Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
If the world was to end, what would happen to rebirth?
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Questioning is what leads people to answers.
Sometimes beginners' attempts to understand Buddhist principles lead them to logical dead-ends (what the Buddha sometimes called an "imponderable", FYI Murasaki, and other times he called such questions irrelevant. Which means, irrelevant to ending suffering and attaining Enlightenment). But beginners, as Murasaki pointed out, don't know they've wandered into a dead-end, or an "imponderable", unless this is explained. Beginners are by definition, well, beginners. If they can't turn to us for a patient explanation, to whom can they turn?
Now Murasaki and other newbies are going to be afraid to ask questions and to learn. That's shameful. :shake:
There never was an impermanent frozen moment. Since there are no substantial moments there cannot be a substantial world.. And thus there is nothing to disappear into nothingness.
What do you mean by "world ending?" Are you speaking of planet Earth, the universe, or your own death? I guess it really doesn't matter. Nothing goes away it just changes.
More importantly, the world, as you perceive it, is created in your mind.
So it helps to see that all things that currently exist have 3 qualities. Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and emptiness of self.
Ending/beginning are just concepts we create in an attempt to provide continuity to impermanence and to condition our understanding of the present moment.
The end of the world would be an event which would cause other events of course. However, life on this earth, or our species specifically, is vastly insignificant in relation to the larger cosmos.
The energy and structured organization required to transmit our lives thousands of light years simply does not exist. And there is no reason for it to exist. It is our desire to live which makes us fantasize about such things, and our egos inability to accept that "our" lives may seem meaningless.
The current apparent obsession among some sections of society with the "end of the world" (Parousia, Apocalypse, Rapture, etc.) is, to my mind, symptomatic of the contemporary denial mind-set around our own death. It may be easier to envisage the 'end of all' than our personal extinction. Modern squeamishness around the treatment of dead bodies and the reverence accorded coffins or, even, archaeological digs border on pre-scientific superstition.
Imagining an end to 'the world' implies a beginning, which risks falling into notions of Creation/Creator. For some of us, as Buddhists, the Heart Sutra enables us detach from both coming to birth and concomitant death. Detached from the chain of dependent origination we can say
GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA
It is meaningful because it illustrates how small and self-centered our view of the cosmos is, if nothing else. Does the whole universe revolve around this little planet and our human species? You can believe that if you want of course, if it makes your life more meaningful. Some of us don't need these kinds of stories.
You can't get an empty mind by simply voiding it of knowledge or concepts. Knowledge is merely memory. The one that survives the questioning process I mean. That's why questions are so important.
Without questioning no one would even want to be a buddhist.
When someone asks you a question, answer him or her sincerely, and when you are not asked, do not force your teaching upon others. -Jae Woong Kim
federica, your statement is clearly meaningless.
Questions without a concrete response, which lead to mere speculation and yet more questioning, are pointless.
I believe it was not I who proposed this, but the Buddha.
but as you clearly know more than I (which is most likely) and more than the Buddha (which i would take issue with) please feel free to carry on.
Anyway, it's an interesting question, and I have to agree that I would think our energy would be 'recycled' into some other place/form.
Until then, I can interpret the Buddha's recommendations quite nicely, thank you.
It's clear cut and dried. As Kamma is seen by many Buddhists to be inseparable from the subject of re-birth - how am I misinterpreting this? Like I said - have fun...
however.... read on....
The Buddha also told us to not commence conjecture "about [the origin etc., of] the world...."
'origin etc.,' covers 'end; also, according to more learned scholars than I.
In fact, remove the comment in the square brackets, and it states exactly:
"conjecture about the world is an unconjecturable, that is not to be conjectured about...."
Where in this, am I incorrect?
And where, more specifically, does the thread question prove the Buddha inaccurate?
You are making the all-to-common mistake of confusing the ultimate with the relative.
Karma is necessarily relative as it involves causality.
Do I need to explain further?
Like I said -
Have fun.
That doesn't mean thats absolutely the case here or that some things aren't ordered by an outside agent.
There is also the curious thought that somehow complex systems don't have any influence on their emergent properties...
So what exactly does Buddhist doctrine say about extraterrestrial life migration? I'm not the one making this stuff up.
I see you're having fun.....
I don't know maybe my reasoning isn't correct. Maybe I didn't really grasp what your original point was. Maybe you could explain it more, particularly what you view the mindstream is that it would need to be transported across space and why it would need an outside force to enable it to do so. Then came the Buddha and in his revolutionary way proclaimed that there are numerous other planets each with its own life forms. He said that these planets are great distances apart from each other. (Jayasuriya, 1963) (Majhima Nikaya 3.124) The Buddha said there are “thousands of suns, thousands of moons, thousands of continents.” Anguttara Nikaya 1.227
The Buddha described a 10,000 world systems, which was to say that there are literally an innumerable amount of solar systems. A world system was the description for a sun or star with several planets revolving around it. We now know that there are several solar systems through direct evidence with high powered space telescopes. Nearly one hundred planets have been identified in the known universe up to this point. The Buddha stated that "the infinite world spheres are incalculable" (KN, Buddhavamsa 1.64).
“He recalls to mind his various temporary states in days gone by – one birth, or two or three or four or five births, 10 or 20, 30 or 50, a 100 or a 1,000 or a 100,000 births, through many cycles of cosmic contraction and cosmic expansion . . . Now there comes a time, when sooner or later, after the lapse of a long, long period of contraction, this world-system passes away. And when this happens beings have mostly been re-born in the World of Radiance, and there they dwell made of mind, feeding on joy, radiating light from themselves, traversing the air, dwelling in glory; and thus they remain for a long, long period of time. Now there comes also a time, friends, when sooner or later, this universe begins to re-evolve by expansion.” (The Buddha, Brahmajala Sutta, Digha Nikaya, Sutta Pitaka)
http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=The_science_of_Buddhism
Also I'm not trying to quote Buddhist doctrine verbatim on my argument. I'm trying to use my own understanding of Dharma and science and reason.
:eek2: