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Eternal Soul
Silouan
Veteran
I know many are former Christians on this forum and have noticed the term eternal soul used several times when describing Christian beliefs.
*Based upon your previous Christian beliefs what is meant by eternal and soul, and why are they used in conjunction?
*What is your critique of those previous beliefs based upon your understanding of the Dhamma?
*Based upon your previous Christian beliefs what is meant by eternal and soul, and why are they used in conjunction?
*What is your critique of those previous beliefs based upon your understanding of the Dhamma?
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Comments
Am i the only one who feels relief in anatta? And i cant claim to even have delved that far into it.
What we were taught is that a soul is a discrete entity, having its own identity, linked to a body. Both will be joined at the general resurrection, hence the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox proscriptions on cremation. I can't speak about other denominations and churches. Based on this, it's my guess this is why Christianity does not accept rebirth or reincarnation. But therein lies the belief that the soul is eternal. In Christianity it will eventually be reunited with its body to live in eternal bliss in Heaven with God, or eternal torment in Hell, with eternal and eternity meaning no end whatsoever. I don't hold with the Christian belief at all, and I'm less inclined to accept the Hindu version. Even in Hinduism, the ātman has a unique identity known as the jīva or jīvātman, the living essence of a being. This is what survives death to continue on.
I'm becoming more comfortable with what Wikipedia describes relative to Buddhism:
Buddhists and Christians both have their own after life dreams for ordering their respective life practices.
Neither has anymore validity than your average new age dream interpretation book.
Maybe Buddhists don't talk about "Eternal Soul" but they do talk about "Buddha Nature". Maybe they don't talk about "Salvation" but they do talk about "Nirvana". Maybe Buddhists don't talk about "God" but they talk about "Non-Self". When I look beyond those letters and sounds, I see the same emotions. Identical letters in different envelopes.
See through the hypnosis of language that we all fall for so easily and then there's nothing to critique and nothing to debate. We are all basically the same. You have "Eternal Soul" and I have "Eternal Soul" but we call it differently.
So then your head spins and explodes lol. Its one of those things that cannot be conceptually explained and can only be experienced by the wise. So since im not wise yet i just continue with my practice and see its benefits in my life here and now.
Those schooled in Christian verse might well remember that John the Baptist was questioned as to whether he was Elijah. Arguably, one could stipulate that this was a rare exception: A singular prophet who magically disappeared with a promise of coming back again. However, that interpretation is doubtless colored by centuries of "Western" thinking, reinforced by the dicta of the Second Council of Constantinople. That sixth century council made early Christian thinkers' thoughts on the preexistence of the soul heretical. Origen was a great proponent of this idea of eternal as going both forward and into the distant past.
Nonetheless, I'm pretty much convinced that "eternal" and "eternity" are very different things. For one thing, you just cannot prove that anything will stay the same forever ("eternity"). It's just some crazy idea. Whereas I think the term "eternal" is much more elegant and even poetic. And by poetic I mean in a more exalted frame of understanding and of knowledge. To what point, then, does one use the word "eternity?"
I think consigning something to eternity is at least partly a death wish. By that I mean that resorting to such a radically unempirical idea is such a gross abstraction from any semblance of humanity or decency, that it lends itself to evil and death. On the other hand, the idea of a realm beyond purely secular time ("eternal") is experienceable and really empirically based. What we may indeed have here is an idealist/materialist antithesis: Eternal being Mind and Light and Eternity being Dead Stuff and Darkness. "Eternal" means something quite different to the Christian mystic, "outside time," "beyond the reach of the secular," if you will. I guess for the Western mind, soul is the perceiver?
I think the more "eternal" truth of the matter for the Orthodox Christian is (in the words of the Book of Common Prayer):
"There is one Body and one Spirit;
There is one hope in God's call to us;
One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
One God and Father of all." -- From the 1979 BCP, Holy Baptism, pg 299
I guess my "critique" would be "It's all on what you emphasize." If one wants to teach the priority of an almost hermetically sealed individual soul, I don't believe that's a very profound interpretation of classical Christian teaching. But I do realize that there are people out there in the religion business who do oversimplify; but oversimplification is falsification and inauthentic.
The East does not believe in an individual "spiritual" soul, and I think that used to be true to an extent in Western antiquity. Look at the Latin, "Anima." The soul was something actually felt bodily, the "core." We call that the "Heart." It's what animates us, both Human and animals.
Of course Erich von Däniken's explanation is that Elijah went on an extended all expenses paid vacation in outer space, and then was unceremoniously dumped off in the Judean desert (OK, I added the part about being dumped off in the desert). When I think about it now, "I waited an eternity for the bus" does sound like punishment. I think you're right that eternal has a nicer ring.
Gassho :dunce:
Not only have I seen the term used on this forum, but also by a prominently respected American Theravada monk to explain the Dhamma.
My purpose in asking these questions is not to prove the validity of one religion over another, but rather as an opportunity to explore the possibility that perhaps from a traditional sense both Buddhism and Christianity ultimately lead one to the same experience despite the differences in language and terminology used, and without any need to use the other as form of confirmation bias.
I'm no theologian, so according to my understanding of Eastern Christian tradition is that the soul and body are not distinct unchangeable entities or beings, and man as a personal existence is not identified with either. Rather they are energies, manifestation, expressions, functions by which the personal existence of man is revealed.
Immortality is understood as a transcendence of death by means of relationship or union with God and not as some kind of survival after death.
Eternity is not limitless time but the simultaneous presence of all time within God. Man in his conditioned state experiences temporal succession as time, but can experience the eternal as an actuality in the present by means of silence and stillness through pure prayer. It is considered a gift, because it is a presence that is accessible and always personally available to man but not produced by him.
Man is one essence and many persons or hypostases of essence, but what man is essentially cannot be identified with either his soul or body. They only spiritually and bodily give effect, express, and reveal the truth of man as a personal being in relation to others. This truth is not changed by birth, maturity, old age, sickness, and death.
If the soul and body in the strictest sense do exhaust what man is then what becomes of the person experiencing infirmity, injury, handicap, deformity, mental illness and so on? Are they less a person or not at all?
what the christians define as soul as well eternal is ok. Buddhst do the same, but they call it the true self, the second self. It posses the same abilities.
There has been a great influence of buddhism into the teaching of Jesus. I do know both sides.
sakko