the great rebirth debate

A discussion on all aspects of Theravāda Buddhism
nowheat
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by nowheat »

Sylvester wrote:
nowheat wrote: Hmmm. Well, I disagree with paṭigha not being used in DN 15 as resistance, but I draw that conclusion from just a quick look at its roots and the way it is used elsewhere, and (more importantly) from the larger context of what's being said in DN 15 via the language of the creation myth that underlies the first five steps of DA (a subject I still need to take up).
If it's OK with you, could you pls furnish a citation of the pre-Buddhist text(s) that furnishes this Creation myth? I get the impression that there was not only one Creation myth (whether from the sacrifice or the food myths) and I would appreciate your thoughts on the weightage you ascribe to the "one" which you think the Buddha was responding to.
I would love to be able to point you to a particular "citation...that furnishes this Creation myth" but I've never found one neat portrayal of this type of creation myth in any ancient volume -- there are dozens of snippets scattered all over (they are found as far back as the RgVeda, as recent as the Upanisads), discussing various parts, changing up the stories, taking as assumed the particular variant for their time or perhaps lineage -- "worshipping" this or that element with poetry, or building their own theories on the structure, themselves. They seem to never sit down and tell the story neatly, from start to finish, as we would, but assume their audience is already familiar with it, and simply use it as background to their arguments. (Oh, say, that sounds familiar... isn't that what I'm saying the Buddha's doing? It always surprises me when I see another way in which what the Buddha is doing is modeled on what has been done again and again in the literature that came before him -- I think this adds to the evidence that he was a well-educated man.)

Since I speak of gurus of the time being obscure -- and you seem quite well-educated on these ancient texts -- I'm a little surprised you'd think that anyone could provide such a citation. I once asked Wendy Doniger (who wrote "The Hindus") if there is any one good source for the myths -- either in the original texts, or even any scholars who had written a book in which it was laid out (hoping for just such a citation as you've asked for here) and she was unable to give me any. All we have is tiny bits and pieces. But I rely on the scholarship of those who have spent their lives studying those texts to provide me with insight into them.

But these myths have been understood, here in the West, the way I'm describing them, for a while (a short enough history given what a little while ago we were clueless about the Hindus and even about Buddhist beliefs). I can give citations that show *that* if you like, here's one piece:
Vedic Mythology, pp13-14, Arthur Anthony Macdonell, PhD, 1897:
In a similar strain to RV 10,129 a Brahmana passage declares that 'formerly nothing existed, neither heaven nor earth nor atmosphere, which being non-existent resolved to come into being' (TB. 2,2,9.1 ff.). The regular cosmogonic view of the Brahmanas requires the agency of a creator, who is not, however, always the starting point. The creator here is Prajapati, or the personal Brahma, who is not only father of gods, men, and demons, but is the All...
or to show that we're still thinking about these interpretations using the same framework but with our own differing theories, here's Brian K. Smith in "Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion" (1989) pp 51
In the beginning, the creative act of "emission" by the Lord of Creatures, Prajapati, is not a cosmogonic paradigm of sacred order but rather what Silburn rightly calls a 'profane act.' Put otherwise, cosmic procreation, in the imaginations of the Brahmins, does not engender a ready-made universal order but results in a problematic metaphysical excess. Similarly, at the level of individual human beginnings, birth and anthropogony are distinct and separate moments, the first being only the necessary precondition for the second. As cosmic creation is not cosmogony, biological reproduction is not the production of a true human being.
Oh, cool -- that was just the first page in the index under Prajapati, and I see that he is suggesting that *they* were talking about "necessary condition" as a condition for the big condition. (Perhaps I should credit Brian Smith with putting the key to the insight that that's what the Buddha was doing into my head in the first place.) And he is saying they were drawing the parallel between the creation myth and the creation of a human being that I am saying the Buddha was using on *three* levels rather than two: the creation myth, the creation of a human being, and the creation of what we mistake for a self.

The next paragraph begins:
It is characteristic -- and perhaps also close to definitive -- of Vedism that between mere procreation on the one hand and true cosmogony and anthropogony on the other is inserted a set of constructive rituals...
But if I go on quoting I will be abusing his copyright. I suggest reading his book, which is the most excellent on the subject I've read. But the quote above shows that it is understood that rituals were about the kinds of "construction" he was talking about above: this is what sankhara represents in the Buddha's system, both the desire for self and the acts that go into creating it.



Anyway, I think I have said, a couple of times, that I don't see the structure the Buddha used in DA as tying to one specific worldview (much less myth), but to a generalized one, which makes sense because, yes, there was not just one Creation myth. I do see the structure strongly matching the Prajapati myth -- in one or two very generalized versions of the popular variants. <edit/insert:> What I am trying to say is that the Prajapati myth may be one useful example of the type of myth the Buddha was generalizing about -- or it may be the primary one -- but what he is describing is meant to be generally representative of the way most people in his day looked at the world, rather than a direct refutation of that one myth. <end-edit> There's one in which Prajapati divides himself up, gaining senses through the individuality of name-and-form (I associate this with "form" in the canon), and in the other all the "pieces" having such similarity that they stuck together and were in constant contact (which I think of as matching "the formless" in the canon). Perhaps there were other myths out there that used a similar pattern, but the Prajapati myth (which was, earlier, associated with Purusa, and later associated with Brahma) matches up well enough to be used for the purposes of discussion. For references to the (bits and pieces in the) original texts that support the common understanding of those myths, I would point to Professor Jurewicz's paper, "Playing With Fire", which is chock full of citations -- she has far more knowledge of these things than I do. You can find a link to her paper on the same page of this forum as there is a link to mine, cited earlier: http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.ph ... 60#p192603
If it's also OK with you, I'd like to steer our discussion away from the issue of paṭigha as being 2 sememes (unless it is relevant in the context of pre-Buddhist pedagody and how you think the Buddha was responding to it) and come back instead to these -
It is relevant (see my mentions of form and formless above) but it is also okay with me to leave details aside since we've discussed it enough to have the needed background when it comes up again.
As I understand this, you still have the impression that somehow DA's very factual-sounding descriptions of a life in a world in which rebirth is the order of the day undermines my thesis that DA isn't describing rebirth, even though I've tried to detail how the Buddha uses the factual to (1) show the pattern of how things happen in a "as in this large literal context it happens, so it happens in what I'm trying to point out to you" sort of way while simultaneously (2) providing the object of meditation we should be looking at to see what is going on -- look in the large field to find the weeds we need to pull...
I still do not get from the above how you make the leap to the proposition that DA was -
The reason he needs to put the succinct definition of nutriment in with DA is because the way he's using DA is not succinct. Instead of a few brief sentences to describe "this is what everyone thinks x is" followed by "this is what I mean by x" which leads to the insight that "what everyone thinks x is" still counts as background, as necessary ground for what follows, in DA we have the bulk of the structure of DA describing "this is what everyone thinks life is about": rebirth -- whether cyclical or once and your done (go to bliss, or go to your ancestors). In the bulk of DA he is describing what everyone believes *because it is what everyone believes that is the ground for the problem he's pointing out and the solution he offers is tied up to it*.
Yes, I can well understand why you'd be confused. Let *me* try to be succinct. In the parts of his talks about DA where he sounds like he is talking about literal rebirth, he is -- talking about literal rebirth, about what people believe about how they came into being. He isn't, at that point, wanting to discuss the overall structure of his argument, but he is lasered in on how people perceive what is happening. This is why it sounds literal. Because he is talking about what people take to be the literal truth of how things work. Consciousness appears in the womb, and in dependence on that, there is the individuality of name-and form, and because of the existence of name-and-form, consciousness can be.

That what's being pointed out has more significance than that comes from the structure of DA, as well as from the way the Buddha speaks in general, as in nutriment.

Let me use the Buddha's method to explain it: a metaphor. Let's say you've signed up for a course on scheduling, and in this part of the seminar, I'm talking about the relationship between the days of the week and why we might want to put different emphasis on different approaches to work on certain days of the week. I'm explaining about Mondays. "Mondays are really bad," I say, "because they follow a day off, Sunday, and they are followed by four more workdays." This statement doesn't mean that *I* believe that Mondays are bad, or even that workdays are bad. It says *nothing* about what I believe. I'm not endorsing the badness of Mondays. And I don't stop and explain that "In general, people believe that Mondays are bad" -- I'm not explicit -- because you already know the context of what I'm talking about. But, shorn of the larger context, you could well take it to mean that I personally believe Mondays are bad, and that I'm explaining *why* they are.

In order for the student to get all the juice out of his explanation of what people understand to be the workings of the literal cycle of life, they need to have already understood that DA is multileveled. They could get this understanding from the way he describes nutriment when he puts it in with his DA lessons, because what he does with it is a microcosm of what he's doing with DA. Or they could get it from hearing the short version of DA and recognizing that he's not endorsing rebirth; he's not even talking about rebirth itself but about our views about rebirth ("ignorance" tells us that). Or they could get it from the way he tends to talk on multiple levels at once, in general, if they are able to recognize how often he does this. Or they could get it the way (I believe -- though it's not instantly clear to the whole world that this is what's going on) Sariputta got it when he was fanning the Buddha while listening to him talk to Longnails, and heard him say, "A monk whose mind is thus released does not take sides with anyone, does not dispute with anyone. He words things by means of what is said in the world but without grasping at it."

In the descriptions the Buddha gives of elements of DA where he sounds like he is describing literal rebirth as if it is-what-is he is describing not what-is but what people "know" (or think they know). He is not, in those portions, detailing his reasons for describing "what everybody knows" because his audience should have already understood from the above what he is doing and why he is doing it. *We* don't get it because we have *not* understood even what he's doing in nutriment, nor have we recognized the structure of DA as three pieces describing a generic version of Vedic life in a way that makes clear to us that "ignorance" and "aging and death" are out of sync with the rest. That's what I meant by "not being succinct" -- I really meant "not being explicit".

If I may trouble you to expand on this on how you think the Buddha's audience actually "thought" rebirth was about and furnish some internal (sutta) or external (Vedic) evidence to that effect. I think this is an important point of departure for me, since I accept the SN 12.10 & 11 narratives as being historically informative about how the Bodhisatta himself awoke to DA and DC. The Bodhisatta woke up to a totally novel way of looking at things and there does not seem to be any record that I know of in the suttas that the Buddha was designing the DA exposition in response to a very specific worldview (why Brahmanical only, when DA is supposed to operate at all levels to describe the 2nd Noble Truth?).
Sorry? I am not sure what you're asking for in the above. Are you asking me to show that the Buddha's audience all thought the same way about rebirth? Or are you asking me to show how the Buddha's audience thought *he* thought about rebirth? Or some sort of proof I could show you of how I know what he thought about rebirth? Or what? I'm only too glad to try to comply with any reasonable request for evidence, but I need to understand the request (and, of course, that it asks me to support what I am actually saying).

:namaste:
Last edited by nowheat on Tue Aug 20, 2013 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
nowheat
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by nowheat »

Spiny Norman wrote:
nowheat wrote:...so what got birthed that resulted in (my unsettling experience of) aging and death was *me* -- my assumptions about the world and who I am and who I should be made "real" (in a metaphorical sense - hah!) by the way I act.
I'm not sure I'm following you here. You seem to saying that it's "me" that gets (re)birthed, but isn't that sense of "me" the same as self-view? I tend to experience a sense of "me" most strongly when craving and aversion arise - it feels like craving and aversion are "symptoms" ( expressions? ) of self-view.
I'm quite pragmatic in my approach to practice and will use ideas which seem helpful - but for me, trying to impose ideas of birth, ageing and death onto this experience doesn't feel helpful.
You made the same separation, above, that I'm trying to point out: there is self view and then there is its expression.

Or, in a little more complex way of saying of the same thing: there is self view; there is what develops from that: the actual feeling that I have a self; and then there is the expression of that self out there in the world.

Or go it one further and insert between the last two -- there are all the unquestioned assumptions made on an unconscious level about the self and the world and the relationship between them and that leads to the ways we express ourselves in the world (or perhaps the middle two could be reversed).

When self-view stops (on an intellectual level) it can take a while for all its expressions to wind down, I think because it actually is a chain of events. I see the "me" as all the ways I continue to act as though I have a self even if I have thoroughly understood that I have no self.

First there is an innate view of self, then there is the perception that we have a self, then there is a refined view of self, and then there are the ways those perceptions inform our thinking, and then they are expressed in action. I may change my refined view of self (through understanding Buddhism) but amazingly still find myself acting as though I have a self. It seems to me I have to work a long time to find all the ways I hold onto that refined view and get rid of them, and then work further back to find all the ways the innate view manifests. What feels like "self" to me is what comes out of having the views. The views aren't "self" they are the cause of (what passes for) "self". And I don't think I've really gotten rid of self-view until I've experienced all of the ways it manifests "in self". Theoretically at least there should be a moment when I see the expression of that last problematic piece and extinguish it like a candle flame between thumb and forefinger. The last birth of self has then appeared and then died when I observed it, and the view is now finally gone -- what needed to be done has been done. There will be no more such births, all there is now is the deathless.


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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by lyndon taylor »

Actually if you don't believe in rebirth, there is no deathless, rather upon death there is only totally dead, not deathless. You can't have it both ways, if there is no rebirth, Nibbana ends completely at death, the end, zippo, are you comfortable with that?
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by nowheat »

lyndon taylor wrote:Actually if you don't believe in rebirth, there is no deathless, rather upon death there is only totally dead, not deathless. You can't have it both ways, if there is no rebirth, Nibbana ends completely at death, the end, zippo, are you comfortable with that?
lyndon, there are two kinds of "don't believe in rebirth". The kind you are referring to is what is loosely called atheism even in Buddhist circles where God has no part to play: an active *disbelief* in rebirth. The other kind is one who *neither believes nor disbelieves". For them, there is the deathless as you are taking it if there is rebirth, and if there is not there is not. But neither case matters (as Craig often argues if I understand him, though he doesn't put it the way I do) because there is the state the Buddha described of living a life with no perception that there is a self that dies -- and that is, in that sense, a deathless state.

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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by nowheat »

Spiny Norman wrote:I'm not sure I'm following you here. You seem to saying that it's "me" that gets (re)birthed, but isn't that sense of "me" the same as self-view?
nowheat wrote:What feels like "self" to me is what comes out of having the views. The views aren't "self" they are the cause of (what passes for) "self". And I don't think I've really gotten rid of self-view until I've experienced all of the ways it manifests "in self". Theoretically at least there should be a moment when I see the expression of that last problematic piece and extinguish it like a candle flame between thumb and forefinger. The last birth of self has then appeared and then died when I observed it, and the view is now finally gone -- what needed to be done has been done. There will be no more such births, all there is now is the deathless.
And I believe this is what the Buddha is describing in DA, when he describes what he means by the fuel (upadana/clinging) as a series of opinions which seem to be catch-phrases for the various schools of thought from his day, which match up pretty well to the step-further-back of thirst (tanha/craving), as well as the worlds one transitions into with bhava: whether it's the kama way of looking at things (I suspect this is karma-rebirth), or the rupa (the world of form -- staying in the world of the fathers?), or arupa (atman-brahman's dissolving into formless union with Brahman), these opinions about the self are what shape the formation of what we think of as the self. That self becomes visible in the world (I say through our actions) and that results in dukkha (the way we experience aging and death/impermanence).

And in practice, we tend to start from noticing the dukkha and then knock it back and back and back. In the middle/ritual portion of DA we are working on the refined views, but we still have to deal, some, with how we perceive self even before we develop views about it -- and that's all back in the first five links.

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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by Aloka »

nowheat wrote:
lyndon taylor wrote:Actually if you don't believe in rebirth, there is no deathless, rather upon death there is only totally dead, not deathless. You can't have it both ways, if there is no rebirth, Nibbana ends completely at death, the end, zippo, are you comfortable with that?
lyndon, there are two kinds of "don't believe in rebirth". The kind you are referring to is what is loosely called atheism even in Buddhist circles where God has no part to play: an active *disbelief* in rebirth. The other kind is one who *neither believes nor disbelieves". For them, there is the deathless as you are taking it if there is rebirth, and if there is not there is not. But neither case matters (as Craig often argues if I understand him, though he doesn't put it the way I do) because there is the state the Buddha described of living a life with no perception that there is a self that dies -- and that is, in that sense, a deathless state.
There's a previous thread here: "What is the deathless" which may be of interest:

http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.ph ... 20#p240963

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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by ancientbuddhism »

lyndon taylor wrote:... if there is no rebirth, Nibbana ends completely at death, the end, zippo, are you comfortable with that?
Do you believe that while sitting crosslegged, you should fly through the air like a winged bird?
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If you don’t, then all you have to contemplate is cognition at sensate events. Are you comfortable with that?
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by nowheat »

lyndon taylor wrote:...if there is no rebirth, Nibbana ends completely at death, the end, zippo, are you comfortable with that?
I didn't notice, till ab posted a comment, that you'd asked me a question, lyndon. To answer it: yes, I am as comfortable with death being the end as I am with the prospect of a rebirth based on the karma from this life I'm living now. I hope you are equally comfortable with either prospect.

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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by Ceisiwr »

lyndon taylor wrote:Actually if you don't believe in rebirth, there is no deathless, rather upon death there is only totally dead, not deathless. You can't have it both ways, if there is no rebirth, Nibbana ends completely at death, the end, zippo, are you comfortable with that?

Deathless is not clinging to anything, not identifying with that which dies


If that happens then there is no death in this life, or another


It's only when, through ignorance, we give rise to "me" is there death

How can death occur when there is no "me" to die?


However your also confusing NON-belief in rebirth with belief in NO Rebirth, a subtle distinction but an important one


Let me put this to you, If somehow you discovered that rebirth didn't happen, would you not still experience dukkha through clinging?

To me it's obvious we do, therefore to be free from dukkha we should not cling, and so Dhamma practice is the same regardless of what happens after death

"Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself.

When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress."

"there is no you in connection with that ... Just this is the end of stress"

I.e. the deathless
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by Aloka »

.

In his book " Don't Take Your Life Personally" Ajahn Sumedho describes the deathless as "the unconditioned" or "nibbana".


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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by Ceisiwr »

Aloka wrote:.

In his book " Don't Take Your Life Personally" Ajahn Sumedho describes the deathless as "the unconditioned" or "nibbana".


.

That's it, the mind that isn't conditioned and deluded by phenomena, and so not giving rise to identity, is Nibbana
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by retrofuturist »

Yes. Nice description Craig.
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by Sylvester »

nowheat wrote: I would love to be able to point you to a particular "citation...that furnishes this Creation myth" but I've never found one neat portrayal of this type of creation myth in any ancient volume -- there are dozens of snippets scattered all over (they are found as far back as the RgVeda, as recent as the Upanisads), discussing various parts, changing up the stories, taking as assumed the particular variant for their time or perhaps lineage -- "worshipping" this or that element with poetry, or building their own theories on the structure, themselves. They seem to never sit down and tell the story neatly, from start to finish, as we would, but assume their audience is already familiar with it, and simply use it as background to their arguments. (Oh, say, that sounds familiar... isn't that what I'm saying the Buddha's doing? It always surprises me when I see another way in which what the Buddha is doing is modeled on what has been done again and again in the literature that came before him -- I think this adds to the evidence that he was a well-educated man.)
Anyway, I think I have said, a couple of times, that I don't see the structure the Buddha used in DA as tying to one specific worldview (much less myth), but to a generalized one, which makes sense because, yes, there was not just one Creation myth. I do see the structure strongly matching the Prajapati myth -- in one or two very generalized versions of the popular variants. <edit/insert:> What I am trying to say is that the Prajapati myth may be one useful example of the type of myth the Buddha was generalizing about -- or it may be the primary one -- but what he is describing is meant to be generally representative of the way most people in his day looked at the world, rather than a direct refutation of that one myth. <end-edit> There's one in which Prajapati divides himself up, gaining senses through the individuality of name-and-form (I associate this with "form" in the canon), and in the other all the "pieces" having such similarity that they stuck together and were in constant contact (which I think of as matching "the formless" in the canon). Perhaps there were other myths out there that used a similar pattern, but the Prajapati myth (which was, earlier, associated with Purusa, and later associated with Brahma) matches up well enough to be used for the purposes of discussion. For references to the (bits and pieces in the) original texts that support the common understanding of those myths, I would point to Professor Jurewicz's paper, "Playing With Fire", which is chock full of citations -- she has far more knowledge of these things than I do. You can find a link to her paper on the same page of this forum as there is a link to mine, cited earlier: http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.ph ... 60#p192603
Thank you for this. If there was no one neat Creation myth, perhaps you could furnish at least one common thread underlying the entire multi-coloured fabric of the pre-Buddhist millieu? I do know from your essay in the OCBS Journal that you may equate this to the "sense of self", but it is not immediately apparent to me what that "sense of self" was, given the diversity of theories presented in the Upanisads. Certainly, I would not discount the utility of DA in accounting for some "sense of self", since grasping/clinging forms an important component of the 1st Noble Truth, while DA is identified with the 2nd. I take MN 44 as furnishing an alternative characterisation of the grasping in the concept of sakkāya, so perhaps this is one expression of a "sense of self".

But that being said, despite the summary equation (saṅkhitta) of the pañcupādānakkhandhā as dukkhā, we cannot discount the other appositional statements in SN 56. 11-
jātipi dukkhā jarāpi dukkhā vyādhipi dukkho maraṇampi dukkhaṃ appiyehi sampayogo dukkho piyehi vippayogo dukkho yampicchaṃ na labhati tampi dukkhaṃ

Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; association with the loathed is suffering, dissociation from the loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering.
Is an account of DA that attempts to address the source/origin of this sense of self alone what is presented in the suttas? I think this is papering over other very important aspects of DA that attempt to explain phenomenon beyond the clinging to identity. Such an account fails to acknowledge that DA as presented in the suttas function to explain feelings as well. Take for example the internal evidence in SN 12.25, where SN 56.11's piyehi vippayoga (seperation from the loved) fits in with SN 12.25's exposition on the source of feeling -
Friend Sāriputta, some ascetics and brahmins, proponents of kamma, maintain that pleasure and pain are created by oneself; some ascetics and brahmins, proponents of kamma, maintain that pleasure and pain are created by another; some ascetics and brahmins, proponents of kamma, maintain that pleasure and pain are created both by oneself and by another; some ascetics and brahmins, proponents of kamma, maintain that pleasure and pain have arisen fortuitously, being created neither by oneself nor by another.76 Now, friend Sāriputta, what does the Blessed One say about this? What does he teach? How should we answer if we are to state what has been said by the Blessed One and not misrepresent him with what is contrary to fact? And how should we explain in accordance with the Dhamma so that no reasonable consequence of our assertion would give ground for criticism?”

“Friend, the Blessed One has said that pleasure and pain are dependently arisen. Dependent on what? Dependent on contact. If one were to speak thus one would be stating what has been said by the Blessed One and would not misrepresent him with what is contrary to fact; one would explain in accordance with the Dhamma, and no reasonable consequence of one’s assertion would give ground for criticism.

“Therein, friend, in the case of those ascetics and brahmins, proponents of kamma, who maintain that pleasure and pain are created by oneself, and those who maintain that pleasure and pain are created by another, and those who maintain that pleasure and pain are created both by oneself and by another, and those who maintain that pleasure and pain have arisen fortuitously, being created neither by oneself nor by another—in each case that is conditioned by contact.

“Therein, friends, in the case of those ascetics and brahmins, proponents of kamma, who maintain that pleasure and pain are created by oneself, and those who maintain that pleasure and pain are created by another, and those who maintain that pleasure and pain are created both by oneself and by another, and those [39] who maintain that pleasure and pain have arisen fortuitously, being created neither by oneself nor by another—in each case it is impossible that they will experience [anything] without contact.”
This analysis is echoed in AN 3.61 - http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html . Both SN 12.25 and AN 3.61 certainly fit in with your description that it addresses a prevailing belief(s), but both suttas do not stop to say that one's sense of self originates from that belief. Both suttas explicity deny the validity of the beliefs, and then go on to present the Buddha's teaching on the source of feelings.

I would also note that AN 3.61 goes beyond the exposition on the origin of feelings. The alighting of the embryo (gabbhassāvakkanti) is mentioned. What's striking here is that clinging to the 6 dhātū is the paccaya for the alighting of the embryo. This turns the table on the discussion, insofar as the Buddha has gone beyond applying DA as just being an account of pañcupādānakkhandhā, but has actually applied DA as pointing to pañcupādānakkhandhā (or the underlying upādāna/clinging) as the condition for the alighting of the embryo. I therefore find it hard to believe that the Buddha actually used DA as a mere pedagogical tool to explain the Brahmin's "sense of self", not when AN 3.61 points clearly to DA being an explanation for how clinging leads to rebirth.
Spiny Norman
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by Spiny Norman »

nowheat wrote: First there is an innate view of self, then there is the perception that we have a self, then there is a refined view of self, and then there are the ways those perceptions inform our thinking, and then they are expressed in action.
I broadly agree, though I think that the "innate view" of self is deep-seated and continuous, so to talk about it being "reborn" doesn't feel right. As I said before, it's the ocean, not the waves - the waves would be like desires. I find in practice that mindfulness works best when I'm experiencing stuff directly, without imposing too many ideas on the process. So I might think "Ah, there's some desire, I wonder where that came from?", but I wouldn't start thinking in terms of birth, ageing and death because it's just adding another layer of conceptual proliferation.
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Spiny Norman
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Re: the great rebirth debate

Post by Spiny Norman »

clw_uk wrote: How can death occur when there is no "me" to die?
But clearly there is still the physical death of the body, and still the experience of dying. As I've noted before, in the suttas death is always clearly described as a physical event.
Buddha save me from new-agers!
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