Recalling My Past Lives
If you know anything about Asian religion, you probably know that Buddhism has an awful lot of symbology associated with it. From depictions of a seeming multitude of deities to elaborate mandalas to lots of ritual adornments, and a plenitude of mythical stories passed down from generation to generation.
We are generally told that this symbology does not reflect belief in the literal images, but that they are primarily metaphoric in nature. Manjushri is depicted with a sword, which represents how penetrating wisdom cuts through ignorance and delusion. Avalokitesvara, the embodiment of compassion, has eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering, and a thousand arms with which to aid them.
This kind of symbolic representation extends deeply into the Buddhist canon, but it’s rarely discussed amongst western practitioners, who often struggle to accept it, viewing the mythic elements as extraneous and decorative and not a central part of the core teachings.
But there are some topics which Asians (and the canon writings) are quite emphatic about. Asians assert the literal reality of things like rebirth and the ability to recollect one’s past and future lives, which westerners usually are reluctant to accept at face value. To a westerner like myself, those concepts seem like they might be yet another instance of densely-piled Asian symbolism, but no one ever seems to come out and admit it.
Well, here’s where it gets personal…
My commutes to and from work this fall have included reading “The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah”, a book that I snapped up while visiting Abhayagiri Monastery, the final destination of the California Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimage I took back in September. For those of you who don’t know, Ajahn Chah was essentially the root teacher of modern Theravada Buddhism. And because he welcomed foreigners to his monasteries, he’s like the grandaddy of one of the most successful branches of Buddhism in the west.
So in the middle of this book, I read the following passage. I cite it here almost entirely because I think the context and the sequence of points is important. Emphasis is mine.
Anger is hot. Pleasure, the extreme of indulgence, is too cool. The extreme of self-torment is hot. We want neither hot nor cold. Know hot and cold. Know all things that appear. Do they cause us to suffer? Do we form attachment to them? The teaching that birth is suffering doesn’t only mean dying from this life and taking rebirth in the next life. That’s so far away. The suffering of birth happens right now.
It’s said that becoming is the cause of birth. What is this ‘becoming’? Anything that we attach to and put meaning on is becoming. Whenever we see anything as self or other or belonging to ourselves, without wise discernment to know it as only a convention, that is all becoming. Whenever we hold on to something as ‘us’ or ‘ours’, and then it undergoes change, the mind is shaken by that. It is shaken with a positive or negative reaction. That sense of self experiencing happiness or unhappiness is birth. When there is birth, it brings suffering along with it. Aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering.
Right now, do we have becoming? Are we aware of this becoming? For example, take the trees in the monastery. The abbot of the monastery can take birth as a worm in every tree in the monastery if he isn’t aware of himself, if he feels that it is really ‘his’ monastery. This grasping at ‘my’ monastery with ‘my’ orchard and ‘my’ trees is the worm that latches on there. If there are thousands of trees, he will become a worm thousands of times. This is becoming. When the trees are cut or meet with any harm, the worms are affected; the mind is shaken and takes birth with all this anxiety. Then there is the suffering of birth, the suffering of aging, and so forth. Are you aware of the way this happens?
[…] You don’t need to look far away to understand this. When you focus your attention here, you can know whether or not there is becoming. Then, when it is happening, are you aware of it? Are you aware of convention and supposition? Do you understand them? It’s the grasping attachment that is the vital point, whether or not we are really believing in the designations of me and mine. This grasping is the worm, and it is what causes birth.
Where is this attachment? Grasping onto form, feeling, perception, thoughts, and consciousness, we attach to happiness and unhappiness, and we become obscured and take birth. It happens when we have contact through the senses. The eyes see forms, and it happens in the present. This is what the Buddha wanted us to look at, to recognize becoming and birth as they occur through our senses. If we know the inner senses and the external objects, we can let go, internally and externally. This can be seen in the present. It’s not something that happens when we die from this life. It’s the eye seeing forms right now, the ear hearing sounds right now, the nose smelling aromas right now, the tongue tasting flavors right now. Are you taking birth with them? Be aware and recognize birth right as it happens. This way is better.
What’s being said here-and the flash of insight that came to me on my way to work-is that the concept of rebirth is a metaphor for attachment. When something becomes so important to you that you have to have it, you are setting yourself up to suffer when it inevitably changes. When you can’t stand something so much that you have to push it away, you’re setting yourself up to suffer because you cannot control it. That is what Luang Por Chah is referring to when he talks about the abbot taking birth with each tree: if he is attached to the trees, he (metaphorically) lives, suffers, and dies with them.
In that way, you are “reborn” as many times as there are things that you become attached to.
That also elucidates the nihilistic-sounding descriptions of nibbana as freeing oneself from the endless cycle of birth, suffering, and death, never to be reborn again in this world. It’s not about some crazy kind of metaphysical suicide; it’s about never placing ourselves in the position of experiencing the suffering that comes from seeking lasting happiness from something that itself is impermanent and subject to suffering.
And so I can say with no trace of irony that I do recall my past lives, and that I have in the past been my parents, my lovers, my friends, and many of the places and plants and animals in nature. Because in some way I have grasped after them deeply enough to become attached, causing myself some degree of suffering when they eventually changed.
Have you never felt the pain of visiting the neighborhood where you grew up and seeing how it has changed? Or lost a dear pet? Or found that you had grown estranged from your best friend? That’s the kind of rebirth that ajahn is talking about.
Similarly, in that metaphorical sense I can foresee my own future “lives” by looking at the things that I am drawn toward. My cat? Of course I’ll suffer when he dies. Cycling? Yeah, that’ll be hard to give up. Nature? My affinity for nature will someday cause me a great deal of suffering when I’m no longer able to get out and enjoy it. In a sense, I am “becoming” these things, because my sense of self has become firmly attached to them.
Even if it’s obscured by a somewhat opaque veil of metaphor about rebirth and past lives, this remains one of Buddhism’s core teachings: eventually, all our attachments come back to bite us, unless and until we learn how to let go of them gracefully.