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Born into the human realm
Bunks
Australia Veteran
For all the Secular Buddhists out there, please ignore this post! 
Did the buddha say it was a coincidence that we come back as a human or that it was due to virtuous deeds?
Or does it depend on the tradition one follows?
I am interested to know why there are 7 billion people on the planet now as opposed to say 20 million (a guesstimate) in the Buddha's time. From a biological stand point the answer is obvious, but what is the explanation from a buddhist point of view?
Did the buddha say it was a coincidence that we come back as a human or that it was due to virtuous deeds?
Or does it depend on the tradition one follows?
I am interested to know why there are 7 billion people on the planet now as opposed to say 20 million (a guesstimate) in the Buddha's time. From a biological stand point the answer is obvious, but what is the explanation from a buddhist point of view?
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The numerical disparity (a very different question from your first one, deserving of its own thread) is explained by a) consciousnesses being born into our realm from other realms, and b) the high death rate at any given time. How many died on 9/11? How many have died in various wars? How many die of AIDS? How many died in the tsunami event a few years ago? How many died during WWII? All those vast numbers of people (not to mention the animals that died during Katrina, WWII, etc.) get reborn.
"Monks, suppose that this great earth were totally covered with water, and a man were to toss a yoke with a single hole there. A wind from the east would push it west, a wind from the west would push it east. A wind from the north would push it south, a wind from the south would push it north. And suppose a blind sea-turtle were there. It would come to the surface once every one hundred years. Now what do you think: would that blind sea-turtle, coming to the surface once every one hundred years, stick his neck into the yoke with a single hole?"
"It would be a sheer coincidence, lord, that the blind sea-turtle, coming to the surface once every one hundred years, would stick his neck into the yoke with a single hole."
"It's likewise a sheer coincidence that one obtains the human state. It's likewise a sheer coincidence that a Tathagata, worthy & rightly self-awakened, arises in the world. It's likewise a sheer coincidence that a doctrine & discipline expounded by a Tathagata appears in the world. Now, this human state has been obtained. A Tathagata, worthy & rightly self-awakened, has arisen in the world. A doctrine & discipline expounded by a Tathagata appears in the world.
"Therefore your duty is the contemplation, 'This is stress... This is the origination of stress... This is the cessation of stress.' Your duty is the contemplation, 'This is the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress.'"
The sutras contradict each other on certain scores.
Human rebirth is just a fluke, per the Buddha. I've gotta remember that one. What was your source, please, robot?
That passage you quoted makes me wonder how people were able to remember past lives that had only recently occurred? If, as the Buddha says, we only take birth as a human once every few thousand years (best guess), how could one remember walking the streets of Suffolk in 1895?
However, in the Theravadan tradition, do they not say that once someone removes the three fetters they're guarantee to come back as a human being in subsequent lives and will be enlightened within seven?
If the Buddha had sudden recall of his past lives upon attaining Enlightenment, it seems like rebirth is more than just a rare fluke.
It's fairly contradictory stuff and maybe over my head. That's why I am inclined toward the short version.
Speaking of karma-- I have a hard time believing in it, as well. To me, it seems like another way of controlling human behavior. It is kind of like a God, in the way God supposedly punishes those who do wrong. It is an external force that one must answer to eventually.
Yes, I have much to learn. But those two things are where I get tripped up because it seems like blind faith to me, and I don't do blind faith very well.
In it's simplest form it just means "actions". Therefore, it isn't something you believe or don't believe - it just is. I've also heard it described as our habits......then you get the hardcore buddhists who say if you steal money in this life you'll be poor in the next life....that I also find hard to believe.
It is a very complex topic and you'll possibly find (as I have) that as you practice more you'll drop the whole believe / don't believe and just sit with the uncertainty.
As for rebirth, you're right - buddhists don't believe in souls. All that is "re-born" is the conscious with the habits / mental grooves / stamps carried over from a previous life. No soul involved at all.....
Karma is cause and effect -- it's not controlled by anyone or anything, so it's not really reward and punishment. Your actions will always have consequences of some sort. This plays out all the time in life, but in Buddhist thought it also extends into future lives.
I hope this helps and that I didn't muck up too badly.
But still, it's ok, chela--you don't have to believe in rebirth to be a Buddhist.
Secular Buddhists can believe in rebirth you know; and more traditional Buddhists might not. But we have been over that territory a zillions times, so....
Significantly dwarfed by the other events - the 2004 tsunami is probably the next highest count at I think around 250,000 people and 2 million displaced.
The rest slide into millions and probably beyond.
@black_tea-- I like your explanations, especially of karma. If it is simply the effect of a cause (intention or action), then I can certainly live with that.
What we are talking about is the awareness continues onward. We have no evidence that awareness discontinues. And eventually when you have enough meditative understanding of awareness and the three times dissolve then you know that awareness is outside of time and space. The rebirth is also not bound by time and space so there is not like a backpack of karma that hops over to the next body.
The self is not the skhandas so rebirth neccessarily has nothing to do with bodies. The mental skhandas are also not the self and thus the mental skhandas have nothing to do with rebirth.
Zen has a saying "what is your face before you were born?" This points to the true self of bodhicitta. It is that which is reborn and apparently it also carries over distortions to the bodhicitta ie karma. I don't know why karma continues to affect the citta after death, but Buddha said that it is impossible to know everything about karma until we become a Buddha ourself.
I think it's important to know regardless of our ponderings such as mine ^ that there is more that we don't know than do know.
On topic: it is said that there are hugely more beings in the hell realm than the human. Not sure if that's from a sutra, just something I read somewhere from Tibetan Buddhist source. The reason is that it is so hard to get out of a hell realm due to it being a viscious circle. As a human who studies the dharma you are on the eightfold path and if you just keep on trucking eventually the virtuous cycle will take you to a high level of confidence and freedom from obstacles. Then the natural radiance and sensitivity of the mind is liberated.
I think I'll stop doing it!
Is there a physicist or a biologist in the house?
http://tmxxine.tumblr.com/quantumbiology
:wave:
I think whatever explanation makes you feel at ease is fine - we are nowhere near a universal solution (if there is such a thing).
Much depends on where you place the observer position - e.g. say you're standing waiting to cross the street - you could consider that from your own observer position as sensed through your natural senses unfolding along your experienced timeline - objects are solid, cause and effect holds, the light goes red cars stop and you cross to a green light and go on your way - or you could consider that from an atomic point of view - very different things going on - same things but different - or a subatomic level - crazy things happening now that barely have a relationship to reality etc.
We cling to mathematics but that is riddled with mysterious tangled assumptions - the foundation of some form of security is derived from practical application - mechanics builds bridges and statistics predicts trends for example - these tools have brought us fabulous material gains - turn to the masters of these tools - inevitably they profess to the deepest ignorances with coy smiles... everyone takes the fiction pill eventually - that is the threshold where chaos is held at bay - our little survival niche.
On a subatomic level, best guesses are a 'quantum foam' - like an all pervading base blanket, below which we are unable to observe - results at this level hint at some everlasting energy exchange mechanism - or that is (hopefully still) close to the current pit stop at least - on one level QM is very accurate at predicting results (more accurate than classical physics results) but on another level it doesn't incorporate gravity, time is still an issue and we're left in the dark in relation to 98% of the 'stuff' that must be around to make the equations balance.
On the other end, I've read papers on black holes and singularity - the challenge is that black holes (beyond the event horizon) seem to 'destroy' energy - the proposition is to consider energy more like data - this sort of means that the reality we perceive and observe is a few dimensions short of the whole deal! It is not energy sucked into a black hole, the data is left at the event horizon... so what the fimmigetty gets sucked in...? who knows... maybe the professor's brain and his lunch.
Meanwhile the universe expands ever onwards into something... or not, perhaps a multidimensional loop... or is it expanding forever, or contracting or just stable for a short while before it disappears?
If it makes you feel at ease knowing that energy is a constant then why not - it seems of little significance unless you're engaged in some practical application - the bridge may well collapse if the builders do not adequately grasp the level of mechanics for the required results but an observer need not know any maths to look upon the structure and put it to use.
I guess in this life, one needs to be prepared to accept that perhaps any idea rapidly degenerates - as does our very existence it would seem - for now anyway - I think... though I'm not all that sure...
"Then there is the case where a certain person refrains from taking life, refrains from taking what is not given, refrains from sensual misconduct, refrains from false speech, refrains from divisive speech, refrains from abusive speech, refrains from idle chatter, is not covetous, bears no ill will, and has right views. With the break-up of the body, after death, he reappears in the company of human beings (or devas). Seems to me that it would just stay in the food that the organism would have consumed to convert the food's energy into energy in the organism's body to begin with. So you could say that organisms don't actually produce energy, they just convert it from one form to another. For example, the sun converts energy from hydrogen via nuclear fusion. Plants convert energy from the sun via photosynthesis. Organisms that eat plants, convert the energy that the plant converted from the sun, etc, etc, etc.
Now if you want to ask "Well where does hydrogen come from". I don't know!
I'm tending to agree with @robot. Energy does exist in the living. That is how it is living. You can't have a living being without energy-- it doesn't work that way. But energy also exists in what we consider non-living. Like the air that blows through your hair, the rocks that break down over time, etc. This is why some belief systems (like American Indians, for example) believe that things in nature ARE alive. Many scientists say the universe is a living entity. Maybe our traditional idea of what life is isn't reality.
@Bunks
No apology necessary! I totally missed your little winky-face! Maybe I need to use my reading glasses more often! ;-)
The English word ‘animation’ comes from the Latin anima. The word literally means mind or soul—but also correlates with the Greek pneuma which literally means breath. Pneuma is often translated ‘spirit,’ sometimes more misleadingly as ‘ghost.’ The Hebrew ruach comes down to the same thing. The obvious metaphorical connection is that a living thing breathes. And so in Genesis, the ‘Spirit of God’ (literally, his ‘breath’) ‘hovered above the waters.’ Also, God breathes life into Adam.
In early Hebraic religion, the metaphysical notion of an immortal soul is a later post-Babylonian captivity development. Prior to that, it did not even occur to the Hebrews to be concerned with an afterlife. During Jesus’ day, it was the Saduccees, not the Pharisees, who were the religious conservatives: they did not believe in an afterlife. In Christianity this idea has its roots more in Plato than it does the Bible (I still think the term ‘Greco-Christian’ makes more sense than ‘Judeo-Christian’).
As a result of this Platonising tendency, via Christianity, westerners have a peculiar relationship with matter: material, ‘flesh’ is inferior to the ‘spirit.’ All the western philosophical quandaries came about because of this divide between matter and spirit. Even today, consciously or not, we have inherited this unfortunate habit of demeaning matter. We long for something else—and we call that ‘something else’ a ‘soul,’ or a ‘spirit’ which is ‘immortal’ and can exist entirely separately from material.
But there is another possibility that does not rely on a metaphysical divorce between mind and matter: What if this breath, this spirit, this thing called ‘life’ was not a metaphysical, otherworldly ‘substance,’ but the very unique and unrepeatable inter-relationship between organic compounds? I therefore do not exist as an essentialised entity with a Platonic ‘soul,’ but as a relational entity—‘I’ am this very animation going on in between a complex structure of organic molecules. If so, then ‘I’ am a relational activity, not a metaphysical essence. And this interaction extends indefinitely beyond the collection of molecules I name as ‘myself.’ Realising this, ‘I’ am not separate from everything else but seamlessly integrated into a more vast relational activity.
This particular kind of materialist view doesn’t turn the world or oneself into a mere cold machine, but rather makes the material world itself ‘holy,’ without the need to veer of into misguided metaphysics. And this then circles back another interesting etymological connection—the word ‘matter’ is derived from the Latin word mater: ‘mother.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What this also means is that every action, word and thought that we engage in has consequences that ripple ever outward to others in who knows what ways. The point is that whatever this 'I' thing is, it isn't a thing at all, but a relational activity that myriad causes and conditions converge upon. 'Relationality' is just another way of saying 'emptiness.'
The best analogy I think is of a vast ocean and you and I and every 'thing' are the waves which rise and fall in perpetual flux. Every wave affects every other wave--even a wave on the other side of the ocean has an effect, whether we are aware of it or not. Every wave in this sense contains all the waves and all the ocean. We tend to think more rigidly, where each thing is a discrete unit independently existing from every other discrete unit. I don't think we realise just how deeply embedded this metaphysical delusion is within our minds, but it is the cause of so many problems because we tend to see ourselves as fragments grinding against other fragments, causing friction and suffering-- at root it is 'ontological violence' that gives rise to all forms of violence.
[apologies for the longish post]
I think there is a possibility that our "need" to hold the idea of a soul above our physical body (matter) is because we see so much suffering that we psychologically can't handle it. But, I see Buddha's teachings as a way to transcend that, to change our perception-- to lessen the fear and to put living and dying on the same playing field. To accept suffering instead of running away from it. It makes life and death a whole instead of an either/or.
Thank you so much for your post.
'Removing' them is a challenge in itself! interesting proposition though...
Also, could someone please point me to teachings that discuss the realms? I fear that I will not know enough of anything to intelligently discuss anything before my life is over.
When you die the heart stops pumping oxygen to the cells so the energy production stops.
The body produces energy only because it is taking food and oxygen from outside the system thus injecting energy. When the body breaks down it releases all the energy that ATP used to build up a highly ordered structured body. That body could only be sustained by food and oxygen coming into the system.
From the universes perspective the homeostasis of the body reduces entropy and forms order. But the heat released in the homeostasis means that the universe still gets more entropy from a living thing.
a chemical reaction occurs if delta G is negative (and the activation barrier has to occur, like a match to start burning of wood).
delta G = delta H - TdeltaS
H is enthalpy, usually bonds potential energy.. when the bond breaks it releases energy... different types of bonds hold different energies.
S is entropy or randomness. Reactions that cause more randomness is favorable to have a negative delta G
T is temperature. The higher the temperature the more prone to randomness a system is.
The universe is always getting more random. At the extreme it will all be a mess of particles bouncing around randomly.
Physics tells us that energy is never lost, and that our brains -- and hence the feeling of life -- operates by electrical energy, and this energy simply can't vanish. The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless world allows for no true death in any real sense. Immortality resides outside of time altogether. Eastern religions have argued for millennia that birth and death are equally illusory. Since consciousness transcends the body -− "external" is a distinction of language alone −- we're left with consciousness as the bedrock of existence. Death has always meant only one thing: an end with no reprieve. If we're just our body, then we must die. But if we're our consciousness, the sense of experience, then we can't die for the simple reason that consciousness is expressed in manifold fashion and is ultimately unconfined.
Since rebirth is influenced by the results of both past and present actions that stretch back countless lifetimes, however, one can't really say that one particular action will lead to one place or experience rather than another as each being has a wide array of kamma that can potentially express itself when the conditions present themselves (which itself depends on factors external to the individual), hence the difficulty in determining the precise working out of the results of kamma (AN 4.77). And that goes double if you take into account the different types of kamma mentioned in the commentarial literature. Well, from one perspective, I'd say that the explanation from a Buddhist point of view is the same as the explanation from a biological standpoint, which is fairly obvious. In terms of the number of beings present in the 'human realm,' however, a number of things can account for the increase. One is that a large number of beings from other realms are being born into the human realm at roughly the same time. Another thing to consider is that the Buddha never said there were a set number of beings in this 'ten thousandfold world system,' so it's quite possible that new beings are continually being born.
If "physics tells us that ...our brain operates on electrical energy...and that energy simply can't vanish", then what happens to it? Is this really what physics tells us, or is this some kind of misrepresentation? btw, any anatomy and physiology class tells you that the body (which includes the brain, also the heart) operates on electrical energy. I'm not sure that energy "goes" anywhere. The body just ceases to produce it anymore.
?
:scratch:
Cut neural activity and the mind has less consciousness, we call this sleep.
No arm and I don't expect to wave. No brain and I don't expect to be thinking.
However, we do during life, arise or incarnate continually in an ever changing but dependent arising. Like one moments candle, lighting the next flame . . .
It is also possible that our entanglement with life, effects or gives being to others incarnation. In other words our being is borne in them . . .
It is also possible that quantum tunnelling and other yet to be discovered mechanisms are operating in other branes (dimensions). These may give us insight into a possible reemergence or continuation of consciousness. However we need evidence that has yet to arise.
:wave: