Some boring Buddhist stuff
A long time ago there lived in India a prince who decided to become an ascetic and eventually, after years of some really hardcore practices, he developed a middle way between the two. Then he spent the rest of his long life hiking bakc and forth the northern India, debating and teaching what he came up with. Eventually he died because of food poisoning and now we're lucky that the symbol of Buddhism is not a bowl full of steaming meat.
In the next centuries Buddhism splitted up into a bunch of schools. Some of them sticked to what they thought was the original teachings of Buddha, the others took liberties in interpretation of the old and creation of the new allegedly inspired stuff. Internal Buddhist disputes started.
This entry is about one of the main points of the Buddhist doctrine, that of Dependent Origination, and how it relates to rebirth. As some of you may know, Buddhism denies the concept of a soul, an atman. Nevertheless, we also deny that death is the end of everything. The whole thing is quite controversial and, at least in my opinion, it draws too much attention, because although Dependent Origination is important, rebirth is not.
The idea of Dependent Origination is in fact quite straightforward: Everything has a cause and everything has consequences. Because of this, that happens. Because of that, this happens. There is never really a true beginning and there is never really a true end to anything. And we are in fact chains of such causes and consequences. Processes. The notion of an individual, an object, arises siply from the way we look at world. Treating people as individuals is simpler and in great many ways much more effective in everyday life, just as using Newtonian physics is simpler and more effective that trying to taking into account relativity effects every time we want to compute what happens to a ball when it is thrown across the gym.
But some Buddhist thinkers, from Mahayana schools, felt quite uneasy with this. They came up with the idea that we can treat the whole chains of events (consciousnesses) as if they were wrapped into a metaphysical "storehouse", an entity which could let as think of a living being as an individual in the absolute and not only conventional sense, instead of a process, and in the same time we wouldn't contradict what the teaching of Dependent Origination. They called it Ālaya-vijñāna.
I had a discussion about it some time ago and I thought it'd be a good idea to record my conclusions. It's kinda boring and I record it here just because I don't want to forget it. I think it's important for me because it connects two schools of Buddhism I'm interested in, and in the same time it leaves out other, more esoteric schools, which I think went too far.
I believe that if this alaya was something more than a name for the sum of its parts, ie. the other consciousnesses, then Buddha Gautama would talk about it. And if it's not, if it's just a name, then it cannot move from one life to another - it ceases and arises just as any consciousness it encompasses.
As Nagarjuna, one of the most prominent early thinkers of Buddhism, pointed out, we can talk about the conventional and about the absolute truth. We know that in the absolute sense there is no individual self. We can only talk about an individual as a label for the sum of its parts. When I say that I do a deed or that I receive a karma, I talk about the conventional truth. 'I' is a name for a set of elements which work together in the moment. These elements change over time and in, say, twenty years, I will still be able to conventionally talk about "me", but in the absolute sense "I" will consist of other elements than I do now.
This is consistent with the teaching of dependent origination, where consciousness in the present moment is a necessary factor for consciousness in the next moment. Together, these two blur the line between this life and the eventual next life. We just move through time and by doing this, we change. The death is an event just like any other. I'm not sure whether the word "literal" apply to this at all. It seems more complex than a simple literal-metaphorical dichotomy.
This also leads me to the question what is this *individual* karma. We can say that in the conventional sense, but we need to remember that the results of our deeds are not the only thing that affect us. There are many other factors and among them are deeds of other people. And our deeds affect these other people as well.
In the absolute sense, there is no individuality in karma, because "an individual" is just a name for the sum of its parts. So, is there karma of body, karma of senses, karma of feelings, etc.? No, there is just karma, with no genitive associated. Karmic fruits cause deeds which in turn produce karmic fruits. But the deeds and karmic fruits are not channeled, they don't affect only "me", because there is no "me" in the absolute sense, and as we know "my" deeds affect other "individuals" as well.
The realization of that blurs the line even more because it shows that there is no contrast, no difference in quality, between my chain of causes and results, and a chain of causes and results of "another being". Conventionally we draw borders between ourselves and the world but in the absolute sense there is no such border. No storehouse. No alaya. We are all connected. And if so, then there is no difference between gaining merit in order to have a good rebirth, gaining merit in order to have a good life in twenty years, and gaining merit for the well-being of a person standing next to me. In fact, if I decided to do skillful deeds just in order to have a good rebirth, it would be very egocentrical and it would move me away from the path.
I think this is one of the main differences between Theravada and Zen: A Theravadin focuses mainly on working with his mind, a Zen adept concludes that there is no real difference between his mind and the world.
Yup. End of story.
More to read from Wikipedia, because I'm lazy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_origination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine