[Buddha-l] rebirth

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2006-01-28 at 16:42 +0000, Mike Austin wrote:

> I have not read Kamalashila. Is he saying that these mental states, with 
> human form, are all that constitute hell, preta and animal realms? 

Not necessarily. He is saying that in the human realm we can experience
all the other realms. He is mostly a Madhyamika, but he has a lot of
Yogacara tendencies, so it could well be that he believed that all the
realms exist only as projections in the mind. He does, in some places,
argue for a subjective idealism, which is one of the legitimate
interpretations of Yogacara. (It's not the interpretation I myself
prefer, but that is beside the point.)

Incidentally, the notion that different realms of experience are
accessible to human beings goes all the way back to the various canons.
Gethin has a nice chapter on this correspondence between "subjective"
experience and the cosmological realms. The relationship between the
"subjective" and the "objective" is pretty vague in most Buddhist texts.
I suspect that's because it really didn't matter much to a practitioner,
whose main interest is with the phenomenological experience and not with
the question of whether a subjective experience does or does not
correspond to something "out there" in the allegedly "real" world. 

I think the idea in most Buddhist texts is that something is real if and
only if one experiences it. So if one experiences ghosts, then ghosts
are real enough. If one does not, there is no need to worry about them.
If one recalls past lives or believes the testimony of others who say
they recall past lives, then rebirth is real enough. If one does not
have such experiences, then there is really no need to give rebirth a
second thought. Buddhism, it seems to me, is magnificently simple and
free of the need to make heavy metaphysical commitments and then to
defend them against "heretics". It is only people who have a deep
habitual tendency to think in terms of dichotomies who feel pressure to
show that people who experience the world differently are somehow wrong
or indulging in what they perceive as wrong view.


-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico