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           BPS Newsletter Cover Essay #6 (Spring 1987)


                     DHAMMA WITHOUT REBIRTH?

                        by Bhikkhu Bodhi




   In line with the present-day stress on the need for religious
   teachings to be personally relevant and directly verifiable, in
   certain Dhamma circles the time-honored Buddhist doctrine of rebirth
   has come up for severe re-examination. Although only a few
   contemporary Buddhist thinkers still go so far as to suggest that
   this doctrine be scrapped as "unscientific," another opinion has been
   gaining ground to the effect that whether or not rebirth itself be a
   fact, the //doctrine// of rebirth has no essential bearings on the
   practice of Dhamma and thence no claim to an assured place in the
   Buddhist teachings. The Dhamma, it is said, is concerned solely with
   the here and now, with helping us to resolve our personal hangups
   through increased self-awareness and inner honesty. All the rest of
   Buddhism we can now let go as the religious trappings of an ancient
   culture utterly inappropriate for the Dhamma of our technological age.

   If we suspend our own predilections for the moment and instead go
   directly to our sources, we come upon the indisputable fact that the
   Buddha himself taught rebirth and taught it as a basic tenet of his
   teaching. Viewed in their totality, the Buddha's discourses show us
   that far from being a mere concession to the outlook prevalent in his
   time or an Asiatic cultural contrivance, the doctrine of rebirth has
   tremendous implications for the entire course of Dhamma practice,
   affecting both the aim with which the practice is taken up and the
   motivation with which it is followed through to completion.

   The aim of the Buddhist path is liberation from suffering, and the
   Buddha makes it abundantly clear that the suffering from which
   liberation is needed is the suffering of bondage to samsara, the
   round of repeated birth and death. To be sure, the Dhamma does have
   an aspect which is directly visible and personally verifiable. By
   direct inspection of our own experience we can see that sorrow,
   tension, fear and grief always arise from our greed, aversion and
   ignorance, and thus can be eliminated with the removal of those
   defilements. The importance of this directly visible side of Dhamma
   practice cannot be underestimated, as it serves to confirm our
   confidence in the liberating efficacy of the Buddhist path. However,
   to downplay the doctrine of rebirth and explain the entire import of
   the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced
   self-awareness is to deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives
   from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so
   one seriously risks reducing it in the end to little more than a
   sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy.

   The Buddha himself has clearly indicated that the root problem of
   human existence is not simply the fact that we are vulnerable to
   sorrow, grief and fear, but that we tie ourselves through our
   egoistic clinging to a constantly self-regenerating pattern of birth,
   aging, sickness and death within which we undergo the more specific
   forms of mental affliction. He has also shown that the primary danger
   in the defilements is their causal role in sustaining the round of
   rebirths. As long as they remain unabandoned in the deep strata of
   the mind, they drag us through the round of becoming in which we shed
   a flood of tears "greater than the waters of the ocean." When these
   points are carefully considered, we then see that the practice of
   Dhamma does not aim at providing us with a comfortable reconciliation
   with our present personalities and our situation in the world, but at
   initiating a far-reaching inner transformation which will issue in
   our deliverance from the cycle of worldly existence in its entirety.

   Admittedly, for most of us the primary motivation for entering upon
   the path of Dhamma has been a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction with
   the routine course of our unenlightened lives rather than a keen
   perception of the dangers in the round of rebirths. However, if we
   are going to follow the Dhamma through to its end and tap its full
   potential for conferring peace and higher wisdom, it is necessary for
   the motivation of our practice to mature beyond that which originally
   induced us to enter the path. Our underlying motivation must grow
   towards those essential truths disclosed to us by the Buddha and,
   encompassing those truths, must use them to nourish its own capacity
   to lead us towards the realization of the goal.

   Our motivation acquires the requisite maturity by the cultivation of
   right view, the first factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, which as
   explained by the Buddha includes an understanding of the principles
   of kamma and rebirth as fundamental to the structure of our
   existence. Though contemplating the moment is the key to the
   development of insight meditation, it would be an erroneous extreme
   to hold that the practice of Dhamma consists wholly in maintaining
   mindfulness of the present. The Buddhist path stresses the role of
   wisdom as the instrument of deliverance, and wisdom must comprise not
   only a penetration of the moment in its vertical depths, but a
   comprehension of the past and future horizons within which our
   present existence unfolds. To take full cognizance of the principle
   of rebirth will give us that panoramic perspective from which we can
   survey our lives in their broader context and total network of
   relationships. This will spur us on in our own pursuit of the path
   and will reveal the profound significance of the goal towards which
   our practice points, the end of the cycle of rebirths as mind's final
   liberation from suffering.

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