[Buddha-l] rebirth

[F.K. Lehman (F.K.L. Chit Hlaing)]

May I add my two-cents' worth here?
      It seems to me (and Joy Vriens's comment yesterday may have been 
intended along the same lines) that scholars of religion often fail 
to take note of the fact that any religious teaching occurs in a 
cultural context, and in that regard it will make all sorts of 
background assumptions that are more or less secular in nature. It is 
in that sense that one can say that rebirth may indeed have been not 
a  'part of' the Buddha's teaching (doctrine). All religions known to 
me certainly, for instance, assume the phenomenal existence of a 
material world, whatever transcendent value they may assign to it. 
Likewise, they all assume that, in some sense or other human beings 
and other 'beings' exist; and all sorts of assumptions go along with 
this, such as, for example, ideas about how beings (I suppose, for 
Buddhists, I am talking about sattva -- let me use the Pali I am used 
to). in this connection, then, if in ancient India everyone supposed 
that in some sense or other life/consciousness.whatever was not 
utterly over-with when the body dies, then no wonder Buddhism adopted 
the idea (incorporated, not 'adopted', really). What is interesting 
here, though, is that He radically changed the idea none the less: ' 
Well, it may well be that 'it' returns, so to say, but not quite;, 
for there's no 'you/me' involved at all, but only the illusion of 
'you/me'. Moreover, whether by the Lord Buddha Himself or by Buddhist 
thinkers afterwards, Buddhism (at least the Theravada I know best) 
has struggled ever since with what this might mean, especially 
reducing the 'it' to a mere collection of khandas with the attendant 
argument about how, ultimately, what one might call the joint 
trajectory (in samsara) of associated khandas comes apart 
(?nibbana?). On this view (which I have discussed over and over with 
learned Burmese scholar monks at home, it is clear at least that it 
makes little if any difference whether one imagines 'rebirth' as an 
actual returning ('joint khanda trajectory, as above -- a rotten 
metaphor, of course) owing to tanha and its associated illusions, or 
as something more abstract such as, let us say provisionally, the 
effect of my attachment in this life in the form of the generation (I 
use this word in the computational, not the biological sense) of 
further existences of new beings (sattva); one way or other, it 
results in further dukkha (I detest the translation of this word as 
'suffering' because (a) it presupposes a whole mess of Christian 
moral-ethical considerations, and (b) its proper range or scope 
includes such relatively petty things as 'problems' -- in Burmese, 
when we want to say 'No problem', as in replying to a request, we 
often saqy 'dukkha mahyi ', lit. 'there's no problem'.
      By the way, the same general form of argument applies, I think, 
to the [lace of 'Gods/gods' (deva, devata). They are imagined, in 
quite a secular sense, to exist, as species of beings -- in their 
case of great power and long life. But, and this is the significant, 
doctrinal turn for Buddhism, they are stripped conceptually of any 
transcendental or moral value, so that, once again, in an important 
way, they are not essential to the teaching.
-- 
F. K. L. Chit Hlaing
Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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