Buddhism in the West it seems to me will only allow so much strangeness in Buddhism then the weird-o-meter starts to go off which means Westerners can say, "Buddhism is a cool religion, don't get me wrong. I really like it. But I am not quite sure about rebirth and some transcendent state. I really can't buy it right now."
These Buddhists don’t seem to realize that the Buddha was dead set against those who denied rebirth and the transcendent, such people being annihilationists, teachers like Ajita Kesakambalin and Pâyâsi. Pâyâsi, the discourses inform us, went so far as to perform hideous experiments to prove there was no soul that went from one life to the next.
“He puts a man (a thief) alive into a jar, closes its mouth securely, covers it over with wet leather, puts over that a thick cement of moist clay, places the jar on a furnace and kindles a fire. When he believes that the man is dead, he takes down the jar, unbinds and opens its mouth and quickly observes it with the idea of seeing whether his soul issues out" (K. N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, p.105).
If one were to seriously measure Western Buddhists by what the Buddha actually said they would not fall into the category of Buddhism but, instead, annihilationism which is against the notion of rebirth and the âtman. The thrust of the annihilationist argument is this: If I do not know it or sense it, it doesn’t exist. The scriptural Buddhist counter argument against this belief was about a man born blind (jaccandho puriso) who, because he could not see forms, colors, the stars, the sun and the moon, etc., claimed that such things did not exist. Despite such a counter the annihilationists wouldn't give up their position.
It seems to me that the bulk of modern Buddhists use the same reasoning to evaluate rebirth and the transcendent, “I do not know this, I do not observe this; ergo it does not exist.” Important I think, and somewhat related is the view of neuroscience which many Buddhists seem to embrace and which strikes me as being non-Buddhist and annihilationist. This position, during the Buddha’s life, was “the body and the soul are identical” (tam jivam tam sarîram, S. ii. 60). Updating it, it would be, “the brain and mind are identical” which is anti-dualist. (We should keep in mind that the self or âtman of the Buddha is transcendent. It is not even dualist [âtman and body are completely different]).
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