The Importance of Rebirth

Barry writes;

could you post on 'rebirth' re your comments agreeing with 'onemind' at 'thebuddhawaswrong.com' I would be interested to read more of your view on this matter since you place a particular emphasis on it and it is a seeming point of agreement between you and the owner of the anti-Buddhist website.

To recap; OneMind had said that without rebirth, the whole structure of Buddhist teaching falls apart. Phrased a little strongly, but essentially he is correct. (The only correct statement on the web-site perhaps)

There have been many attempts to cobble together some kind of Buddhism that leaves rebirth out of the picture. I can't really understand why anyone would try. The result is either stoicism or existentialism with an optional dash of vegetarianism perhaps, but it sure isn't any Buddhism that the old teachers would recognize. I guess the motivation comes from a misguided impulse to make the Dhamma more palatable to modern people by pandering to their delusions.

Actually, and I've said this before, rebirth per se isn't the most important issue. Denial of rebirth means a total misunderstanding of the First Noble Truth. But the real damage in these bastardized materialist/agnostic/existential "Buddhisms" is to the Third Noble Truth. I'll go into this in a little detail, bear with me here.

The First Noble Truth is the statement of the problem. It implies dukkha, annica, anatta in every moment of consciousness. But it implies something much more profound than this; it teaches that there is no way out within the confines of samsaric existence. At each moment there is just mind vainly seeking satisfaction from the ten thousand objects. This is repeated ad infinitum. The only way out is to stop doing that.

Now, it is vitally important for the full grasping of this situation to realize that this process has been going on for an indefinitely long period in the past, and has the potential to go on for an indefinitely long period in the future. The true hollowness of samsaric satisfaction can only be fully understood in the context of manifold lifetimes.

This makes a crucial difference in the depth of meditation. If one is to realize the unconditioned, then there has to be a complete and radical relinquishment of the conditioned. No half measures will do. Every arising object, and every potential object, must be seen as completely empty, vain and undesirable. This is possible if one has really internalized the reality of multiple lifetimes. Whatever fantastic desirable thing may be out there is essentially just more of the same. Been there, done that, billions of times.

If however, one is working from the concept of one life-time only, this level of relinquishment is not possible. The experiences of the senses take on a different flavour, a greater importance or perhaps one should say, piquancy, if this is the only shot at the can. In fact, it would be fair to ask if relinquishment is even a worthwhile goal in this context.

So awakening is simply not possible if one adheres to miccha-ditthi (erroneous views.) Sorry to all the "agnostic Buddhist" but the Unconditioned is one place that particular eel is unable to wriggle to.

This brings us to the Third Noble Truth. Nibbana has to be written out of materialist or agnostic reworkings of the Dhamma. This is for both philosophic and experential reasons. Philosophically, there is no possible place for a transcendental reality in a materialist world. Experentially, Nibbana cannot be realized by adherents of false view, so none of them deal with it their writings. Or they redefine it into something that "fits" onto the flat-land of their impoverished world-view. And if one of them ever did attain the path and fruit, he would immediately and forever cease to be a materialist thereby.

Loose Ends

OK, I've got the log-in problem solved. Blogger now wants me to use my email address as my user name instead of my user name. I don't remember when they changed that; certainly seems counter-intuitive and the error messages they give when you do it wrong are particularly useless even by the low standards of computer error messages. Grumble, gripe.

Now, onto a philosophic issue. A couple of comments have questioned my assertion that chess ability is culturally specific.

There is nothing special about chess. It takes the average person 5 minutes to learn how each peice moves and the objective of the game. The game is completely mechanical and a persons skill at it is determined by how many variables a persons short term memory can keep track of via thinking about moves in advanced and that is completely determined by dna. Otherwise computers would not be unable to beat grandmasters at the game. There is nothing cultural about algorithms or memory and these human traits are completely genetic.

Oh dear. I can only assume the writer of that has never played serious chess. There are so many misconceptions in the above paragraph, it's hard to know where to begin.

Of course, chess is highly algorithmic, but only at a very deep level. The complexity of the game is such that it is only very recently that the most powerful computers have been able to play at a grandmaster level. Even now, they can't consistently beat the top human players.

There is more, a lot more, to the skill of a top player than being able to think ahead several moves. The algorithms needed to work ahead more than a half dozen moves are so complicated, and the number of possible scenarios so literally astronomical, (there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe) that no human, or even any current computer, can play the game by brute force analysis alone.

For human players, there is a great deal of intuition involved; a mental faculty that can't be quantified (another hole in the swiss cheese of the materialist's world-view). The computer uses very clever algorithms that try to maximize factors like control of the centre-board, or conservation of pawn structure. There simply isn't the computer power in the world to play a purely brute force game.

The actual playing of the game by masters is as much an art as a skill. The fact that the grandmasters can hold their own against these powerful computers when no human can possibly hold so many variables in memory demonstrates this.

There is a lot more to learning chess than just knowing how the pieces move.

Housekeeping

I'm still having trouble logging in here; I need to "recover my password" every single time. Something is screwed up and I don't know what. I got some advice in an email from one of the readers here, a reference to a web-site that talks about Blogspot's software is incorrectly flagging some blogs as spam. I don't think that's the problem. Anyway, I'm working on it.

BTW, I hadn't heard of spam blogs before.

On another issue, one of the comments took mild umbrage at my decision to go to moderated posting. Sorry about that, I don't particularly like it either, but we had a serious problem here a while back with extremely nasty posts and even threats. To re-iterate, I will only ban posts that are abusive or obscene, never just because they disagree with me. (Otherwise known as "being wrong.")

What's up with Google?

Last couple of times I tried to log in to this blog to post, I had to go through the password verification rigamorale; anyone else have this problem lately?

Back to You

Regarding my posted critique of "The Buddha Was Wrong"; the site author (a chap known by the handle OneMind) has posted his reply over on his forum (a copy can be found in the comments here also.) I've posted a riposte to that reply on his forum. You can follow the dueling dialectic here; FreeSpeech Forum.

Actually, he was spot on

A friend sent me an email suggesting I have a look at a website whose author has apparently been making a lot of noise over at the e-Sangha discussion board. The site has the deliberately cheeky name "The Buddha Was Wrong." There's nothing really new here, it's the same tired old retreads of the materialist/skeptic position.

Take his article on Rebirth as an example; he states that "there are literally hundreds of scientific studies of brain death which proves the mind does not exist when the last neuron in the brain fires." This is the kind of zero content statement materialists love to throw around. What studies, where and by whom? Obviously there are no such studies, nor ever could be even in principle. How can you prove that mind does not exist?

On the contrary, materialist science is quite unable to account for what philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers calls "The Hard Problem." That is, the simple reality of knowing; consciousness or in Pali citta. Consider the difference between facial recognition software looking at your face and your best friend doing the same. In both cases, there is an initial impact of light waves on a sensitive mechanism (eyes, camera) then the signal is converted and sent to a processor (fibre-optics to a computer, nerves to a brain) where further parsing and decoding occurs. In both cases the output is a "recognition" of your face. But only in the case of your friend is there a subjective, first-person singular experience of seeing.

This end-point of knowing is so perfectly immediate and simple that it cannot, even in theory, be reduced to an algorithmic explanation. There is either a knowing (in the case of your friend) or there is not (in the case of the facial-recognition system.) Everything else in the system can be explicated algorithmically, at least in theory. This last and crucial step cannot.

Why is this important? Because if mind were a physical process, depending on neurons, then it would have to be capable of an algorithmic explanation. "Neuron A fires and sets off neuron B which constitutes knowing." Even to put it in these terms demonstrates the absurdity of it. No, the Buddha was right after all.

Incidentally, perhaps the only statement on this web-site that I agree with is this; "Without the concept of rebirth, the rest of Buddhist philosophy breaks down and becomes irrelevant." I've been saying that for years.

Fortunately, we don't have to abandon rebirth or accept materialism. There is really zero evidence for the latter and quite a bit for the former. The author of the site mentions the recently deceased Ian Stevenson, just to dismiss his meticulous case-studies as "anecdotal." Really, by the nature of the problem, how could there be definitive evidence that isn't of an anecdotal nature? Anyone who has taken the trouble to look into Dr. Stevenson's work will know that he has collected hundreds of cases where a child's past life memories have been objectively verified, even to the remembering of specific names and details of someone's life in another town.

But there are other indicators of rebirth in the common domain. For instance, the remarkable cases of child prodigies. Someone like Mozart learning to play the piano at seven, or Morphy learning chess even earlier simply by watching adults play. The remarkable thing about these individuals is the culturally specific nature of their precocious ability. It isn't a case of strong general intelligence, but of coming into the world with a narrowly specific skill already there, taking only a little nudge to recover.

Furthermore, any parent will tell you that children come into this world with strong personal traits. And the case of identical twins proves that there is something other than either nature or nurture at play. Twins who came from the same zygote, with the same DNA down to the last base pair, and raised by the same parents, can still manifest different personalities.

I could go on. There is the odd phenomenon of people developing strong affinities to a particular foreign culture or historical period. There is love (or aversion!) at first sight. A totally irrational sense that I already know this person, this person is important to me.

None of this this will convince the "skeptic" (in quotes because most of them aren't sceptical at all, in the real sense). Their minds are already made up and they don't want to be bothered with what they dismiss as anomalies. And admittedly, none of this should count as final definitive evidence. But it is fair to say that all of these things are more easily explained with rebirth than without it.

Back to the Buddha Was Wrong website; the author's strong bias shows through in many spots. In his entry for "The Buddha" he shows a picture of a mud shack and claims that this is what the prince Gotama's famous palace must have looked like. I'm not sure what he was trying to prove with this, but it just shows the typical ahistorical prejudice of the modern materialist. Ancient India was quite a bit more advanced than this, as both archaelogy and literary sources attest. Nor is there any justice to his snide comment that "There were no tooth brushes in those days and human hygiene wasn’t much better." Even a cursory reading of the Vinaya texts demonstrates that there was meticulous attention to personal hygeniene not excluding oral. There are numerous passages about the proper manufacture and use of "tooth-sticks." The author doesn't serve the credibility of his cause with such ludicrous historical errors.

I won't go into his very protestant diatribes against the monastic order, for fear of sounding partisan, except to note that like many of the "skeptic" critics who denounce cultural baggage, he quite fails to notice the enormous pile he is dragging around himself.

Finally, for a really good web-site with numerous articles dealing with all the issues involved in the confrontation of Buddhism and materialism you can't do better than "Buddhism vs. Materialism."

Evolution of Consciousness?

Many, if not most, people nowadays are pretty sensitive to the various kinds of chauvinism; national, gender, religion, age and so forth. One pretty big one that goes unremarked is what might be called historical chauvinism or prejudice against the past. This goes hand in hand with what I've called The Myth of Progress, the casual assumption that things are continually getting better, and we're getter smarter, more moral and probably better looking.

I've doubted this for some time, and I'm not the only one apparently. Here's a thought-provoking essay by Jared Diamond about The Worst Mistake in Human History. (spoiler: it was the invention of agriculture.) I've often thought that the high point in human history was the Cro-Magnon period. By high point, I mean the time when people were happiest. Who wouldn't rather be out hunting wooly rhinoceros with the boys than digging in the dirt for your over-lord in Sumer?

Something I've often wondered is how different our minds are from those of our ancestors. Various writers have broached this subject, but most like Julian Jaynes with his Bi-Cameral Mind theory, begin by assuming that the present model is more correct and interpreting ancient ways of knowing in a manner that makes them equivalent to pathologies.

Some time ago I read an article by a Christian writer about angels (sorry no reference, I'm winging it here, no pun intended.) He had one quirky idea that stuck with me. He suggested that the invention of perspective in the Renaissance wasn't really an invention at all. The odd flat scenes in Medieval painting wasn't a lack of technique. It was, he said, a faithful representation of the way people actually saw things.

Then came a shift in human consciousness around the middle of the 15th century and suddenly we were seeing things in 3-D. We had entered fully into the material plane and while gaining a better perception of that realm, we lost contact with the spirit realm.

I'm not sure I buy this theory, it sounds too much like a classic Calvin and Hobbes routine. But in a broader sense, I think he's on to something. Something did change around then, and arguably not for the better. The religious hysteria that gripped Europe for two centuries was perhaps a symptom of a loss of contact with higher consciousness, and a desperate attempt to refind it. When the dust settled from the Reformation, there followed the Scientific Revolution and the increasing knowledge and mastery of the arena left to human consciousness, the realm of matter and form.

In my more optimistic moods, I think this may be a phase we as a species needed to go through. Perhaps we needed to work out a deeper relationship with matter before we could return to spirit with fresh insights; an upward turn of a spiral. In my pessimistic moods, I think it was the beginning of the great crash of our species.

In no case do I buy the view that we are wiser than our ancestors. Nothing comes without a price, and our culture's descent into materialism has cost us dearly.

Signs of Spring

Footnote to "Mind and Body"

Anonymous posted this on the "Mind and Body" thread;

check out the work of the late professor Dr. John Lorber on the student without a brain who went on to graduate with an honours B.A in Maths at the university of Cambridge.
Most of current knowledge is simply the 'party line' cross it at your peril.

You can read about this case here: Is Your Brain Really Necessary?

An excerpt;

This case is by no means as rare as it seems. In 1970, a New Yorker died at the age of 35. He had left school with no academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, was found to have practically no brain at all. Professor Lorber has identified several hundred people who have very small cerebral hemispheres but who appear to be normal intelligent individuals. Some of them he describes as having ‘no detectable brain’, yet they have scored up to 120 on IQ tests.

This comes from a web-site with a lot of fascinating and strange stuff, Alternative Science.

Mind and Body

From the comments, Doug Rogers said;

Mind is what the Universe does. All the causes and conditions come together to birth consciousness. In my understanding then, Consciousness is just a consequence of having a form to contain it. This is rather like Pinker's radio, tuned to a frequency and capable of receiving, like Brain/Body --> Mind. Really there isn't a difference between Brain/Body/Mind. We're bound by the language to make the distinction, and as such, there really isn't a distinct edge we can draw -as to self- between the fingers, the fingers on the keyboard, and the keyboard while in the act.

As far as Mind is concerned, Body is just a filter for sensation. Until a whole lot of neurons come together, there just isn't consciousness. Is there Mind before then? What exactly is reborn? Isn't this anthropomorphization a dangerous and misleading trap? How otherwise to say it? Is this some mal-understanding between English and Pali?

Is mind an effect, spontaneously generated with each sentient form? Or does Mind find form to birth into?

Let me try and clarify the Buddhist position on the mind-body problem, as I understand it (the last clause is an important caveat!)

I think the assumption made in the sentence "Until a whole lot of neurons come together, there just isn't consciousness" is unwarranted. The very first verse of the Dhammapada states that "mind is the forerunner" and it seems to me preferable to say "until mind enters the womb, there just isn't a structured network of neurons."

There isn't any strong a priori reason why one of those formulations is more logical than the other. The first is the default assumption of modern thought, but that doesn't make it either correct or logical.

The latter is the formulation that is in accord with the dependent origination, one of the cornerstones of Buddhist teaching. "Because of consciousness, there arises name-and-form." According to the dependent origination, mind does not arise out of matter (neurons), rather the reverse. If not strictly speaking matter, certainly form (organized matter) does arise out of mind. Brain is something mind does, not the reverse.

This is an odd way of thinking for most moderns, but there may be a theoretical basis in science to explain it. The biologist Rupert Sheldrake raises the serious problem of morphogenesis, i.e. when all the cells in a body have the same DNA, how do the embryonic stem cells "know" how to turn into liver cells or brain cells and organize themselves into complex organs?

This problem is profound, and is quite insoluble if you start with the ordinary materialist assumptions. With everything we know now about DNA the only mechanism we can demonstrate is coding for protein sequences. That seems to be all the DNA is capable of doing. And the problem cuts deep. Once a string of amino acids are combined into a protein string, this string must then fold itself into a workable shape. A given string can fold into a very large number of possible configurations, but only one will do the job intended. How does this bit of insensate matter "know" what is required? A purely physical explanation is impossible. And this only the lowest tier in a long hierarchy of increasingly complex maneuvres required to create an organism.

Sheldrake's explanation is something he calls "morphogenetic fields." These are pure information fields, without any physical location in space (non-local). This sounds vanishingly close to the Buddhist idea of Mind. Mind has no physical characteristics such as size, shape or location. It is everywhere (boundless) and nowhere (void). Thinking about Mind using physical concepts is to make a grotesque category error.

It's quite possible that in a hundred years time the philosophy of materialism will be just a quaint foot-note in the history of science, alongside the phlogiston theory of combustion and phrenology. It's easy to see how it arose in the first place; in the first three centuries of the modern scientific revolution (roughly starting with Newton's Principia) it has provided an enormously powerful explanatory matrix. This only started to get wobbly in the first half of the twentieth century, with quantum physics.

Nevertheless, nineteenth century habits of thought die hard and the materialist view remains strong. What is harder to understand is why it is so much taken for granted. It is really a quite unnatural way of thinking. Consider; mind is what we know directly. Matter (and the external universe) we only know second-hand, strictly speaking as an inference. Is it natural to assume that that which is immediately and surely known is derived from that which is only inferred?

Don't we ever learn?

After mad cow and chicken fever, you'd think people would be thinking twice about the wisdom of our industrial agricultural methods. But you'd be wrong.

The latest crisis is the massive die-off of honey-bees. This is becoming a serious threat to our food supplies, which depend on the bees for pollinations.

A number of possible factors are being considered; cell-phone radiation, GM crops, new pesticides, immune collapse due to stress.

Some of these may be partial explanations. I don't buy the idea of cell-phones having a major effect; we've saturated the ether with RF radiation for decades now and the picayune amount added by cell-phone towers shouldn't make that big a difference. (Pity though, it would be grand to have an excuse to ban the damned things)

GM crops seem to be a more likely causal agent; these weird genetic brews have been unleashed haphazardly on the environment and we are just beginning to see the fall-out.

But it seems that there is an over-arching systemic issue here; same one that was behind the mad-cow and crazy-chicken episodes - the greedy capitalist itch to wrack more and more out of Mother Nature.

Bee-keeping has gone industrial. The same intemperate use of chemical inputs that characterize the keeping of larger stock also goes into the bee-hives. Honey is just a side-line for modern bee-keepers, the big bucks is in trucking the bees around the countryside to perform crop pollination services, a highly unnatural life for the bees to say the least. What's more, some bright bulb thought of the idea of making pre-formed combs larger than nature's to force the bees to grow bigger.

The really telling detail is that organic bee-keepers who use natural sized combs and no chemical inputs are not experiencing bee death.

Just Plain Silly

He told them not to go to warp nine.
When you get old.
Blue screen of death, no one hears your scream.
World's most perfect map ever.
Green Lama saves America (don't ask me)

Coming Soon

Hello all, I've been away from the monastery on a teaching trip and have had spotty access to internet. That is my excuse for neglecting the blog; I should be back by the weekend and will try to get something new up then. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, we continue to get some interesting comments from readers to check out.

Desire Continued

Barry wrote (in the comments)

What is wrong with enjoying one's food or a householder enjoying their marriage bed or any of the many beautiful and wonderful things in this human life? Surely they all belong?

This is exactly what I mean by wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Phrasing the rhetorical question in terms of right and wrong is misleading. Of course, there is nothing "wrong" with sensual enjoyment per se. That is not the issue.

The issue is one of results. The realization of the Unconditioned, nibbana, is only to be had by a disengagement with the Conditioned, samsara. All the "beautiful and wonderful things" are still marked by dukkha and anicca (misery and impermanence) and engagement in even the most refined objects of the senses lead only to rebirth in the sensual desire sphere. A moral life but one still enmeshed in sensuality can, at best, lead only to the heavenly realms.

The middle path as defined in the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta is between the ignoble extremes of sensuality and ascetism. It doesn't mean a moderate enjoyment of sensuality, but a contented non-seeking after either pleasure or pain.

The realization of nibbana only comes from disenchantment and dispassion towards the conditioned objects of sense. You simply cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Desire (Reposted Tale of Two Similes)

Some good discussion about the nature of desire in the comments section.

Let's remember that the Buddha was very clear in his formulation; the second noble truth says that the cause of suffering is desire (dukkha, tanha). I detect a little bit of wanting to have your cake and eat it too in attempts to shift the problem away from desire to attachment or something else.

Here is an old post from October, 2005 with some salient points;

A Tale of Two Similes

I previously blogged about my trip to the Exploring the Mind conference, and mentionedespecially Mark Epstein's lecture, which I quite enjoyed although one or two points bothered me.Well, I'm currently reading his new book "Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life" and I'm finding more than a pointor two to be bothered about. (For example, that title)

But for now I'll just focus on one symptomatic point that illustrates most of my problem withthe "psychologized" form of Buddhism. Dr. Epstein quotes a well-known story from the Zen tradition.This is a great favourite of western Buddhists and shows up a lot in slightly different versions.But there is a subtly different version in the Theravada literature that is not nearly so wellknown. Read the two versions below and then I'll add a comment or two;

Zen Version, as retold by Dr. Epstein There is a famous storyfrom Japan that expresses the peculiar delight with which desire is held in the Buddhist tradition.A young woman, it is told, is walking through a field when she encounters a tiger that eyes herhungrily. She runs and the tiger pursues her. She comes to a cliff, takes hold of the root of awild vine and, in a single motion, swings herself over the precipice. Dangling there, clutching thevine, she sees the tiger sniffing the ground above her. Trembling, she looks down. It is a long wayto the bottom, and she feels momentarily dizzy. Then she , sees something else. There is anothertiger below, presumably a hungry one, who has also noticed her plight. The tigers prowl, one aboveand one below; waiting for their feast. She clings to the vine. Suddenly; two mice appear at theedge of the cliff and start to gnaw at the roots that hold her. The woman notices a wildstrawberry growing nearby on the side of the hill. She reaches with one hand to pluck thestrawberry, still clutching the vine with the other, and places the fruit in her mouth. She takesone bite. Ahhhh! How sweet it tastes. This is the end of the story. We never learn what happens or,rather, we are told exactly what we need to hear.

The story, as I understand it, is about desire. As a Buddhist teaching story,it is obviously about other things as well. It is about being in the moment and the fragility ofeveryday life and doing one thing at a time, but it also seems to be a metaphor for desire. Thewoman encounters her desire and it appears as a tiger. In psychoanalysis, the tiger would be calleda projection. Fierce, wild, devouring. A beast. just as with desire, there seem to be only twooptions: to flee or to surrender to it.

Our protagonist runs from the beast, only to encounter a second tiger. There isno escape. Cornered, she hangs on for dear life. But desire continues to torment her. It changesform, multiplies, threatens her as she struggles to avoid it. Even in the form of the mice it isdangerous. How can she escape? The solution lies in the strawberry. What does she do? She tastes itand it is good. She takes one bite, not even knowing if she will have a second one, not knowing ifthere will be a next moment at all. With complete attention, she savors the flavor of the fruit.Desire is the tiger and the mouse, but it is also the strawberry. When the young woman stopsrunning and gives up the fear of being devoured, she can finally taste it. The flavor of desire isgood.

Theravada Version; from the Avadana A man is lost in a drearydesert for a long time, being persecuted by misfortune. Then he comes to a dark and dense forest.Exhausted from the scorching sun, he is at first delighted to enter the cool shade. As he wanderson, however, thorns and jungle undergrowth cause him difficulty so that he can progress only withgreat hardship. As he struggles like this, wild animals come closer from all sides. With flarednostrils, glinting eyes and greedy jaws, they get closer and closer. Full of fear , he tries toescape , but the jungle becomes even more dense.

On this desperate escape from the desert, from the thorny forest and from thewild animals he finally comes to a half-overgrown well. In his fear he seeks refuge there. But ashe hurls himself into the well, one of his feet becomes entangled in a creeper wine, and he findshimself hanging upside down in the dark well. Although almost unconscious from fear and despair,his eyes have grown accustomed to the dark, and he sees a poisonous snake winding itself slowlytowards him, flicking its tongue in and out. Full of terror, he looks up again only to see the headof a huge elephant with two enormous tusks looking over the edge of the well.

Among the vines of the creeper in which he became stuck, wild bees swarm busilyand occasionally one of them stings him. Whenever he is stung, he flinches from the pain. At thesame time, however, droplets of honey drip from time to time onto his face. Greedily he licks themup, enjoying their sweetness, and concentrating completely on their dripping on hill.

Suddenly he notices two mice-one black and one white gnawing on the roots of thecreeper holding him. It is just a matter of time before the roots are chewed through and he fallsinto the abyss and into the snake's reach. But on the pinnacle of despair, yet another drop ofhoney drips onto his face. He sticks out his tongue to get it and for a moment forgets his hopelesssituation.

All of a sudden he notices that the wild animals have disappeared. A merciful manlooks into the well and shouts down that he will free him from his terrible peril. The man caughtin the well shouts back: "Just a moment! Wait till I've enjoyed this honey!"

The explanation of the similes;

The arid desert: the cyclic existence of beings .
The dense jungle: humanbirth.
The cool shade: childish carelessness.
The thorns: the necessity to wind oneselfthrough life .
The wild animals: manifold diseases.
The well: lust for the body.
Thecreeper: hope and expectation.
The poisonous snake: the inevitable decay of old age .
Theelephant : an expression for the power of death.
The bees: changing fate .
The honeydrops; the five sense desires, longed for, loved, thrilling, belonging to desire , charming.
The two mice: day and night, sun and moon, that gnaw away at one's life .
The merciful man:the Awakened One .

These two stories illustrate the point I previously made in this blog about the importance ofThird Noble Truth. In the first version, there is no escape from the well (no faith in Third NobleTruth or Nibbana) whereas in the second (older) version a man representing the Buddha appears tooffer an escape; transcendence.

Notice how this turns the point of the story one hundred and eighty degrees. In the version usedby Dr. Epstein, eating the strawberry becomes an almost heroic act of existential engagement withthe present moment. Given the assumptions of the story, the best thing you can do is enjoy thesweetness of the strawberry. But in the Theravada version, continuing to lick the honey becomes anact of supreme folly. There is a man offering a way out, and only a fool would hesitate to take it,no matter how sweet the honey.

As Ajahn Chah put it; if you stop and smell the roses along the way it may be dark before youfind your way home.

Right Speech and the Internet

Good news, since I reluctantly activated moderated comments, I've only had to delete one post. Bad news, that was a piece of spam for some financial scam, so the spam bots are finding their way past Blogspot's letter-code entry system.

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It was unfortunate, but all too common, the way the comments threads had started as an intelligent discussion and degenerated into a peta-realm of insults and trolls. We've all seen this kind of thing far too often on the internet. Is there something about the medium? The anonymity is a factor, no doubt, and also the casual ease of posting which means a person can upload something in a bad mood they might later regret.

But remember, Buddhists, there is karma attached to speech. Speech is a power we have of inserting dhammas directly into another being's mind-stream. The internet if anything multiplies this power, and the karmic repurcussions.

One of the formulas for right speech is the four-fold one of what speech a Tathagata would utter. A Tathagata only speaks (a) that which is true, (b) beneficial, (c) meaningful and (d) either pleasant or if unpleasant, spoken at the right time. In the context of the internet, and of this blog, I take (d) as permission to disagree but with respect and care.

Another point, and one I've addressed before, is that I occassionally get criticized for raising political questions here. Although I may sometimes slip up, I try to do so with discretion and care. Buddhism, and Buddhist ethics, ought to practical and relevant to real-life. And it seems to me that there are two very important areas of concern, war and climate-change, that could urgently use the application of Buddhist ethics. If we can't apply those ethics to the momentous issues of the day, then they are only museum relics. So, I don't intend to stop.

Time to Play Nicely Children

The comments coming into this blog have descended to a level where a reader has to wade through screenfuls of nasty insults and vague threats to find the few gems where someone has actually said something meaningful and sensible.

Barry has suggested that I do something about it. I've gone a step further than his idea of disallowing anonymous posting; I've enabled "comment moderation" so that I will now preview postings before publication.

Hopefully this will be a temporary measures until the trouble-makers mend their ways or go away and find another forum to vent their spleen. I don't really like the idea of moderated comments, which is too much like censorship.

You are still free to disagree with me or with each other; but address ideas not personalities.

Here are the new rules;

Any post will be deleted which;

1. Is an ad hominem attack or insult
2. Constitutes "hate speech"
3. Contains threatening language

If these types of posts stop coming in, I'll go back to unmoderated comments.

Just for the Hell of it

I can't help rather liking Pope Benedict. The man is a bit of an anachronism, but as I've said before, in times like these, anachronism is virtue. He has raised some more controversy by stating that hell is real, causing all kinds of consternation among the modernists, who apparently take objection to the Pope stating Catholic doctrine.

It's fashionable these days in some quarters both Christian and Buddhist to say that hell (and heaven) are just states of mind here in the human realm. This is clearly not what the Buddha taught about other realms. In the Sangarava Sutta (Majjhima 100), for instance, he was asked straight out whether or not there really are gods. His answer was definitive;

When this was said, the brahmin student Sangarava said to the Blessed One: "Master Gotama's striving was unfaltering, Master Gotama's striving was that of a true man, as it should be for an Accomplished One, a Fully Enlightened One. But how is Master Gotama, are there gods? (devas)"

"It is known by me to be the case, Bharadvaja, that there are gods."

As for hell, there is quite a long depiction of the torments in Niraya (hell) found in the Devaduta Sutta, Majjhima 130, complete with many gruesome details. It comes as a shock to many westerners interested in Buddhism that we do have our own fire-and-brimstone literature.

Of course, there are crucial differences between the Christian conception of hell and the Buddhist. Most importantly, the Buddhist hell, and the Buddhist heaven too, are not eternal. They are considered as stations of rebirth. As well, hell was not created by anyone as a place of punishment. It is a natural result of certain karmas, particularly the karma of violence and cruelty.

The rationalists are already objecting; but this isn't a real place. By raising this objection they are revealing their adherence to the naive assumption that this human realm is a real place. So is hell real? What do you mean by "real", grasshopper?

The universe we actually live in, the only one we can ever know directly, is the product of our own mind. True, we get faulty and limited signals from some mysterious "out there" in the form of light waves striking the eyes, pressure on the nerve endings, sound-waves striking the ear. But the world we actually experience is fabricated from this external data mediated through the physical apparatus of our senses and the mental apparatus of perception.

There have been schools of Buddhism that postulated that there is no real external universe. This has not been the position of the Theravada. We admit the reality of an external world, we're just not all that interested in it. Why bother about something we can only know second or third hand?

So, we could say that we dream this human world, but the dreaming is constrained by various inputs of data from an external world. The other realms are also experienced as dreams, perhaps somewhat less constrained by the incoming data. The Zen master Dogen once wrote something about how a man, a demon, a naga and a ghost all experience the same river differently. This is much stronger than the modern psychological interpretation, it does posit quite different states of being. However, there is also no reason to rule out the traditional Theravadin interpretation that heaven and hell are actual "places" existing as whole realms distinct from this plane of reality. In fact, it seems quite naive to assume that this realm is the only one.

The existence of heaven and hell make perfect sense within the system of karma and rebirth. A being is reborn according to their predominant karmas and cravings. If these are of an extreme nature, either towards goodness or evil, then the karmic-resultant will also be extreme and for instance, one who has lived by killing and torturing will be reborn into a sphere of killing and torturing.

However, it must not be forgotten that the point of Buddhism in the end is to escape from all of these insubstantial, impermanent and imperfect realms and end the cycle of karma and rebirth once and for all.

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POSTSCRIPT

Here are a few links for those who haven't raised enough hell yet

The Afterlife in Different Religions
Comparison of Christian and (Mahayana) Buddhist beliefs
Catholic Encyclopedia article on Hell
Tibetan Buddhism article on Hell (scroll down past the Google ads)
Dante's Inferno Test. Which circle of hell is right for you?
And of course, this venerable chestnut; Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?

In Defence of America

There's been some very heated discussion in the comments section. While it's good to see that the blog is generating some interest and controversy, it's time for everyone to take a deep and mindful breath. Some of the posts have crossed the line into wrong speech. I'm thinking particularly of Rod's nasty characterization of Americans.

While it's always wrong to slander a whole nationality, it's also rather nonsensical to apply such generalizations to a country as diverse as the United States of America. It's perfectly valid to be critical of American foreign policy, or the current administration, but America is more than that.

In my opinion, for what little it's worth, this presidency will surely go down in history as the worst and most destructive ever. And one of the most damaging aspects of Bush's legacy is what it's done to America's reputation around the world. Sadly, Rod's views are pretty widespread.

Something to consider; Bush was not fairly elected, either time. The first time, in 2000, Al Gore plainly got the most votes and almost certainly actually would of taken Florida if the vote count had not been stopped. In 2004, the election was shamelessly rigged with touch-screen voting. It is highly unlikely that at any time the majority of Americans actually supported Bush.

Something else to consider; most Americans are fundamentally decent and compassionate. The only way the war party has been able to sell their imperial projects has been to package them as humanitarian endeavours, "to spread freedom" and topple dictators. Even now, the most often heard excuse for prolonging the agony of the obviously failed colonization of Iraq is that an American withdrawal would lead to a "humanitarian catastrophe." If the Americans were really as mean and nasty as some would have us believe, Bush and his cronies could have just told the truth; "We're going in to steal their oil and we don't care how many of them we have to kill to do it."

Yes, there are ugly parts of America's history; the genocide of the natives and african slavery the most obvious, but the same is true of most countries. We should not forget the good things that America has given the world.

Unfortunately, when Americans of a conservative bent think of the good they've done, too often their mind goes immediately to military interventions. "America saved Europe twice." Not only does this miss the point and encourage the worst side of the collective American character, it's also historically dubious. America's importance in both world wars has been greatly exaggerated. (They were barely involved in the First, and Russia won the Second; the western front was a diversion at best.)

What America gave the world was first and foremost the concept of a free nation based on the consent of the governed and with a people holding inalienable rights. Remember the American Revolution predated the French one, and was pulled off without a reign of terror. This was quite an accomplishment, even if all they were doing was taking good old British liberties to their logical conclusion. It would be a particular tragedy if they let their constitution fail; it is on shaky grounds these days with even habeas corpus practically abandoned. (Gonzales partying like it's 1214)

As a free nation with a free and prosperous population, America has been a cultural powerhouse. Yes, I know ninety percent of American culture is crap, but as Theodore Sturgeon said about science fiction, ninety percent of everything is crap. It's the ten percent that is so impressive. America gave us Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Walt Whitman. And American cinema, at it's best, has no comparison anywhere. And let's not forget jazz.

And don't forget that when America puts it's technological know-how into something other than killing machines, they can do astonishing things like put a man on the moon. In the sixties. With less electronics on-board than it takes to power up your Nissan.

Most Canadians have mixed feelings about our big neighbour. Best way to summarize it would be to think of a major sporting event, like an international hockey tournament. Nothing makes us happier than whipping the American team, but if the Canadians are elimated we automatically root for the Yanks. Speaking personally, I like America and Americans, I've travelled around the States a fair bit and enjoy their brash self-confident open-hearted cultural persona. (Canadian joke; what's the best thing about Americans? You never have to tell them to speak up.) Which is why I am so troubled by the way the leadership is taking the country.

America is great when it remembers it's a republic, it's horrific when it imagines it is an empire.

Dangerous Games

It's kind of amazing to me that high-stakes international politics sometimes looks like a school-yard squabble. Nobody wants to admit they made a mistake and say they're sorry.

In the current stand-off over the British sailors held in Tehran, both sides say the capture was made on their side of the international boundary. And both sides are flat out lying. The simple truth is that there is no agreed international boundary in the Gulf. See the analysis by Craig Murray, former head of the UK Foreign Office's Maritime Section, Blair Faked Map. short version, there is no way either the Brits or the Iranians can state with certainty which side of a line that doesn't exist that boat was on. Another "dodgy dossier" for Mr. Blair?

Which begs a few questions; if this area of water is disputed, why is the Royal Navy going there at all? If they wanted to avoid trouble with the situation so tense, you think they'd allow a de-facto neutral zone. (Leaving aside the bigger question, why are they in the Gulf at all?) On the other hand, why are the Iranians pushing their luck?

Part of the answer may be that the sailors were seized by radical elements of the Revolutionary Guard. The western media likes to portray Iran as a monolith headed by a dictatorial Ahmadinejad. Nothing could be further from the truth, the government there has all kinds of internal power blocs and factions and Ahmadinejad really has very little power. If the sailors had been confronted by Iranian regular navy or army the situation might have been resolved on the spot.

But there may be something else, a reason why more pragmatic elements of the Iranian leadership seem willing to push the issue. There is a piece in the Indepedent that has got a lot of attention; it reports that the Iranians are responding tit-for-tat after the Americans raided their diplomatic liason office in Arbil.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment....

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.

This nasty little incident greatly antagonized the Iranians, and for good reason. Not only is this kind of thing totally in breach of diplomatic conventions and international law, it is also puts the lie to the claim that the Iraqi authorities have any say about what goes on in their own country. These officials were there on the Iraqi's invitation. And the Americans are still holding five low level Iranians seized in the raid. (The big fish got away.)

Some of the commentary from the Jingos would almost be amusing if it weren't so pathetic; check out this utterly predictable screed from the Yorkshire Post, Let's Give Iran a Bloody Nose. Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) has done a good job of puncturing this sort of blather; Call That Humiliation?

Let's hope the children are able to put away their toys and play nicely from now on.