[Buddha-l] rebirth

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2006-01-28 at 18:12 +0000, Mike Austin wrote:

> It is in the very 'thinking about' and 'meditating on' that Buddha's
> teachings are proved to be beneficial. 

On the other hand, it makes sense to be a little selective about what
one choose to meditate on. For example, as Bob Zeuschner has pointed
out, the Buddha had some teachings on geography that don't repay the
effort one might spend on reflecting on them. Some of his notions of
physiology strike me as pretty quaint, and so I have never found it
useful to spend much time reflecting on them. In some texts (such as the
Lankavatara) it is said by a character called the Buddha that all
buddhas teach in Sanskrit, because Sanskrit contains all the sounds of
all human languages. That I know to be false, so I don't spend a lot of
time meditating on it.

I have given some thought to rebirth, just because I like thinking about
questions in philosophy of mind. But I have never found any use for
meditating on rebirth as part of my practice. None of the people who
taught me meditation exercises ever said anything about it, so it has
never been part of my practice to give it any thought. Unfortunately, I
have derived so much personal benefit from the practices I was initially
taught that I have never felt a need to seek for other practices. It
seems to be an instance of the old dictum "If it ain't broke, don't fix
it."

> It is for this reason that I accept the teachings on rebirth.

Of course. It would be foolish not to accept that they are part of the
tradition. I'm not aware of anyone who would deny that.

>  I do not believe them, but I believe in them.

This distinction does not work very well for me. My own preference would
be to say that I believe these teachings have long been part of
Buddhism, but I have never yet found a use for them, nor do I have any
way of determining whether or not they are true. They don't cause me the
least bit of discomfort, so long as no one insists too strongly that
people who do not believe that they are true are somehow incapable of
cultivating the virtues that define what it is to be a buddha.

-- 
Richard