after mind moment in our daily lives (as outlined by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu in Practical Dependent Origination - you can read excerpts here). It then serves as a metaphor for “rebirth” when the physical body dies. Leigh Brasington contrasts this view with the more traditional view here.

Secondly, there are many more secular interpretations of Buddhism, which place the discussion of rebirth—including what’s in the Pali texts, the scriptures most confidently attributed to the Buddha—within its historical context. In other words, sure the Buddha talked about rebirth, but that’s because that was the worldview at the time, i.e., that’s how people made sense of things and Buddha too. For more perspectives on this, I recommend the page on reincarnation from Barbara O’Brien.

One Theravadan view, which many consider totally radical (or even heretical, “nuts”), but is quite rational to me, also comes from Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. However, it does require an understanding, or at least acceptance, of the Buddhist concept of no-self or anatta. In the talk “Anatta & Rebirth” (PDF) which he gave to students at Puget Sound University in Seattle, WA, he says:

When there is no atta (self), then what is reborn? What or who is reborn? Forgive us for being forced to use crude language, but this question is absurd and crazy. In Buddhism, there is no point in asking such a thing. There is no place for it in Buddhism. If you ask what will be reborn next, that’s the craziest, most insane question. If right here, right now, there is no soul, person, self or atta, how could there be some “who” or “someone” that goes and gets reborn? So there is no way one can ask “who will be reborn?” Therefore, the rebirth of the same person does not occur. But the birth of different things is happening all the time. It happens often and continuously, but there is no rebirth. There is no such thing, in reality, as rebirth or reincarnation. That there is one person, one “I” or “you”, getting reborn is what reincarnation is all about. If all is anatta, there is nothing to get reborn. There is birth, birth, birth, of course. This is obvious. There is birth happening all the time, but it is never the same person being born a second time. Every birth is new. So there is birth, endlessly, constantly, but we will not call it “rebirth” or “reincarnation”.

There is also the view of Stephen Batchelor, who was a monk for many years in both the Korean Zen and Tibetan traditions and is the author of Buddhism Without Beliefs and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. While he’s since updated his tagline on rebirth from agnostic to atheistic, here’s an informative article “Rebirth: A Case for Buddhist Agnosticism” published in the Fall 1992 Tricycle. Batchelor says in a more recent interview with Buddhist Geeks:

I certainly have difficulty with the traditional way which Buddhists understand the doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation (it’s the same word in Pali.) And what this boils down to is that after physical death some part of you…will continue into another life…Now, I really just do not understand what that could mean; it simply does not make sense to me. It’s not coherent, and it seems to rest upon our adopting certain metaphysical views, namely that there is some part of our being that is separate, by nature, from the physical body that will continue into another life…And I find it very difficult to understand how you can propose a theory of rebirth without adopting a mind-body dualism.

And that dualism, I think, is quite at odds with what the Buddha had in mind. And I think it is also very difficult to square with how we actually understand the nature of the world in which we live. I don’t think there are two separate things, one material and one spiritual, that in some weird way, sort of co-exist. I feel that whatever the stuff of the universe is, it is of one nature. And I think probably nowadays you’d have to reject both the word matter and the word mind as being adequate, except perhaps sort of symbolically, to describe what, in fact, is this extraordinary stuff that has come into being that we call life.

Yes, I like that. Though, of course Batchelor’s view is rather controversial. I should also point you to the response from the transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart, “An Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century”. If you are more sympathetic to this interpretation or are just interested in some anecdotes, you may want to check out the book Rebirth As Doctrine and Experience by Francis Story (Buddhist Publication Society, 1975). Of course there is also the comprehensive guide through the state between death and rebirth in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The “to believe or not believe” in rebirth debate goes much deeper, with B. Alan Wallace writing a stinging critique of Stephen Batchelor’s view in Mandala, which then garnered a response from Mr. Batchelor. If that isn’t enough, there is further discussion at The Secular Buddhist and again, at Buddhist Geeks.

The one other concept that I would bring your attention to is that of nibbana/nirvana being the state of the “Deathless”. It’s too much to go into here, but a nondual interpretation of this aspect of the teachings addresses more my first comment to you about energy, process, movement.

Just some things to chew on! Let me know how it goes…

Katherine