Rebirth? (Buddhism, choice, experience, Buddhism, Mahayana)

[bholly72]

I think that some of the problems people have with the idea of rebirth is taking it too literally. In Buddhism generally there is no real self, and the idea of a person is just an static idea projected upon an ever-changing reality. “I,” “me,” “Brian Holly”: these are handy, indeed indispensable labels, but that’s all they are: labels for a collection of ever-changing phenomena that have no real identity over time. The Buddha’s argument against the existence of a real self is both simple and unanswerable: If there is a real self, it must either be identical with the five skandhas (the ever-changing components of a person including body, consciousness, dispositions, perceptions, etc.) or it must be different from them. If it is the same as the skandhas, it can’t be a real self, because the skandhas are constantly changing, and a self has to be the same thing over time – that’ the whole point of the self, to be identical over time. But neither can a self be outside the skandhas, because then it would have noting to do with the person’s body, memoires, perceiptions, consciousness, etc.

Mahayana Buddhism extends this analysis to all things and thus doesn't countenance real entities. All things are empty of substance, as Nagarjuna taught. But no real entity is needed to preserve or contain the flow of cause and effect (karma). We are convenient fictions causally related to various other convenient fictions in the past and future, but whether or not being part of a continuous causal flow constitutes rebirth of oneself depends on what we regard as 'I'. If I want to consider whether some particular future person is or was "me" in some sense, I can't look to see if some "soul" is being passed along. There is no such thing. Rather, I have to ask, just how similar to the "me" that exists now does something have to be to count as "me" in the future or the past? Just how connected?

For me, the relationship between myself and future sections of the causal flow (that extends beyond death) or before birth is too weak to say that "I" will be reborn. I rather like what one Tibetan teacher said when asked what was reborn: “Your bad habits.”



Shakyamuni somewhere answers someone asking just this question, and replies that the person who is reborn is "not the same and not different." Ultimately, I think that how we treat this is a matter of choice, a matter of how we define the limits of the concept of personal identity. When we look at what constitutes personal identity even in one life, we find that while there is physical and psychological continuity, there is no genuine identity through the processes of continual change except what we put there.

The changes we experience in this life are slow enough and the different stages have a strong enough similarity, that it is convenient (and more, necessary to survival) for us to talk about the "same" person. In other causal flows, the change seems so abrupt, and the stages so different, that we talk rather about omething being destroyed, as when we burn wood. We don't, unless perhaps we're chemists, talk about the logs and the resulting ashes as being the same anything.

What I'm trying to say here is that identity through time is not something given in nature. It is, rather, completely dependent on our choice of what concepts to apply. Impermanence is one of the most basic principles of Buddhism. It tells us that everything is changing all the time, that all things are as evanescent as smoke: the only difference is the time-frame. Nature does not determine which of these continuing causal processes we should regard as constituting the same thing over time and which we should regard as one thing stopping (the wood) and another coming into being (the ashes).

What the concept of rebirth does for us, I think, is get us to expand the notions of the "self" into the past and into the future, just as the concept of esho funi helps us expand the notion of self outwards into the social and natural environment. The point of this is to weaken our attachment to the narrow, conventionally defined self and expand our range of compassion and concern outward to encompass, eventually, all beings in time and space.

[Anraku]

The Tathagata is the true realityof the Self(atta)
(Majjimapannasa Atthakatha 3, 379

The true nature of the Tathagata is the Self.
(Ittivuttaka Atthakatha 2, 187

The Self is deathless and is identical with one's true nature (svabhava)
Jataka Atthakatha,No.66,370

Just so it is,that the Self (atta) is none of the five aggregates(skandha)
Udana Atthakatha No.376

[lilithu]

Hinduism says that there is a self (atman) which is unchanging.
Buddhism says that there is no self (anatman) because nothing is unchanging.
Mahayana Buddhism says that anatman is atman, which I take to mean as "Nothing" is unchanging.