[Buddha-l] rebirth

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

F.K. Lehman (F.K.L. Chit Hlaing) schreef:

> 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/ khanda/s with the attendant argument 
> about how, ultimately, what one might call the joint trajectory (in/ 
> samsara/) of associated/ khanda/s 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.

This is exactly Gombridge's point. The Buddha used the concepts and words of his time, adepts them to his own needs and is pragmatic. A good example is the use of the word 'Brahma' in 'brahmaloka' and 'brahmavihaara'.

Erik


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