Rebirth and Buddhism
No time for a detailed post, but I want to draw your attention to this podcast from Buddhist Geeks. In it, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says, in response to questions about the need for Westerners to believe in rebirth, that the concept isn’t necessary for practice, but it doesn’t hurt to assume it’s true. It makes for good living now.
In connection, I recommend Jay Garfield, “Nagarjuna’s Theory of Causality: Implications Sacred and Profane,” Philosophy East and West, Vol 51, No 4, 507-524. The article discusses just to what extent belief in rebirth is necessary, particularly for bodhicittas. The abstract is below:
Nagarjuna, in Mulamadhyamakakarika, defends the emptiness of causation, and a regularist view of dependent arising implicating a sophisticated view about the nature of explanation not only of individual phenomena but of regularities themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, this view has implications for contemporary philosophy of science, in particular conceptions of the relations between different levels of explanation and description, between phenomena described at distinct levels of analysis and between theories developed at distinct levels of analysis. Less surprisingly, it also has implications for Buddhist soteriological theory. But perhaps most surprisingly, it suggests that the most commonly held view about the necessary conditions for the cultivation of Bodhicittathat defended by Dharmakirti and by rJe Tsong Khapa among others–is incorrect, and in fact represents a subtle form of self-grasping and of the reification of causation. I will argue that in both cases Nagarjuna’s analysis corrects prevalent errors.
I may have more to say later, but at least check out the podcast (third in a series of three).
Arbitrary Chatter:
jacqueline: We just dropped our daughter off at... Colin Caret: Jeong, that’s why I... Jeong: Hi Colin, I just wrote something in your... Colin Caret: Well that failed miserably. Try... Colin Caret: I feel like we are verging on some...