Re-birth

[ghengis]

Knowing your 'past lives', even deciding whether reincarnation is 'real' ...  is irrelevant information to the practicing Buddhist of any school. Which may be why the Buddha refused to comment on the question.

See Five Questions on Kamma. In particular ...

Question 4: Is there such a thing as a human being who is reborn and who is able to speak accurately of his or her past existence?

ANSWER: Certainly, this is not an uncommon occurrence, and is in accordance with the tenets of Buddhism in respect to kamma. Such a person is called a jatisara puggalo from jati, existence, sara, remembering and puggalo, rational being.

Question 5: Which are the five Abbhinnana? Are they attainable only by the Buddha ?

ANSWER: The five Abhinnana (Psychic powers) (Pali Abhi=excelling; nana=wisdom) are:

  1. Iddhividha, Creative power,

  2. Dibbasota, Divine Ear;

  3. Cittapariya-nana, Knowledge of others' thoughts,

  4. Pubbenivasanussati; Knowledge of one's past existences; and

  5. Dibbacakkhu, The Divine eye.

The five Abhinnana are attainable also by Arahants and Ariyas and not only the above, but by ordinary mortals who practise according to the Scriptures; as was the case with the hermits, etc., who flourished before the time of the Buddha and who were able to fly through the air and traverse different worlds.

In the Buddhist Scriptures we find, clearly shown, the means of attaining the five abhinnana ; and even now-a-days, if these means are carefully and perseveringly pursued, it would be possible to attain these. That we do not see any person endowed with the five abhinna today, is due to the lack of strenuous physical and mental exertion towards their attainment.

[ghengis]

See Understanding Anatta.

The anatta doctrine is one of the most important teachings of Buddhism. It is the most distinctive feature of Buddhism, for as many scholars have recognised, it makes Buddhism different from all other religions. Scholars write that all other religions accept the existence of some kind of spiritual, metaphysical, or psychological entity or agent or being inside and, in some cases, simultaneously outside of sentient beings. That is, most religions accept the existence of a soul or self. ...

[sabaijai]

Certainly, this is not an uncommon occurrence, and is in accordance with the tenets of Buddhism in respect to kamma. Such a person is called a jatisara puggalo from jati, existence, sara, remembering and puggalo, rational being.

One monk's view (Ledi Sayadaw), based on commentaries. Nothing in the Suttas refers to such specifics. Which is not to suggest that it's not true, but that perhaps it's not relevant.

[sabaijai]

Even if you could have the power to see all your past lives, it would be a very dreary, uninforming perspective. As noted in the Samyutta Nikaya XV.14-19 Mata Sutta 'Mother'"

At Savatthi. There the Blessed One said: "A being who has not been your mother at one time in the past is not easy to find... A being who has not

been your father... your brother... your sister... your son... your

daughter at one time in the past is not easy to find.

"A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by

ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on.

Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced

loss, swelling the cemeteries -- enough to become disenchanted with

all fabricated things

The key is "Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced

loss, swelling the cemeteries -- enough to become disenchanted with

all fabricated things"

We've done it all and then some. The only thing we know for sure that we haven't experienced, is Path Consciousness. Only that halts rebirth, otherwise rebirth is occurring every moment, endlessly. It's one, long round of existence, not a chain of existences separated by birth and death.

Rather than dividing conditioned existence into separate 'lives', more fruitful to look at this very moment and see the arising and passing away of name and form. That's where the goal of Buddhism lies, not in analyzing the past.

[snowleopard]

Speaking as someone who has meditated every day for the last 3300 years, I would say that the concept of Nirvana is something you cannot understand without some deep inner spiritual experience.

Buddha says: Middle way is best.

It might be the best way but some Buddhists just take the "Middle Way" way too literally!

I've seen quite a few passed out in the median during rush hours in Bangkok!

Death-wish,suppressed survival instinct due to suppressants or blind faith in the doctrine of rebirth??

Sure beats me!

Snowleopard.

[ghengis]

From Understanding Anatta

Buddha teaches, in fact, that people are reborn with patisandhi, “relinking consciousness,” a rebirth consciousness which does not transmigrate from the previous existence, but which comes into existence by means of conditions included in the previous existences, conditions such as kamma.

Thus a reborn person is not the same as the one who has died, nor is the reborn person entirely different from the one who has died. Most importantly no metaphysical entity no soul, and no kind of spiritual self continues from one existence to another in Buddha’s teaching.

This begs the question 'who is reborn?' Who's karma am I born with? If it is mine, then what is the 'me' that the karma is associated with it it is not the Soul (Atta)?

[stroll]

Rather than dividing conditioned existence into separate 'lives', more fruitful to look at this very moment and see the arising and passing away of name and form. That's where the goal of Buddhism lies, not in analyzing the past.

Great! This is the path.

Now to the practical part: How can one realise this in everyday life?

I don't expect a comprehensive answer, but maybe somebody has an inspiring reply to this. Pity I left all my books behind when I moved to Thailand, sure I read something about it.

[sabaijai]

From Understanding Anatta

Buddha teaches, in fact, that people are reborn with patisandhi, “relinking consciousness,” a rebirth consciousness which does not transmigrate from the previous existence, but which comes into existence by means of conditions included in the previous existences, conditions such as kamma.

Thus a reborn person is not the same as the one who has died, nor is the reborn person entirely different from the one who has died. Most importantly no metaphysical entity no soul, and no kind of spiritual self continues from one existence to another in Buddha’s teaching.

This begs the question 'who is reborn?' Who's karma am I born with? If it is mine, then what is the 'me' that the karma is associated with it it is not the Soul (Atta)?

The five khandas congregate to form the entity we call a person.

rupa the physical form

vedana initial reactions to sensory input

sañña perception; identifying ability of the mind

sankhara mental formations (thoughts and emotions)

viññana consciousness

These dissassociate at death but may re-associate acccording to conditions that occur moment to moment.

For Buddhists endowed with wisdom, to conceive of karma over numerous lifetimes is a crude and ineffective way of moving towards the goal (whether it's nirvana or simply a better, more useful life). To the Buddhist mind, it's obvious you can't do anything about your past 'lives' (actually one seamless round, with the illusion of separate lives), so it's fruitless to contemplate them as a way of improving your present or your future. Rather than striving to understand your potential past lives/karma, or to relate them to your present situation, the efficient Buddhist examines the more obvious moment-to-moment linkage in his or her present life. The one thing that links your present to your past -- whether over lifetimes, months, days or hours -- is your mental state in any given moment.

Regardless, you can't do anything to change what you did yesterday morning, much less in any past lives. But you can affect your present mental state, and it's only your present mental state that can affect your future. In that sense, we are being reborn every single moment. The way we are right now is conditioned by the way we were a moment ago, and that moment was determined by the previous moment, and so on as far back as you care to go. Whatever chance one has as a Buddhist -- as a human being -- to progress further than where we are now is to begin with the present moment. Everything else, on a developmental timeline, is irrelevant.

One Buddhist parable likens the 'who?' and 'why?' questions about existence to being shot with a poisoned arrow. Is it in your best interest at the moment your body is pierced with the arrow and the poison is working it's way into your bloodstream, to sit down and ask 'Who shot this arrow? Why did he shoot it? What kind of wood is the shaft made of?' Or is more wise to gently extract the arrow as quickly as possible?

[sabaijai]

Rather than dividing conditioned existence into separate 'lives',  more fruitful to look at this very moment and see the arising and passing away of name and form. That's where the goal of Buddhism lies, not in analyzing the past.

Great! This is the path.

Now to the practical part: How can one realise this in everyday life?

I don't expect a comprehensive answer, but maybe somebody has an inspiring reply to this. Pity I left all my books behind when I moved to Thailand, sure I read something about it.

Stroll, you could fill a lot books with the potential answers to your question "How can one realise this in everyday life?"

If you've never practiced before, it's probably a good idea to find an experienced teacher. Here in Thailand there are so many good ones, each with their own approach but also with many aspects in common. If you're in Bangok, I highly recommend attending a few discussion groups with Ajahn Sujin, as I mentioned in an earlier post. She's not everyone's cup of tea but I can just about guarantee that even if you decide you're not the abhidhamma type (they focus almost entirely on abhidhamma, ie, Buddhist psychology/philisophy/metaphysics), what little you do get from the discussions will be valuable grist for the mill -- perhaps for many years to come. She has a very rare talent for cutting direct to the heart of the matter. It's a very direct, but also very steep, approach. Most Westerners who get into Buddhism think that meditation is the end-all, be-all of it. Ajahn Sujin presents a very good antidote to that kind of thinking ... but go and see for yourself, wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.

In the meantime I'll take a stab at some generalities about practice, picked up from the Tripitaka and from my own experiences. I don't hold myself out as a particularly great example, mind you, and I claim no lofty achievements.

Buddhist practice rests on three pillars of action: to be a good person (sila = morality), to meditate (samadhi), and to develop wisdom (pañña).

Sila is following the five precepts (laypeople), eight precepts (lay people on retreat, 10 precepts (novices) or 227 precepts (monks).

Samadhi comes via concentration meditation, what the Thais call samatha, contemplating visual objects, mantras and so on. This sort of contemplation is the mainstay of most contemplative traditions, including Transcendental Meditation, most kinds of Zen meditation, most kinds of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, and the meditation methodologies of a variety of other Buddhist schools, all of which can be lumped together under the general name samatha or samadhi. The name basically means 'one-pointedness' and the general results of such meditation are calmness and concentration.

According to the Suttas or discourses of the Buddha, samadhi alone cannot generate the wisdom necessary to understand what's really going on, to break the bonds of conditioning. Samadhi is instead used to prepare the practitioner for a second kind of meditation meant to develop vipassana (literally 'essential perception' or 'inner seeing', but most often translated simply as 'insight'). The Buddha prescribed a specific set of practices for developing insight: Satipatthana, literally 'awareness development' in Pali, but most commonly translated as 'mindfulness'. The main source of instruction is the Satipatthana Sutra (Mindfulness Thread/Discourse), and the instructions were later amplified in a large commentary tome called Visuddhi Magga (Path of Purification).

The point of satipatthana vipassanna is, as the Buddha was quoted as saying:

When you see, just see. When you hear, just hear. When you smell, just smell. When you touch, just touch. When you know, just know.

Much easier said than done. But it's when you become aware of what the brain does with hearing, smelling, touching, etc, that you at last understand the thorough conditioning your mind has undergone -- the social and genetic indoctrination -- and find a new way of moving from this moment to the next. That's where the real practice begins, with the seeing of your condition.

Vipassana is so effective that some Buddhists maintain that it's sufficient to accomplish everything Buddhism can accomplish. However the more orthodox view says that the ongoing development of wisdom is best supported by those two other pillars of action, morality and concentration/tranquility.

In other words you need to act like a good person even if it's not really your nature, and you need to work on one-pointedness so that you have the stamina to penetrate to nama/rupa (mind/form).

When insight is sufficiently developed, one attains the wisdom necessary to stop behaving like an automaton conditioned by the past and move into the future as a free being. That's what's called 'enlightenment' (bodhicitta, literally 'illumined mind-moments'), a concept Westerners throw around a lot but which appears relatively rarely in the Buddhist canons.

Here's how it works in a nutshell, and this is something anyone can practice in their daily lives. One begins with awareness of sensations. This could be sensations of body, mind, emotion, whatever - in the beginning you choose the object but as you get better at it there's no choice involved, you simply note whatever sensation comes to consciousness first, and when it decays, another one takes its place, and it's like watching a very interesting movie.

Next comes awareness of action, and finally -- and this is the crux of the whole thing, as far I can tell from experience - intention. I make it sound simple and quick, but it takes effort and time to get to this point, believe me.

Once you become mindful of intention, all sorts of interesting things happen. That seems to be where conditioning really forms, ie before an action takes place. This also means that two actions that appear to be identical to the outside observer have different karmic outcomes depending on the intention of the actor. It's also when the mind settles in on intention that you finally see that there's a profound interaction between nama and rupa (tough to translate, but some possibilities include: mind & form; mentality & physicality; nuomenal & phenomenal; and my personal definition - conceptualizing & the physical world). The apprehension of nama and rupa - the experience is like being struck by lightning, it's like a momentary parting of the curtain where you see what's going on beneath the skin of things - is what defines vipassana or insight. As I mentioned earlier, as vipassana accumulates, one develops the wisdom to live more skillfully. This is a big thing with some teachers, not using moral terms like 'good' or 'bad' in terms of behavior, but rather 'skillful' and 'unskillful', i.e., skillful in terms of what kind of conditioning is being perpetuated.

I apologise for the length of this post. Really it's a vast topic and one that Buddhists debate endlessly. I'm sure other practitioners here will have shorter, snappier answers!

[ghengis]

For Buddhists endowed with wisdom, to conceive of karma over numerous lifetimes is a crude and ineffective way of moving towards the goal (whether it's nirvana or simply a better, more useful life). To the Buddhist mind, it's obvious you can't do anything about your past 'lives' (actually one seamless round, with the illusion of separate lives), so it's fruitless to contemplate them as a way of improving your present or your future. Rather than striving to understand your potential past lives/karma, or to relate them to your present situation, the efficient Buddhist examines the more obvious moment-to-moment linkage in his or her present life. The one thing that links your present to your past -- whether over lifetimes, months, days or hours -- is your mental state in any given moment.

I think this is evading the question of "What is the 'Me' that carries karma from live to live?"

Is truth the same for people at different levels of consciousness. The 'truth of an enlightened persion is that the small self (soul) no longer exists because he/she has now realised the eternal Self.

To someone like Buddha, who reached the state of Nirvana, Atta (self) does not exist. However, to those not at that level some entity, whether your call it the soul or some other name, does survive death and determines the level of consciousness in the next rebirth. A train ticket is not much use once you have reached your destination, but is required along the journey.

[stroll]

Thank you once more for your input, sabaijai. I still dither about going out and exploring/sampling the teaching centers.

But thinking about the teachings in front of my computer is a start (-I am a lazy sod).

"Much easier said than done. But it's when you become aware of what the brain does with hearing, smelling, touching, etc, that you at last understand the thorough conditioning your mind has undergone -- the social and genetic indoctrination -- and find a new way of moving from this moment to the next. That's where the real practice begins, with the seeing of your condition."

This is the sort of pointer I am looking for, I think I had some glimpses of this. I guess one needs the discipline of meditation to make the experience last.

"In other words you need to act like a good person even if it's not really your nature, and you need to work on one-pointedness so that you have the stamina to penetrate to nama/rupa (mind/form)."

'act like', I get the drift now, this matches some modern psychology approaches to induce a state of mind by mimicking it..

There is still the question of who is being reborn, but once you are concious of the process of rebirth, the question is absurd.(?)

[Darknight]

hi guys, sorry for the late reply's on stuff. bizzy doing some things in the material world

Buddhist practice rests on three pillars of action: to be a good person (sila = morality), to meditate (samadhi), and to develop wisdom (pañña).

Sila is following the five precepts (laypeople), eight precepts (lay people on retreat, 10 precepts (novices) or 227 precepts (monks).

Don't completely agree with the precept thing as you know from another thread, even if i agree with their general intention and meaning i feel to much is fakingly pushed aside by monks or lay people , which only leaves subconsieus feelings hiding in the background. but ok...

Samadhi comes via concentration meditation, what the Thais call samatha, contemplating visual objects, mantras and so on. This sort of contemplation is the mainstay of most contemplative traditions, including Transcendental Meditation, most kinds of Zen meditation, most kinds of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, and the meditation methodologies of a variety of other Buddhist schools, all of which can be lumped together under the general name samatha or samadhi. The name basically means 'one-pointedness' and the general results of such meditation are calmness and concentration.

According to the Suttas or discourses of the Buddha, samadhi alone cannot generate the wisdom necessary to understand what's really going on, to break the bonds of conditioning. Samadhi is instead used to prepare the practitioner for a second kind of meditation meant to develop vipassana (literally 'essential perception' or 'inner seeing', but most often translated simply as 'insight'). The Buddha prescribed a specific set of practices for developing insight: Satipatthana, literally 'awareness development' in Pali, but most commonly translated as 'mindfulness'. The main source of instruction is the Satipatthana Sutra (Mindfulness Thread/Discourse), and the instructions were later amplified in a large commentary tome called Visuddhi Magga (Path of Purification).

The point of satipatthana vipassanna is, as the Buddha was quoted as saying:

When you see, just see. When you hear, just hear. When you smell, just smell. When you touch, just touch. When you know, just know.

Very correct , i would call it in one word "witnessing" , looking at yourself your non-self , your enviroment ect. As discussed somewhere else witness all as "illusion" , don't identify yourself with it. it's like looking at your own movie.

Much easier said than done. But it's when you become aware of what the brain does with hearing, smelling, touching, etc, that you at last understand the thorough conditioning your mind has undergone -- the social and genetic indoctrination -- and find a new way of moving from this moment to the next. That's where the real practice begins, with the seeing of your condition.

Vipassana is so effective that some Buddhists maintain that it's sufficient to accomplish everything Buddhism can accomplish. However the more orthodox view says that the ongoing development of wisdom is best supported by those two other pillars of action, morality and concentration/tranquility.

I couldn't agree more, the insight in to your own conditioning is mind boggling let alone not even start to talk about cultures, traditions, ect..

The only comment i would like to give on it is that i feel that even the "monk" trip is a form of conditioning. You need to strive for enlightment in the beginning and becoming a monk will give you oppertunities to pull away from material distractions for a while.

In your quest for insight and enlightment you'll actually need to give up your quest in the end as well. the quest itself will become a hindrance to enlightment itself in the end. the last wanting will be the final identification of "self".

In other words you need to act like a good person even if it's not really your nature, and you need to work on one-pointedness so that you have the stamina to penetrate to nama/rupa (mind/form).

I would like to strongly disagree with that sabaijai. Maybe we mean the same thing but you just explained it differently.

The "acting" of a good person doesn't mean nothing at all. Only if you witness your "nature" you can transcend it. To "act" is only to put on a show for others. A thief or murderer can "Act" easily that he's a monk. There mere "performing the moves" routine will not add anything to your inner development. Only if you've experienced, witnessed and gained insight into karmic lessons can you transcend them. It's actually the same problem i have with the precepts. It's not because a rule says that you have to be celibate, that you can transcend your karmic lessons in that area. I find it very counterproductive and probably the reason why staying at a temple was not very appealing to me. I just saw the monks going through the moves....

Even buddha himself wouldn't have reached enlightenment when he would have been born a beggar or a monk. Only through his initial wealth was he able to not only understand and transcend his primal energy's (sex, money, everything he wanted) in his early years, But by then denouncing all his wealth and becoming the total opposite astetic person he also discovered that also that was not the real path. He actually became enlightened when he gave up his quest and decided to just "let it go".

Here's how it works in a nutshell, and this is something anyone can practice in their daily lives. One begins with awareness of sensations. This could be sensations of body, mind, emotion, whatever - in the beginning you choose the object but as you get better at it there's no choice involved, you simply note whatever sensation comes to consciousness first, and when it decays, another one takes its place, and it's like watching a very interesting movie.

Next comes awareness of action, and finally -- and this is the crux of the whole thing, as far I can tell from experience - intention. I make it sound simple and quick, but it takes effort and time to get to this point, believe me.

Once you become mindful of intention, all sorts of interesting things happen. That seems to be where conditioning really forms, ie before an action takes place. This also means that two actions that appear to be identical to the outside observer have different karmic outcomes depending on the intention of the actor. It's also when the mind settles in on intention that you finally see that there's a profound interaction between nama and rupa (tough to translate, but some possibilities include: mind & form; mentality & physicality; nuomenal & phenomenal; and my personal definition - conceptualizing & the physical world). The apprehension of nama and rupa - the experience is like being struck by lightning, it's like a momentary parting of the curtain where you see what's going on beneath the skin of things - is what defines vipassana or insight. As I mentioned earlier, as vipassana accumulates, one develops the wisdom to live more skillfully.

Indeed sabaijai i would say that it becomes a realization that things move on many different plains of existence. Especially the link between mind , creation and "reality" is pretty fascinating. also the divers links between the body, the enviroment, disease, health ect are "mind" boggling.

This is a big thing with some teachers, not using moral terms like 'good' or 'bad' in terms of behavior, but rather 'skillful' and 'unskillful', i.e., skillful in terms of what kind of conditioning is being perpetuated.

Actually Good or Bad is another of life's great illusions if you start to percieve buddhism (or related religions). Like you said it boils down to "skillful or unskillful", "wise or not wise yet", "consiousness or ignorance" "light or dark".

The buddha can't see things as "good or bad" but just as "as is" no need for explaining or dividing up the whole.

I apologise for the length of this post. Really it's a vast topic and one that Buddhists debate endlessly. I'm sure other practitioners here will have shorter, snappier answers!

I couldn't have found more better answers sabaijai, clearly an "enlightening" post

[sabaijai]

I think this is evading the question of "What is the 'Me' that carries karma from live to live?"

I would refer you to the poisoned arrow parable again. Also our own Stroll's comment:

There is still the question of who is being reborn, but once you are concious of the process of rebirth, the question is absurd.(?)

Another way to put this is that it's Ignorance that's being reborn.

Buddha's responses to the question of self vs no-self were somewhat non-committal. There's a long passage somewhere in the Suttas where he says that to believe in the existence of Self is wrong view; to believe in the non-existence of Self is wrong view; to believe in the existence of both Self and non-Self is wrong view, etc.

Thanisarro Bhikkhu on this issue:

The Buddha wasn't the sort of teacher who simply answered questions. He also taught which questions to ask. He understood the power of questions: that they give shape to the holes in your knowledge and force that shape -- valid or not -- onto the answers you hope will fill up those holes. Even if you use right information to answer a wrong question, it can take on the wrong shape. If you then use that answer as a tool, you're sure to apply it to the wrong situations and end up with the wrong results.

That's why the Buddha was careful to map out a science of questions, showing which questions -- in what order -- lead to freedom, and which ones don't. At the same time, he gave his talks in a question-and-answer format, to make perfectly clear the shape of the questions he was answering.

So if you're looking to his teaching for answers and want to get the most out of them, you should first be clear about what questions you're bringing to it, and check to see if they're in line with the questions the teachings were meant to address. That way your answers won't lead you astray.

A case in point is the teaching on not-self. Many students interpret this as the Buddha's answer to two of the most frequently-asked questions in the history of serious thought: "Who am I?" and "Do I have a true self?" In the light of these questions, the teaching seems to be a no-self teaching, saying either an unqualified No: There is no self; or a qualified No: no separate self. But the one time the Buddha was asked point-blank if there is a self, he refused to answer, on the grounds that either a Yes or a No to the question would lead to extreme forms of wrong view that block the path to awakening. A Yes or a qualified No would lead to attachment: you'd keep clinging to a sense of self however you defined it. An unqualified No would lead to bewilderment and alienation, for you'd feel that your innermost sense of intrinsic worth had been denied.

As for the question, "Who am I?" the Buddha included it in a list of dead-end questions that lead to "a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion, a writhing, a fetter of views. Bound by a fetter of views, [you]don't gain freedom from birth, aging, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, or despair." In other words, any attempt to answer either of these questions is unskillful karma, blocking the path to true freedom.

So if the not-self teaching isn't meant to answer these questions, what question does it answer? A basic one: "What is skillful?" In fact, all of the Buddha's teachings are direct or indirect answers to this question. His great insight was that all our knowledge and ignorance, all our pleasure and pain, come from our actions, our karma, so the quest for true knowledge and true happiness comes down to a question of skill. In this case, the precise question is: "Is self-identification skillful?" And the answer is: "Only up to a point." In the areas where you need a healthy sense of self to act skillfully, it's wise to maintain that sense of self. But eventually, as skillful behavior becomes second nature and you develop more sensitivity, you see that self-identification, even of the most refined sort, is harmful and stressful. You have to let it go.

from http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/modern/.../questions.html

[sabaijai]

I've started a separate thread on the thorny issue of self vs non-self in Buddhism, at http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11887

Don't completely agree with the precept thing as you know from another thread, even if i agree with their general intention and meaning i feel to much is fakingly pushed aside by monks or lay people , which only leaves subconsieus feelings hiding in the background. but ok...

On the subject of subconscious feelings or emotions somehow being 'repressed' by precepts, the Buddhist view on such feelings and emotions is that they, like all conditioned phenomena, are transitory. The precepts are a framework against which such feelings are more likely to pass on, like clouds overhead, without one's 'acting out' of them. You can test this for yourself the next time you notice a feeling coming on, whatever it might be. Chances are if you focus on it, you'll notice it's associated with certain physical sensations (that you might not otherwise have noticed). Maintain awareness, and the both the feeling and the physical associations will change their character rapidly and eventually fade away.

Since there wasn't yet such a term as 'Buddhism' during his lifetime, the Buddha referred to his teachings as dhamma-vinaya, ie, natural law & discipline. He wasn't a Taoist, taking the watercourse way downhill nor was he a Freudian believing that feelings unacted upon could become 'stored' and somehow harm you.

Until one is enlightened, one will always be plagued by 'subconscious' feelings (only subconscious to the unmindful), the trick being not to be a puppet to transitory emotion. The idea that feelings must be indulged in to get beyond them is classic wrong view. Indulgence is habit-forming and simply conditions the next moment in an unskillful way.

[Reminds me of an academic study I read about last year. The stress levels of people who say they express their anger and sorrow readily versus those who say they preferred not to act out on strong emotions were compared. The groups that reportedly preferred to express or act out on strong emotions showed higher stress levels - as measured by blood pressure, heartbeat, galvanic skin response, etc. Yet another nail in Freud's coffin ...]

To try and keep a moral precept establishes the intention to do things according to dhamma-vinaya. Now if in the next moment, that intent is abandoned and replaced by the intent to act on transitory feelings which may be akusala (unskillful), the precept is then no longer being kept. This is why monks re-take their vows every fortnight, or if they break a vow they meet with a senior monk to re-establish the vow. They start over again ... and again ... and again

In or out of the monastic system, every moment offers us the chance to follow dhamma-vinaya or not to follow. It's not a matter of collecting credit on vinaya nor is it a matter of suppressing, it's simply an attempt to foster kusala citta, skillful mind in the present moment.

Dhamma and vinaya can't be separated, though it may feel intellectually more comfortable (in the short term only) for us to believe they can.

[stroll]

1.Until one is enlightened, one will always be plagued by 'subconscious' feelings (only subconscious to the unmindful), the trick being not to be a puppet to transitory emotion. The idea that feelings must be indulged in to get beyond them is classic wrong view. Indulgence is habit-forming and simply conditions the next moment in an unskillful way.

2.[Reminds me of an academic study I read about last year. The stress levels of people who say they express their anger and sorrow readily versus those who say they preferred not to act out on strong emotions were compared. The groups that reportedly preferred to express or act out on strong emotions showed higher stress levels - as measured by blood pressure, heartbeat, galvanic skin response, etc. Yet another nail in Freud's coffin ...]

1. This explains the classic Buddhist view well. I agree this is vrey wise, and good for you if you can follow this path. However, I keep referring to modern psychology (I could post some sources if anybody is interested and prepared to wait until I'll get to my books July/August).

Often desires, cravings and emotions are so compelling and urging, one does need to go into them, with awareness, not merely indulging, and become concious of the exact nature of what is disturbing so much.

I am not suggesting killing somebody or sexually abusing children with awareness is the right thing to do, but to go into the thoughts and feelings and explore them until resolved, afterall, it is not a matter of 'letting it pass' as far as compulsion is concerned. But one will hopefully learn the skills to merely observe and let is pass, once one has got to know the enemy, so to speak. And yes, there is the pitfall of the exploration of the issue leading to attachment, or even the exploration itself becoming an unhealthy habit.

2. Which leads to: the temporary stress level of somebody working on their emotions (which I refered to as 'cooking' before) would be high, I am not one to quote statistics, and the perpetual display of strong negative emotions will do damage to yourself on various levels, so far agreed. But not dealing with these feelings, and 'choosing' not to express them (we are talking about unenlightened people here) does cause them to be expressed elsewhere in one's being, even further away from conciousness, also in form of physical illness, the entire category of psychosomatic disorders illustrates this. I hope I managed to pull the nail out of Freud's coffin now.

As I say, I come from a psychology perspective, and several authors in this field refer to Buddhism. I also read some Buddhist literature and attended meditation courses in the past, not to any depth, as you will have noticed by now.

Please bear with me.

[Treeniap]

A child told me what rebirth is about..

The Bhudda once referred to the man who leaves a room is not the same man who entered the room. This means we change all the time - we are reborn all the time..

..sometimes we want something, sometimes we are bored, sometimes we cannot think and find the answer.. sometimes we think we are the best and sometimes we hate ourselves. The Bhudda helped people to understand these behaviours by giving them names (animals, angels, petra etc), but remember they are just ways people behave - watch your wife or your best friends and you will notice how they change minds and moods from time to time. They become like animals and like angels - they want stuff and they think too much.. Some people get stuck in their path and cannot become enlightened to this fact - as we see with the unhappy drunk and the stuck-up rich kid, and most people in society - the endless cycle of suffering.

This is all rebirth emplies- and to be free from it and become enlightened one must first realise this (and thus become human) and then forget it.

[andyinkat]

QUOTE (sabaijai @ Fri 2004-06-11, 12:59:21)

Rather than dividing conditioned existence into separate 'lives', more fruitful to look at this very moment and see the arising and passing away of name and form. That's where the goal of Buddhism lies, not in analyzing the past. 

Great! This is the path.

Now to the practical part: How can one realise this in everyday life?

I don't expect a comprehensive answer, but maybe somebody has an inspiring reply to this. Pity I left all my books behind when I moved to Thailand, sure I read something about it.

Stroll, the practical part: let go.

When someone's getting on your tits and you feel your blood pressure rising just recall: this situation is a process - it rises and it falls. My anger is a fliud movement through my mind - it comes, it goes. The 'person' I was angry with no longer exists; that momentary combination of fleeting dhammas has already gone.

As soon as you identify the processes you cease to be caught up in them; they lost their energy - and you let them go.

[kwiz117]

A child told me what rebirth is about..

The Bhudda once referred to the man who leaves a room is not the same man who entered the room. This means we change all the time - we are reborn all the time..

Yes, this is how Lord Buddha has explained it according to "Thripitaka" [a book similar to the bible, but written in Pali (older version of Sanskrit, now a dead language)..]

[sabaijai]

"Actually, this life and the next life are different only by one moment. At the moment of death, we call this life. At the next moment which comes immediately, we call it the new life or next life. That is, because we use the terms conventionally. So actually the death in one life and rebirth in another are just the same as one moment following another moment during life-time. Now, one second after twelve midnight of the 31st of December, we call it a new day, a new month, a new year. But in fact there is just one second's difference between the old year and the new year. And actually we cannot say that the previous moment is the old year and the next moment is the new year. But we agree to call it the old year, and the next one, the new year, and then we say we are in the new year, but actually we are only one second away from midnight.

"In the same way, when beings are reborn after death in one life, they are just one moment after death. So the arising and disappearing of mind and matter go on and on until one becomes an Arahant or a Buddha and one dies. Until that moment, this arising and disappearing of mind and matter will go on and on incessantly. And here also, the rebirth is produced by kamma, and so, we can do something about kamma in this life so that we are reborn in a better existence.

"Now when we talk about rebirth, people want to know what it is that is reborn there. This, we answer, with the maxim: "Neither he nor another." The person who is said to be reborn in the next life, is neither the same person that died in the previous life, nor is he a totally new person, totally independent of the being who died in the previous life. So this is the maxim we use "Neither he nor another." At the moment of rebirth what happens is: Kamma produces a state of mind and some material properties and that we call rebirth. So, mind and matter that are produced or that arise at the moment of rebirth are not something that is carried over form the previous life."

-- Venerable Sayadaw U Silanandabhivamsa

rebirth & kamma

Edited July 15, 2004 by sabaijai

[camerata]

There's an excellent explanation of rebirth by Bhikkhu Bodhi at beyondthenet.net. I like his description of the simile of the candle and how identity is preserved:

An illustration may help us understand how this preservation of, identity can take place without the transmigration of any "self-identifiable" entity. Suppose we have a candle burning at 8 o'clock. If we come back in an hour, at 9 o'clock, we see that the candle is still burning, and we say that it is the same candle. This statement is completely valid from the standpoint of conventional linguistic usage. But if we examine this matter close-up we'll see that at every moment the candle is burning different particles of wax, every moment it is burning a different section of wick, different molecules of oxygen. Thus the wax, wick and the oxygen being burnt are always different from moment to moment, and yet because the moments of flame link together in a continuum, one moment of flame giving rise to the next, we still say it is the same flame. But actually the flame is different from moment to moment. The flame itself is an entirely different phenomenon. It is conditioned by wax, the wick and air, and apart from them there is nothing.

BTW, some great posts in this old thread.

[sabaijai]

A devout elderly lady from a nearby province came on a pilgrimage to Wat Pah Pong. She told Ajahn Chah she could stay only a short time, as she had to return to take care of her grandchildren, and since she was an old lady, she asked if he could please give her a brief Dhamma talk. Ajahn Chah replied with great force, “Hay, listen! There’s no one here, just this! No owner, no one to be old, to be young, to be good or bad, weak or strong. Just this, that’s all - just various elements of nature going their own way, all empty. No one born and no one to die! Those who speak of birth and death are speaking the language of ignorant children. In the language of the heart, of Dhamma, there are no such things as birth and death.”

-from No Ajahn Chah - Reflections

[ourmanflint]

My understanding is, as Sabaijai mentioned somewhere along the line, there is no permanent thing called a soul, it exists only from moment to moment , so how can there possibly be any rebirth.

It is all an illusion. If you believe in Rebirth then will you be reborn? you don't really know do you!!

the trick is not to believe in it and let go. IMHO

Edited September 22, 2006 by ourmanflint

[rikpa]

If you've never practiced before, it's probably a good idea to find an experienced teacher. Here in Thailand there are so many good ones, each with their own approach but also with many aspects in common. If you're in Bangok, I highly recommend attending a few discussion groups with Ajahn Sujin, as I mentioned in an earlier post. She's not everyone's cup of tea but I can just about guarantee that even if you decide you're not the abhidhamma type (they focus almost entirely on abhidhamma, ie, Buddhist psychology/philisophy/metaphysics), what little you do get from the discussions will be valuable grist for the mill -- perhaps for many years to come. She has a very rare talent for cutting direct to the heart of the matter. It's a very direct, but also very steep, approach. Most Westerners who get into Buddhism think that meditation is the end-all, be-all of it. Ajahn Sujin presents a very good antidote to that kind of thinking ... but go and see for yourself, wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.

A little late to the game here. I'm just a student of this stuff, so don't know if I have anything to offer, but.. did have the good fortune to have some really good teachers. Yes, I agree Khun Sujin is a really great teacher of Abhidhamma, and as you say, it’s also not everyone’s cup of tea.

Honestly, I would never have been prepared for Khun Sujin’s stuff without getting a really good grounding in the basic theory from Zen and Tibetan teachers first. The Abhidhamma is really heavy, and presupposes a fair amount of theoretical knowledge and a willingness to learn at least the Pali terms for things.

There is also great basic teaching on meditation at Wat Mahatat, in “Section 5”. This is quite well regarded, and I found the teachers there extremely knowledgeable and compelling. This is where the main focus is on the vipassana (insight) style of meditation, which includes mediation on the breath, walking meditation, and even eating meditation. Also, Ajahn Chah’s monastery very highly regarded, as is Buddhadasa Bikkhu’s monestary in Surat Thani.

I also agree that meditation is not the be-all and end-all, even though I think it is very important, and probably necessary for anyone who can't easily and spontaneously quiet the mind and enter deep concentration at will.

When you see, just see. When you hear, just hear. When you smell, just smell. When you touch, just touch. When you know, just know.

Much easier said than done. But it's when you become aware of what the brain does with hearing, smelling, touching, etc, that you at last understand the thorough conditioning your mind has undergone -- the social and genetic indoctrination -- and find a new way of moving from this moment to the next. That's where the real practice begins, with the seeing of your condition.

Vipassana is so effective that some Buddhists maintain that it's sufficient to accomplish everything Buddhism can accomplish. However the more orthodox view says that the ongoing development of wisdom is best supported by those two other pillars of action, morality and concentration/tranquility.

In other words you need to act like a good person even if it's not really your nature, and you need to work on one-pointedness so that you have the stamina to penetrate to nama/rupa (mind/form).

Just to add to this, the analysis of name and form is one of several tools available to insight meditators. In the Satipatthana Sutta, the Buddha outlined a number of prescriptive ways to go about meditation, including observing the duration of the breath, etc. The Four Frames of Reference therein refer to observing the condition of the body, the feelings, the mind, and mental qualities. It involves first setting the stage for meditation (a quiet spot, away from the madding crowds), thus creating the appropriate conditions for insight; and then employing one or any number of practices to deepen that insight. Eventually the application of mindfulness is said to help bring the mind to a very sharp focus, and brings a very clear, unwavering comprehension of the object of observation. This implies very strong and bright degree of concentration, unhindered by distracting emotions like mental dullness or agitation.

This brief text contains the essence of all meditation systems ranging from Theravada, to Zen, and to Tibetan Buddhism.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.22.0.than.html

I apologise for the length of this post. Really it's a vast topic and one that Buddhists debate endlessly. I'm sure other practitioners here will have shorter, snappier answers!

Great stuff, sabaijai!