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No "SOUL" IN BUDDHISM? Think again...
there are many suttas you can find where the Buddha is explaining the different relms of exsistance. Each relm we are Born into we always have 2 things, a body of some sort, and consciousness. There is the understanding of a "non self", but in fact there is still some kind of self. Though we can not explain what it is, or where it is...if there is no self, how can you be sitting there reading this? how can there be buddhism for us to know? there is reality and there is a "self"...But this self that changes, and is born into another realm, or even human or animal can be called a soul....or spirit, or even energy if you like. The buddha never said there is no soul.
Here is an example of what I am talking about...
Suttanta Pitaka > Majjhima Nikāya > Suññata Vagga (10 of 10) > Devaduta Sutta(The Heavenly Messengers.) >
MN 130: Devaduta Sutta(The Heavenly Messengers.)
I heard thus.
At one time the Blessed One was living in the monastery offered by Anaathapindika in Jeta’s grove in Saavatthi. The Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus from there. ‘Bhikkhus, like a man standing between two houses with doors standing adjacently would see people entering, leaving, wandering and roaming in the two houses.Likewise I see with my heavenly eye purified beyond human, beings disappearing and appearing, unexalted and exalted, beautiful and ugly, in heaven and in hell. I see beings according their actions: These good beings conducting well by body, speech and mind, not blaming noble ones, developping right view, bearing the right view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, go to increase, are born in heavenThese good beings conducting well by body, speech and mind, not blaming noble ones, developping right view, bearing the right view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, are born with humans. These good beings mis -conducting by body, speech and mind, blaming noble ones, developping wrong view, bearing the wrong view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death,.
are born in the sphere of ghosts These good beings misconducting by body, speech and mind, blaming noble ones, developping wrong view, bearing the wrong view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, are born with animals.These good beings misconducting by body, speech and mind, blaming noble ones, developping wrong view, bearing the wrong view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, decrease, and are born in hell."
Now look at this next part...
" Bhikkhus, the warders of hell take him by his hands and feet and show him to the king of the under world ‘Lord, this man is unfriendly, not uniting, not chaste, does not honour the elders in the family, mete him the suitable punishment"
Notice how the Buddha says the wardens take this being by the hands and feet? this clearly shows we have a body even in hell...but the body cannot exsist without consciousness...the fact that we are reborn to different places, with different bodies according to our karma, tells us very plainly and clearly there is a self...
Other sutta's say "dragged to hell"
What is the thing that is being dagged? Again, the buddha NEVER SAID "NO SUCH THING AS A SOUL" So we can saefly call it a soul...Or spirit, or A bundle of energy....it is this "thing" that is however changing, still a self.
Now human...later maybe an animal, maybe a deva, maybe a ghost, maybe in Hell....But we clearly have a "soul" that goes to these places.
Here is an example of what I am talking about...
Suttanta Pitaka > Majjhima Nikāya > Suññata Vagga (10 of 10) > Devaduta Sutta(The Heavenly Messengers.) >
MN 130: Devaduta Sutta(The Heavenly Messengers.)
I heard thus.
At one time the Blessed One was living in the monastery offered by Anaathapindika in Jeta’s grove in Saavatthi. The Blessed One addressed the bhikkhus from there. ‘Bhikkhus, like a man standing between two houses with doors standing adjacently would see people entering, leaving, wandering and roaming in the two houses.Likewise I see with my heavenly eye purified beyond human, beings disappearing and appearing, unexalted and exalted, beautiful and ugly, in heaven and in hell. I see beings according their actions: These good beings conducting well by body, speech and mind, not blaming noble ones, developping right view, bearing the right view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, go to increase, are born in heavenThese good beings conducting well by body, speech and mind, not blaming noble ones, developping right view, bearing the right view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, are born with humans. These good beings mis -conducting by body, speech and mind, blaming noble ones, developping wrong view, bearing the wrong view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death,.
are born in the sphere of ghosts These good beings misconducting by body, speech and mind, blaming noble ones, developping wrong view, bearing the wrong view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, are born with animals.These good beings misconducting by body, speech and mind, blaming noble ones, developping wrong view, bearing the wrong view of actions, at the break up of the body, after death, decrease, and are born in hell."
Now look at this next part...
" Bhikkhus, the warders of hell take him by his hands and feet and show him to the king of the under world ‘Lord, this man is unfriendly, not uniting, not chaste, does not honour the elders in the family, mete him the suitable punishment"
Notice how the Buddha says the wardens take this being by the hands and feet? this clearly shows we have a body even in hell...but the body cannot exsist without consciousness...the fact that we are reborn to different places, with different bodies according to our karma, tells us very plainly and clearly there is a self...
Other sutta's say "dragged to hell"
What is the thing that is being dagged? Again, the buddha NEVER SAID "NO SUCH THING AS A SOUL" So we can saefly call it a soul...Or spirit, or A bundle of energy....it is this "thing" that is however changing, still a self.
Now human...later maybe an animal, maybe a deva, maybe a ghost, maybe in Hell....But we clearly have a "soul" that goes to these places.
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Comments
So on the conventional level we can have something that goes from life to life without negating the ultimate nature of phenomena.
You might find it helpful to read this sutta: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.059.nymo.html
Even hell is not forever, once our karma has been exhausted in hell we again die and are reborn...and on and on it goes...so there has to be a "something" a "self" for there to be change. For there to say "I am impermenent" ...there is an "I".
Just change.
If someone thinks that practising Buddhism means arriving at a metaphysical position.. that is barking up the wrong tree. It is also why in Buddhism it is recommended that people take Refuge and practice with the support of a Sangha... and a teacher. lest they completely miss the point. Which is easy to do because the point is very simple and direct and experiential and addressed as a matter of Dukkha,
The mind is a self less continuum, Self dissolves at the time of death and is reborn according to various karma that the mind carries into one of the 6 realms. If this was not so Buddha would not have referenced time without beginning and so forth in the Suttas and Liberation being an escape from cyclic rebirth...etc.
There is no thing or essence. There are appearances but they are empty of thingness.
Views of existence, non existence, both and neither do not apply to reality.
There is suffering, no suffer.
There is happiness, no being exeriencing the happiness. Just happiness experiencing itself as itself. Then gone like a bubble.
You might find it helpful to investigate dependent origination. The general principle is that of dependent arising.
Basically I am agreeing with all of you, but its difficult to put these things into words.
wow kashi...
I agree with you as well...If you think about though...everytime you post something, your getting your opinion out there lol!
The point Im trying to make is...there is a self, but theres not a self...but its not possible to be anything, human or otherwise, unless there is something that is us.
Some call it true nature, some call it soul...ect ect...
it does not matter that these things are always changing. The point is, there IS SOMETHING that is changing.
and The Buddha clearly shows us different things that can happen to this "thing" "i" "self" "being" ect ect.
So I suggest its not against the Buddhas teaching to say "soul" as part of a language we call english.
If you say "I am a human being", aren't you basically saying the opposite of what is said above?
For instance we see a cup as a cup, when in fact is a multitude of colors, which create a shape between itself and the negative shape. Thus with light we distinguish it as form. Not only that we give it three dimensions in relationship to the fixed location we place upon the cup and ourselves. Then we say this is a cup based on its function, etc.
But to a dog, there is no color, it is a possible chew toy.
But that doesn't mean there is some kind of human or dog that objectively exists and an unchanging entity.
The human is also color and there is no distinguishing the body from anything else in the field of vision. The distinction is clinging to sensations and concepts and changing them all together to form what we call "my" body.
Or if you think the mind is human, where is the mind? Who is the mind? No concepts and references points can even touch the mind. The mind is clear and void. Even thoughts that reference a self are clear and void. A thought appears then gone. It doesn't appear to a who, where or when. These are projected points of references.
http://www.buddhanet.net/3-gqga.htm
Very interesting thread.
"I am a human being" does not mean "I AM" as in something that will not change...I said a few times that all these things change...I have a human mind, and a human body, but its not the ultimate "me"
are you suggesting that you do not have a human mind?
Animals think differently as someone else mentioned above, a cup is a "cup" to the human mind, but to a dog maybe its a chew toy. My point is not getting across I see.
Im agreeing but suggesting something that should not be so hard to understand.
We say "tree"...but the tree comes to "being" from causes and effects...ints inter connected to non-tree elements. Same with everthing else...but The Buddha never said a tree can reach enlightenment...it does not have the kind of consciance mind like that of a humn. in fact, You Can ONLY reach enlightenment during human form.
There is something special about being human....animals and plants cant know the dhamma.
Again, there is something that we "are"...always changing, but in short we go from one form to the next...thats not possible if there is no "self"
I follow Theravada buddhism, so the concept "nothing exsists" or "mind only" is not a notion that corisponds to the the buddhas teaching, and therefore I care nothing about these ideas.
Im hoping im not making any enimes here, Im trying to be very straight forward with what I hope to get across. I urge other people to re-read what you just quoted me saying there.
Then here you go.. in a nutshell.
speculation about an essential self-substance is beside the point.
So there is something of importance to what I quoted also. But I do thank you for this also important teaching Richard.
I understand your position.
Check this out:
"
Anatta or soul-lessness
This Buddhist doctrine of rebirth should be distinguished from the theory of reincarnation which implies the transmigration of a soul and its invariable material rebirth. Buddhism denies the existence of an unchanging or eternal soul created by a God or emanating from a Divine Essence (Paramatma).
If the immortal soul, which is supposed to be the essence of man, is eternal, there cannot be either a rise or a fall. Besides one cannot understand why "different souls are so variously constituted at the outset."
To prove the existence of endless felicity in an eternal heaven and unending torments in an eternal hell, an immortal soul is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, what is it that is punished in hell or rewarded in heaven?
"It should be said," writes Bertrand Russell, "that the old distinction between soul and body has evaporated quite as much because 'matter' has lost its solidity as mind has lost its spirituality. Psychology is just beginning to be scientific. In the present state of psychology belief in immortality can at any rate claim no support from science."
Buddhists do agree with Russell when he says "there is obviously some reason in which I am the same person as I was yesterday, and, to take an even more obvious example if I simultaneously see a man and hear him speaking, there is some sense in which the 'I' that sees is the same as the 'I' that hears."
Till recently scientists believed in an indivisible and indestructible atom. "For sufficient reasons physicists have reduced this atom to a series of events. For equally good reasons psychologists find that mind has not the identity of a single continuing thing but is a series of occurrences bound together by certain intimate relations. The question of immortality, therefore, has become the question whether these intimate relations exist between occurrences connected with a living body and other occurrence which take place after that body is dead."
As C.E.M. Joad says in "The Meaning of Life," matter has since disintegrated under our very eyes. It is no longer solid; it is no longer enduring; it is no longer determined by compulsive causal laws; and more important than all, it is no longer known.
The so-called atoms, it seems, are both "divisible and destructible." The electrons and protons that compose atoms "can meet and annihilate one another while their persistence, such as it is, is rather that of a wave lacking fixed boundaries, and in process of continual change both as regards shape and position than that of a thing."[11]
Bishop Berkeley who showed that this so-called atom is a metaphysical fiction held that there exists a spiritual substance called the soul.
Hume, for instance, looked into consciousness and perceived that there was nothing except fleeting mental states and concluded that the supposed "permanent ego" is non-existent.
"There are some philosophers," he says, "who imagine we are every moment conscious of what we call 'ourself,' that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence and so we are certain, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call 'myself' I always stumble on some particular perception or other -- of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself... and never can observe anything but the perception... nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect non-entity."
Bergson says, "All consciousness is time existence; and a conscious state is not a state that endures without changing. It is a change without ceasing, when change ceases it ceases; it is itself nothing but change."
Dealing with this question of soul Prof. James says -- "The soul-theory is a complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the actually verified facts of conscious experience goes. So far no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific reasons." In concluding his interesting chapter on the soul he says: "And in this book the provisional solution which we have reached must be the final word: the thoughts themselves are the thinkers."
Watson, a distinguished psychologist, states: "No one has ever touched a soul or has seen one in a test tube or has in any way come into relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience. Nevertheless to doubt its existence is to become a heretic and once might possibly even had led to the loss of one's head. Even today a man holding a public position dare not question it."
The Buddha anticipated these facts some 2500 years ago.
According to Buddhism mind is nothing but a complex compound of fleeting mental states. One unit of consciousness consists of three phases -- arising or genesis (uppada) static or development (thiti), and cessation or dissolution (bhanga). Immediately after the cessation stage of a thought moment there occurs the genesis stage of the subsequent thought-moment. Each momentary consciousness of this ever-changing life-process, on passing away, transmits its whole energy, all the indelibly recorded impressions to its successor. Every fresh consciousness consists of the potentialities of its predecessors together with something more. There is therefore, a continuous flow of consciousness like a stream without any interruption. The subsequent thought moment is neither absolutely the same as its predecessor -- since that which goes to make it up is not identical -- nor entirely another -- being the same continuity of kamma energy. Here there is no identical being but there is an identity in process.
Every moment there is birth, every moment there is death. The arising of one thought-moment means the passing away of another thought-moment and vice versa. In the course of one life-time there is momentary rebirth without a soul.
It must not be understood that a consciousness is chopped up in bits and joined together like a train or a chain. But, on the contrary, "it persistently flows on like a river receiving from the tributary streams of sense constant accretions to its flood, and ever dispensing to the world without the thought-stuff it has gathered by the way."[12] It has birth for its source and death for its mouth. The rapidity of the flow is such that hardly is there any standard whereby it can be measured even approximately. However, it pleases the commentators to say that the time duration of one thought-moment is even less than one-billionth part of the time occupied by a flash of lightning.
Here we find a juxtaposition of such fleeting mental states of consciousness opposed to a superposition of such states as some appear to believe. No state once gone ever recurs nor is identical with what goes before. But we worldlings, veiled by the web of illusion, mistake this apparent continuity to be something eternal and go to the extent of introducing an unchanging soul, an atta, the supposed doer and receptacle of all actions to this ever-changing consciousness.
"The so-called being is like a flash of lightning that is resolved into a succession of sparks that follow upon one another with such rapidity that the human retina cannot perceive them separately, nor can the uninstructed conceive of such succession of separate sparks."[13] As the wheel of a cart rests on the ground at one point, so does the being live only for one thought-moment. It is always in the present, and is ever slipping into the irrevocable past. What we shall become is determined by this present thought-moment.
If there is no soul, what is it that is reborn, one might ask.
Well, there is nothing to be reborn.
When life ceases the kammic energy re-materializes itself in another form. As Bhikkhu Silacara says: "Unseen it passes whithersoever the conditions appropriate to its visible manifestation are present. Here showing itself as a tiny gnat or worm, there making its presence known in the dazzling magnificence of a Deva or an Archangel's existence. When one mode of its manifestation ceases it merely passes on, and where suitable circumstances offer, reveals itself afresh in another name or form."
Birth is the arising of the psycho-physical phenomena. Death is merely the temporary end of a temporary phenomenon.
Just as the arising of a physical state is conditioned by a preceding state as its cause, so the appearance of psycho-physical phenomena is conditioned by cause anterior to its birth. As the process of one life-span is possible without a permanent entity passing from one thought-moment to another, so a series of life-processes is possible without an immortal soul to transmigrate from one existence to another.
Buddhism does not totally deny the existence of a personality in an empirical sense. It only attempts to show that it does not exist in an ultimate sense. The Buddhist philosophical term for an individual is santana, i.e., a flux or a continuity. It includes the mental and physical elements as well. The kammic force of each individual binds the elements together. This uninterrupted flux or continuity of psycho-physical phenomenon, which is conditioned by kamma, and not limited only to the present life, but having its source in the beginningless past and its continuation in the future — is the Buddhist substitute for the permanent ego or the immortal soul of other religions"
http://www.buddhanet.net/nutshell09.htm
You're doing fine, I'm following. While we can't prove the existence of soul, we can't disprove it.
At death, the body remains and the "thing" that makes up who you are as kashi or Alison exits.
Many people follow a lot of different "buddhism's" and all have their own ideas about what that is. Do you think the goal in buddhism is to keep being reborn again and agian non stop as a hum being until all beings have reached enlightenment much like a Bodhisattva does? To me, that is not buddhism, but to others it is.
I am not going to have a petty arguement over this if thats where this will lead.
"Now, Venerable Nāgasena, the one who is reborn, is he the same as the one who has died, or is he another?"
"Neither the same, nor another" (na ca so na ca añño).
"Give me an example."
"What do you think, o King: are you now, as a grown-up person, the same that you had been as a little, young and tender babe? "
"No, Venerable Sir. Another person was the little, young and tender babe, but quite a
different person am I now as a grown-up man . " . . .
"... Is perhaps in the first watch of the night one lamp burning, another one in the middle
watch, and again another one in the last watch?"
"No, Venerable Sir. The light during the whole night depends on one and the same lamp.''
"Just so, o King, is the chain of phenomena linked together. One phenomenon arises,
another vanishes, yet all are linked together, one after the other, without interruption. In
this way one reaches the final state of consciousnes neither as the same person. nor as
another person.''
Also, in the //Milindapanha// the King asks Nagasena:
"What is it, Venerable Sir, that will be reborn?"
"A psycho-physical combination (//nama-rupa//), O King."
"But how, Venerable Sir? Is it the same psycho-physical
combination as this present one?"
"No, O King. But the present psycho-physical combination produces
kammically wholesome and unwholesome volitional activities, and
through such kamma a new psycho-physical combination will be
born."
That there are many things in the world that Buddha did not teach about. He focused on suffering and how to be relieved of it.
I imagine that suttas as well as verses from any book are subjected to INTERPRETATION... the discussion above is people posting various interpretations on the subject. No one here will be ugly to you..we all come with our view in respect.
Not "answered"... but settled , along with all metaphysical questions and answers. It is not settled in the sense of being left aside because it is imponderable... but uprooted along with all metaphysical doubt and confusion. This is not a big deal "Enlightenment".... it is a matter of course... with just doing it. Lots of people settle it.. in practice. It is not a big deal.
anyway.. now I'm avoiding work.. so I better go.
And experientially through meditation one can come to the conclusion that there is no enduring soul or entity.
So keep on talking. Some of us are actually listening.
I guess it comes down to western or eastern philosophy.
taiyaki has just posted a ton of stuff for me to read....and I really want to. But I have things to do right now, so im asking for everyone to take a break from this until you see another responce from me...I dont want to be overloaded and get behind on this topic because to be honest, if I come back and theres a ton of posts and I feel that I cant catch up, then I am simply going to be done with it and move on.
if thats too much to ask Im sorry.
Talk to you later...depending.
I like this thread! And I agree with @vinlyn your thread is very refreshing...you can be a spiritual mutt like me!
please allow for any time difference, ok?