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Rebirth revisited
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 According to Stephen Batchelor, religions are united not by the belief in God, but by belief in life after death. Personnally, I never found out a better explanation for the question of suffering then the concept of karma linked to rebirth. For questions such as:
What is the cause of the inequality that exists among mankind? Why should one person be brought up in luxury, and another in absolute poverty? Why should one person be a prodigy, and another an idiot? Why should one person be born with saintly characteristics and another with criminal tendencies? Why should some be artistic, mathematically inclined, or musical from the very cradle? Why should others be congenitally blind, deaf, or deformed? Why should some be blessed, and others "cursed" from their births? ... etc., the concepts of Karma and Rebirth do give an insightful explanation... but not without some "but". According to religious Buddhism we will be reborn in a form of life that accords with the ethical quality of actions committed in this or a previous life. The monotheistic religions affirm more or less the same, limiting the options to heaven or hell. Stephen Batchelor argues that while religions may agree that life continues after death, on a way or another, this does not indicate the claim to be true. Religions also maintained that te earth was flat, right? Batchelor states that in accepting the idea of rebirth, the historical Buddha reflected the world vision of his time and place and actually the prevalent hindu system was enough basis for his ethical and awakening teaching... nothing more. On the same way, Christian church would fear that the loss of faith in heaven and hell would be a pretext for lack of morality. It was much later that Enlightenement reasoned that an atheist could be as moral (or more) as a believer. Even if Buddhism is sometimes called a religion without a dogma, the question of rebirth seems too often almost like a "credo" - almost as if you are not a buddhist if you don't belief in rebirth. But if one follows the Buddha's words - don't accept anything blindly - "then orthodoxy should not stand in the way of forming our own understandig". One question that always arises is "what it is to be reborn". For all other religions, which state that there is an eternal self (soul, atma, etc.) survivig the body-mind complex, this is not a problem. But Buddhism, on the opposite of every other system I can think about, says there is no intrinsic self. What we are used to think as unique, independent, hopefully eternal self, cannot be found anywhere. It cannot be realized by meditation or through analysis. This idea is part of our plot, our fiction, our conditioning, a habit that lies at the root of our ignorance and our craving. On the other hand, rebirth concept implies that "something" survives this life and will reborn again. Different answers have been given to this issue, by different schools of thought: - the force of habit driven by our craving reappears in another form of life - some sort of non physical mental counsciousness (a continuum of counsciousness) is driven to find an escape, another matrix Stephen Batchelor claims that these speculations are metaphysical, and don't have anything to do with the agnostic and pragmatic point of view of Buddha's teaching. In religious Buddhism, the idea of rebirth is the vehicle for the Hindu metaphysical idea of Karma, but Buddha tended to emphasyze its psychological side: "Karma is intention". By being mindful of intention, of the movement of the mind that occurs when we think, speak, or act, we realise how intentions lead to our habitual patterns of behaviour, which affects the three modes of of the quality of our experience: I like, I don't like, I don't care But, according to the Buddha, Karma alone doesn't explain all about individual experience. To the question of rebirth, it would seem that we only have two choices, either we believe it or not. Batchelor says that we have a third choice, to honestly state I don't know. We don't have to adopt the religious, metaphysical view of rebirth as it is presented by tradition, but we don't have to choose an extreme view either, and see death as annihilation. Whatever we believe, in fact, our actions do have an echo, which can go beyond death. Our thoughts, our words and actions, can nurture the world and those who will be touched by our lifes. Our practice must not dwell on fear and expectations concerning an after life, our practice is about ethical empathy here and now. |
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