Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 74-minute discussion, Pamela Lyon explores the final three links of the twelve-link chain of dependent origination: becoming, birth, and aging-and-death. She anchors the Buddhist understanding of rebirth in its philosophical distinctiveness—rejecting a permanent self while acknowledging continuity through consciousness—and distinguishes it sharply from reincarnation models in other traditions. Rather than rely on analytical logic alone (which she finds unconvincing), Lyon surveys three approaches to understanding rebirth continuity: logical reasoning, personal memories, and systematic research, particularly the work of Ian Stevenson on children who remember past lives and exhibit corresponding birthmarks. She then opens the last three links to scientific scrutiny, showing how lineage-specific patterns of development, aging, and death flow naturally from the doctrine once one accepts impermanence and non-self. Throughout, she emphasizes that understanding these links has profound implications for practice: without belief in rebirth, she argues, genuine bodhicitta becomes logically problematic; yet even those who doubt it can still live ethically and skillfully by recognising the plasticity of mind and the power of repetition to reshape habitual responses.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 08 01 Pamela Lyon The Twelve Links 01-08-08.mp3
UUID: 5fb7016f-2ce2-4e7c-81ba-b599b051a8dd
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-08-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 74.2 minutes
Words: ~7,547
Is that what Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. Is that alright? Is that better?
Yeah. Good. Wonderful. Okay. Is that a little bit loud?
It is a bit loud, isn’t it? Is that better? Is that all right? Okay. Good.
Good. Good. Well, this is welcome to the last night of the Wheel of Life. Am, it’s, I’m feeling like we’ve been on this journey together and I’ve realized now just how much more there is to talk about on this. And I’m just I hope that you’ve got a bit of a flavor flavor of the matter, the twelve links of dependent origination.
Tonight we’re going to talk about the last three. We’re going to cram the last three into this last night. But before we start out, we’ll start as we always do by relaxing our minds and bringing ourselves into the present. Taking a firm, comfortable posture, having the back straight, the head placed lightly atop the vertebra, like a stack of coins. Take a deep breath if that would if that’s useful to you.
But check through the body body for any signs of tension, of holding, the stress of the last week, the last week, the stress of today, maybe the stress of even just the last hour or so. And just let it all drain away through bottom of your feet, and bring your mind to the breath. The easy in and out flow of the natural breath, bringing the mind to the present. Think of how incredibly fortunate we are to have experience and the nature of our lives. Our bodies are not worn out with excruciating toil.
We know where our next meal is coming from. We have shelter over our heads. How their then be in a place where the teachings of Buddha Śākyamūni are still taught. Think of all the billions and billions, countless, countless billions of beings, including human beings just on this planet who don’t have the leisure and fortune that you have, that I have right this moment. And try to feel a bit of gratitude for that, how fortunate we all are.
And from that feeling of gratitude, to develop just a little bit of strength of will, of determination to make good use of these beneficial conditions. By making good use of these beneficial conditions, May I add to the sum of peace in the world? May I add to the sum of joy and happiness in the world. What are you doing back there? Okay.
I have made a revised chart, and I think it’s probably a good idea if everybody has one in their hand. Yeah. That’s alright. Yep. Including me.
Okay. So this is a rendering of the all twelve the twelve links. But tonight, we’re going to talk about the last three. We’ve spent a lot of time on how we as biological creatures have a very narrow view of reality, that we have a tendency to we exist in a very narrow slice of space and time, that reality is much greater than we are, it’s also much smaller than we are. We live in a very, very narrow band of conditions.
So what we sense is by itself already limited. We also don’t see the fact that the world in which we inhabit is made out of compounded things. Even though, when we analyze objects, the rug, these pictures, the chair, our bodies, our minds, We know that we can see that they are the products of innumerable causes and conditions coming together to create something that we can designate as a body and a mind and a chair and a table and a cushion and a painting, a thangka, but that’s not how we relate to them. And from these habitual tendencies of mind, that are necessarily self referenced because we are biological creatures that have have evolved in a particular way, that we have to maintain our bodies within particular parameters, particular values outside of which we’ll die. If we’re too hot, we die.
If we’re too cold, we die. If we don’t have enough salt, we die. If we have too much salt, we die. If we don’t exist in a particular band of pressure, we die. If we don’t have a particular amount of oxygen, we die.
The conditions under which we live are extremely rarefied. Extremely rarefied. They are in fact conditions that we have helped to construct. The atmosphere that we breathe is the product of innumerable creatures creatures respirating. And that atmosphere came into being as the result of our single celled ancestors who turned this planet from one in which oxygen was a poison into one in which oxygen is the primary gas that we breathe.
So we have a very, very limited view, no matter how you slice it. And from this limited view, we develop certain tendencies to act in the world. We develop tendencies of body, of speech, and of mind. And from those tendencies we saw that these conditions are: consciousness and to a considerable extent the form that we inhabit. We haven’t discussed how the state of mind influences form is not something that we have talked about at all.
We haven’t talked about the idea of birth, of rebirth, of aging and death. Is a notable omission because the wheel of life is not just the quintessential Buddhist account of causality and of subjective experience, it is also intrinsically the- not inherently, but intrinsically- the account of how we come to be. Coming to be, becoming, is the tenth link in the wheel of life. It’s called it’s sometimes called karma again, or potentialised karma. This is that means it it has the potential for acting as primary cause for another set of the twelve links to commence.
But in Sanskrit, it means the tendency to come to be. It’s simply from one moment to the next, one mind moment to the next. Every single moment of the mind, every thought, every feeling, every perception carries the potential for another to come to be. Okay? It’s one moment of h two o has the potential for being another moment of h two o.
One moment of mind has the potential for becoming another moment of mind. One moment of anger has the potential for becoming another moment of anger. One moment of embodiment with the in the five aggregates is the potential for being another moment embodied in the five aggregates. Okay? Now, this is also this is also the link that is most strongly associated with rebirth.
But, bhava and even jati, which is birth, this is the coming to be, coming into being, that does not have this implication either. Neither of these words implicates a rebirth per se. Okay? And in fact, in the Sanskrit and the Pali, there is no word for this. The English word of rebirth, you know, being born again.
There is there is becoming again, but there is not birth again. Alright, so it’s the potential to become and to become again. Right? Is anybody confused? Yep.
Yep. Well, I think quite subtle, but I think this relates to the quintessential Buddhist view of what we call rebirth. In other religions it’s called reincarnation. But by not having a term that says reborn or re becoming, that means that whatever it is that becomes again is not a fixed entity. It is not fixed.
There is no, there is no person of a particular name in a body that comes back into, you know, another life with a different name and a body. Right? There is no fixed entity that becomes again. And those are the two things that separate the Buddhist notion of rebirth, what we commonly call rebirth in English, from all of the other accounts of reincarnation. There are many.
There are the Hindus obviously have one. The Sikhs have one. There are forms of Islam that have one, Sufism. There are forms even of, you know, forms of Judaism that have a limited kind of a reincarnation. It’s called Gilgul.
Yeah, I know. Surprised me too. There are forms of of esoteric Christianity, like Gnostic Christianity, and that sort of stuff that have some form of becoming again. There is, and the Jains have another, have another one. But the thing that makes the Buddhist notion of rebirth different from all of the other accounts, and at the time that the Buddha taught, he differentiated.
You know, it was either he differentiated or his followers differentiated it. And that’s because there is, okay, there is no fixed entity because there is no self. No self. In the first instance, that means that whatever it is that becomes again, whatever it is that is capable of taking birth, of becoming again, of coming into being again, is constantly changing. It’s changing from moment to moment.
So there’s no specific thing that you can point to and say, this is me. This is me this moment. This is me this moment. This is me when I’m a frog. You know, this is me when I’m, you know, whatever.
You know, this is me. This is me. This is me. Is no particular moment that you can say this is it. Now, in the Hindu view, you know, there is an Ātman.
You know? There’s a soul. But in the Buddhist view, there is not. And that’s one of the ways that the Buddhist view of rebirth is different from other forms of rebirth. The other one that makes it different is anicca, which is impermanence.
Not only is whatever it is changing every moment, it is coming together and dissolving every moment or, you know, within within a a rising and falling away in every moment. It’s it’s compounding and falling apart. So it’s these two qualities that make the presentation in the original language of becoming and birth not having anything with a re in it. Because there is nothing that takes birth, you know, from something else. It’s a continuum, but it’s not anything that you can you can’t say this is the self.
This is the self. I mean, it may be a nominal self. It’s the self that’s definitely going to experience the effects of the actions that were- I hate the word committed. It sounds like sin. The actions that were engaged in, of body, speech and mind, but and that follows.
But there is no there’s no there’s no fixed in abiding something. Okay? Now, can anybody see sitting in this room in a Tibetan Buddhist, Gompa, can anybody see a problem problem with this. Where is there a picture of the Dalai Lama? Yeah.
How was the Dalai Lama selected? The Dalai Lama was selected based on something that people regard even though they say philosophically it’s not fixed. That there’s a kind of an inference, that there’s something there, some pattern, some something that continues. So interestingly, I came across this article in a scientific journal called Psychological Essentialism in Selecting the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. And basically what it’s saying is that even in a tradition where philosophically, you know, you can’t, you know, this isn’t happening, there are, you know, that our tendency to essentialize mind is really, really natural.
And that that comes through in this particular tradition. Now, Jampa, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that when Tsongkhapa first did his great reformation reformation that he was saying that there would be, you know, Don’t look for my rebirth because there ain’t going to be one, basically. You know, I mean, like he didn’t say there’s not going to be one, but he really, really discouraged looking for this essential thing. But it seems to be a reasonably reliable way of getting people who have certain kinds of qualities. So it was something that continued.
Isn’t that correct? Is that correct? No, no recognized reincarnation of Tsongkhapa because he- I mean, basically he said, you know, we should stop doing this. You know, old habits die hard, you know. So, how you cash this out, you know, something, whatever it is, a consciousness, a mind, that comes, you know, that becomes again, that is not a fixed entity, that has no self, that is impermanent and yet carries on it somehow all these imprints from previous actions has been a real problem for Buddhists from the beginning, how to actually cash that out.
But apparently, you know, it’s realizable. I can’t can’t do any better than that. I mean, like, what do you mean? Realizable, like, you can realize that whatever it is consciousness will say Mind as a placeholder. The five, you know, that can become again, you know, this ignorant mind, this ignorant mind can, you know, come again to, you know, take on the five aggregates or actualize the five aggregates or realize the five aggregates or become the five aggregates or whatever it is that happens, that that is not fixed.
Fixed. It’s changeable because ignorance can be purified. Right? It has no self and it is also arising and falling away with every moment. It is possible apparently to realize all of that, but I can’t.
I mean, I don’t know how to do that. At this At this time. Thank you very much. Thank you for your confidence at this time. So all I can do at this stage is throw open the mystery, you know, and say, If we’re looking at this in a scientific way, we can’t say that there is no proof for this.
We can’t say that because there is proof for this. There’s actually quite a lot of it. But the ways of demonstrating this continuity is, as far as I can tell, roughly three. First one is analytical and logical. And this is the one that I have I personally have the most trouble with.
That is the you know, if you if if you know, It’s based on the notion that like causes give rise to like results. It’s the basic idea that a rice seed will give rise to a rice plant. That is the sort of analogy that’s used quite a lot. So only be another moment of mind. Is that correct?
Yeah. Okay. Now, but it depends upon what you mean by mind. And it also depends upon what you mean by the same. And I have trouble with that.
You know, what parts of it are the same. It is actually possible to make a rice seed, give rise to something else other than rice, not naturally, but it can be done. And it is possible to imagine something that is not like except in terms of the matter that it’s made of. For example, when caterpillars go into metamorphosis, they make cocoons, right? Apparently insides, what happens inside the cocoon, is almost a complete reconfiguration of everything.
It’s almost as if the caterpillar is liquefied and then re assembled and becomes, it’s not literally liquefied, but it undergoes a transformation so profound. By the way, apparently memory persists. The memory of the caterpillar persists in the moth, in the butterfly. There’s been an article on this just like within the last six months. They’ve tested that.
Yeah. Yep. Do you mean by the same? Because nowhere does it say, my parents are aware of, that the consciousness goes on or the mind that goes on, the consciousness that goes on is the same. It’s not the same.
No. No. But this is part of the analytical and logical reasoning that is sometimes given in Dharma teachings about how you come at the idea of a continuity of consciousness. One moment of mind gives rise to another moment of mind. Something that is a similar cause gives rise to a similar effect.
No, unless something is identical, you have a problem with similarity as well. What do you mean by that? I mean, logically you have a problem with that. That’s like saying that the water that begins in the mouth of the Murray is the same all the way down. No.
It would be like saying that H two O has to come from another moment of H two Similarity of type. I agree with that. But where does that come from? That’swhere does that come from? No, I know that.
But where does that dictum, where does that axiom come from and what is its warrant? I don’t, what I’m saying is that I don’t think the analytical logical method of determining a continuity of consciousness is especially convincing unless you are a highly, you know, unless you have been meditating for a really long time and you start, you know, you start getting some experience of something back there before birth or something like that. What’s the chrysalis’ memory of? Basically being conditioned to be averse to a particular thing or being shocked in the presence of something that, you know, they’re being conditioned not to like. That’s their memory.
So feeling fear for particular. Yeah. So there’s fear of being a caterpillar. There’s fear of- there’s fear of- you can make almost- you can make many things aversive. You can make a particular- a bitter taste really aversive.
You can, by administering shock, you can actually make something that is normally attractive aversive by administering shock. But the point I am trying to make here is this is one way of demonstrating the continuity of consciousness. I can’t argue this very well because I don’t find it convincing. I don’t think that kind of analysis in deep meditative states over prolonged periods of time, you may come to an understanding of that. But I think just, you know, similarity of type arguments, I don’t think.
What’s a type? Okay. What is it? Why don’t you do that at the break? That would be great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but I’d be surprised if I was gobsmackingly convinced by that. The other one is personal memories. People have memories of experiences. Henry Ford apparently remembered a past life, was a big believer in reincarnation.
General Patton believed that he was quite seriously believed, and all members of his family apparently believed in reincarnation, believed he was a reincarnation of Hannibal, of course. But nobody is ever the slave. I was the slave. But there are also people who have their children who remember previous lives. There are a lot of them, actually.
Yeah, he smelled the battle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the most fertile source of of some sort of, evidence for, comes from children who remember previous lives. No. No, because that can be- instinctual behavior can be rationalized or explained strictly on evolutionary grounds.
Now what you wouldn’t be able to explain, I mean very easily I think, is if you had a puppy or a kitten that instinctively liked sweet potato or tapioca or something like that cats and dogs would never have eaten, know, would never have had a, you know, and like really, really loved sweet potato right from the get go. Well, sweet, that’s got sugar in it, so maybe that’s explicable. Let’s say cucumber. You know, like a dog or a cat that really loved cucumber. That would be I would put to you that that would be almost impossible to explain evolutionarily.
You could say in that case maybe that there were imprints from a previous life. I mean that might be the most parsimonious explanation, but you could also say, well, in the skin of cucumber there’s particular bitters, you know, compounds that we actually need. We don’t get enough, especially these days, don’t get enough bitters. But that might explain a human, but maybe not a dog or a cat. I don’t know.
And I wouldn’t have thought that either of their digestive systems would be particularly well suited to digesting something like cucumber. It would just be, you know, thrown a trice. So one of the main- and the other one is the systematic investigation of this sort of stuff. And the most the greatest person who is engaged in this is a guy named Ian Stevenson who died last year. He was at the University of Virginia.
He started life as a a psychiatrist and somebody who was interested in the neurobiology of psychiatric illnesses. He did some experimentation not on himself, but with others with LSD. He was was part of that generation. And he was raised in a family, that had- that was very influenced by theosophy, so he had quite an open mind. And a case was brought to him in the 1960s.
He investigated it and he started developing a mode of systematically investigating, children who remember past lives. As a result these investigations, he developed theory of birthmarks. There is no explanation of how we get the kinds of birthmarks we get. Mean none, zero zip. And when he would investigate children, particularly who could remember a violent death like being stabbed, you know, having something explode in their face, being shot.
They frequently had birthmarks that corresponded with the injury that killed them, the previous becoming. He did this through autopsy photographs and he, you know, almost to the extent possible he documented everything through local records, autopsy photographs, and interviewing people quite separately from from, the people who were reporting it. Interestingly, the children had a tendency to remember between two and four, and to forget by seven and eight. So, the ages of two to four, particularly up to four, it’s a very, very sensitive period in the development of human children. Has anybody heard of Ian Stevenson?
I personally think the best book so far written on that is one called Old Souls, by a guy named Tom Shroder. He was, I think he was a reporter for Wall Street Journal. I’m not sure. It was a major publication in the United States. And he traveled with Stevenson in the last- when he was in his eighties, when he was probably making his last field trips.
It’s a very accessible book. Ian Stevenson’s own work is not very accessible. It’s written dry, it’s scientific, it’s written basically for scholarly kind of publication. Does anybody have any questions about this? People of Aboriginal descent had birthmarks.
Birthmarks? Anywhere on their body. I’m not sure I follow that. It was it was just a theory. I kind of grew up, so I can’t give you documented I grew up with these things, with not having any moons on your fingernails, if you had a birthmark anywhere on your body, that you had Aboriginal blood in you.
That is really, I think that’s probably really wrong. Yeah, I think that’s probably really wrong. Because there are, I mean, are, interestingly, are a lot of port wine stains in Tibetans. You know, if you go to Tibet, there’s a lot of people with port wine stains. And I would presume that that’s got genetic component to it.
Either that or a lot of people are getting shot in the face. One or the other. Yeah. He followed up the cases wherever he found them. He had a most of the early ones were in cultures that have an acceptance of rebirth so that people didn’t say, Oh, of course, darling, you weren’t shot in a previous life, This is your house, this is your brother, this is your sister.
Don’t be ridiculous. You know, if you’re saying that this is not my house, this is not my room, these are not, you know, you are not my parents. This is not my brother. That’s the sort of thing that these kids say. And, so he investigated cases in the Druze community in Lebanon.
Yeah, Lebanon, quite a few in India, Turkey. I think he did some amongst the Dene in Canada. There were quite a few, ultimately European and North American cases, a lot of different countries. And he’s left three people who were trained to carry on his work. He was quite lucky because when he published published his first article on what he liked to call cases that are suggestive of reincarnation he never said they were reincarnation.
This guy, this inventor, gave him endowed a chair for a million dollars and then gave him another million dollars to continue his work. So he was functionally untouchable by the university, which was useful because I’m sure they would have loved to have gotten rid of him. Anything else? Don’t know. Don’t know.
Except that, you know, everything is arising and falling away every moment. This is something that can be demonstrated, and that things are changing all the time. So these are facts. How this other stuff happens, how you get a child that remembers, you know, that can pick, you know, the damaru that belongs to the previous, you know, the previous becoming. I don’t know.
I have no idea. Why do they forget? And why do they forget? Happened to you at three o’clock this afternoon? Yeah.
What happened to you two hours ago? You know, what were you thinking? What were you feeling? What were you doing? We forget almost everything.
And maybe, I mean, okay, if you want to say that there is such a thing as rebirth, and I mean, like, you know, I’ll confess it right here. I believe it. You know, I believe in it. So, but it’s a belief, you know, I have reasons for my belief, but I don’t know that they’re going to convince anybody else. You know, then you’ve got menopause.
Menopause. Hang on. What was I saying? What was the last thing you said? Memory of it.
Why would you forget by the age of it? Ah, right. Okay, well, it wouldn’t be very useful. It wouldn’t be very handy from a natural selection standpoint if you were carrying around a whole lot of conditioning from, you know, like active conditioning from from a from from, you know, a previous a previous set of circumstances. But do you think that if you had a really horrific death, horrifically violent death, that that would be something, you know, you asked you asked Well, these kids, a a lot of the kids that remember past lives had violent deaths.
They had violent deaths, and they were reborn not very far away from where they died, you know, like within a hundred miles or sixty miles or something like that. Were reborn not very far away. No. No. No.
Well, wasn’t full. Wasn’t full. I mean, you know, like, for example, one child remembered that they had been a mechanic and they were thrown from a car. They lived thrown into an adult stage. Yeah.
Yeah. I have no idea. You know, what the stuff that I’ve read says is that we have the karma to be reborn as almost anything. And depending upon, you know, the karma that ripens at the time of death and providing there’s no intervention anywhere in the intermediate state and that sort of stuff that, you know, that, you know, whatever the conditions are that ripen at the time of your death, will determine your next rebirth. And it could be anything.
Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t. But it is. Yep.
Yep. The, like, a human population is increasing, and there are no new streams of consciousness ever that I mean But there are heaps and heaps of animals that have gone extinct. That animals are sort of moving up the evolutionary scale. Are they moving up? I mean, there’s this kind of shift from because the humans must be coming from somewhere.
Well, but yeah, correct me if I’m wrong, Jampa, please. But, you know, a mind, a mind in its, you know, at its base, you know, not the particular, you know, the sort of onion layering of ignorance and volitional tendencies and all that sort of stuff. In its primordial state, a mind is a mind is a mind is a mind. That the mind of an ant is, you know, has Buddha nature in the same way that the mind of a human has Buddha nature. What we seem to have is a whole lot more degrees of freedom choosing to act in the way that we do.
I mean, I don’t think that an ant has the capacity to say, you know, this flesh eating thing just isn’t working for me anymore, I think I’ll become a vegetarian. You know, I don’t think they have that capacity. Whereas a human being can say, for whatever reason, I am engaging in this habitual activity, I am going to make an effort to stop it. Like anybody who’s quit smoking knows how difficult that is. And that takes real, it takes a determination to do it and the persistence to stay with it.
And, I don’t think other animals are capable of doing that. I think that kind of agency is what makes us different. But at base yeah. Well, that’s a good question, but my answer is really quite unsatisfactory because I think I’ve believed it all my life. I had a belief in rebirth when I was a child.
I don’t know why. My parents believers in anything. And, I mean, were nominally Episcopalian. And when I started taking, instruction to be a Catholic, I realized I couldn’t be a Catholic because I believed in rebirth. You know, I just thought, well, you know, I just don’t believe the after story.
You know, I just don’t. And to me it was just, it seemed like it was, you know, the cycling just seemed to make sense. Every single atom, every single molecule, you know, in one form or another, everything just keeps rolling and the same types of organization still come together. How does it change my life? I mean, I find it, know, on the one hand, horrifying, you know, I mean, like, geez, not again, you know.
How, you know, when am I going to wake up and smell the coffee for heaven’s sake, you know. I mean, really, honestly, you know. So I find it horrifying. But on the other it makes me feel as though if I make aspirations that they have power. You know, if I make an aspiration to be a benefit to sentient beings, that has some kick.
You know, that has some power behind it. And that that won’t be wasted, you know, even if I’m proved wrong, you know. Because it might come to fruition at some time in the future. Permanent nature. No.
It it might come to fruition at some time in the future. In some future life. Sometime in the future. Yeah. Well Possibly.
Don’t know. Yeah. Does that satisfy you? I mean, does that Yeah. I’m just comparing that with somebody who perhaps doesn’t have that belief, whether they can still have the same ideals and the same satisfactions in life as you do live an altruistic life and and still have the same.
Yeah. That’s my best belief. But it’s like it’s like saying that they believe. But it’s like it’s like saying whether you believe in tomorrow because, I mean, tomorrow we can never come. But rebirth is the same thing except, you know, next life.
But tomorrow is the next day. So if you don’t believe in tomorrow, then what’s the point of living today? So to make to for tomorrow I’m I’m I’m not leaving for tomorrow, you know, for the present, but at least tomorrow is an aspiration. Tomorrow is a better day or another. Well, two questions in juxtaposition bring up a really interesting point actually, which is that, there was a paper given at a conference in Melbourne on, it was an, you know, philosophy.
And the argument that was being run was that you can be a Bodhisattva without believing in rebirth. You can develop bodhicitta without believing in rebirth. And this entire argument was run by this guy named Jay Garfield who translated the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā into English and philosophical language and all this sort of stuff. This guy is not dumb. Stuff.
He’s thought about it a lot. And so he was making this presentation and everybody is sitting there, Yeah, yeah, yeah. This would be a great idea. This would be a great idea. So the guy who was my supervisor, John Powers, who wrote the textbook on Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, said, Well, okay, Jay, if that’s the case, then your bodhisattva seeing suffering beings everywhere and knowing that death is the end to it should basically kill as many as possible, because it will put them out of their suffering now.
You know, it’s sort of like the Terminator view of compassion because it’s not going to get any better. You know, the likelihood of your actually moving beyond ignorance in one lifetime is not terrific. So what you really ought to do is just kill as many people and as many beings as you can possibly do, because they’re not coming back and frankly neither are you, you know? So- and Jay had this look on his face of like, Oh my God. You know, like, and he still hasn’t got a response to it.
There still isn’t a response to it, actually. I told that to Geshe Pemba, and he laughed his head off. He loved it. And the thing is, is that if you really believe, you know, you can live a good life. You know, you can live a moral life.
You can live a life of kindness. You know, you can live a life of love. But whether you can actually be a Bodhisattva, whether you can actually develop bodhicitta, which is basically I will work to make sure that everybody is free. Everybody is free of their delusions and their ignorance. I will make sure that I do not achieve peace until everybody is free.
Isn’t that a ignorant statement by Isn’t that a ignorant statement by itself? What do you mean? I will will every week, and according to you, it would now include bacteria. I mean, how many beings are there in this world to say that I can save every being? But that’s what the bodhisattva vow is.
And that’s what a lot of early Buddhists said to those who were, you know, the early Madhyamikas, the early people who were developing Mahāyāna. They said it’s nuts. Yeah. I mean, I have probably the Buddhist ideas as well because it doesn’t make sense to me. From my analysis of the situation, bodhisattva by definition means enlightened beings.
Right? Bodhi, being enlightened sadva means being. No. No. No.
They’re they’re they have they’re beings who have the aspiration to become enlightened. Yeah. That’s the that’s the Hīnayāna definition. It’s the aspiration to be Buddhahood. Mhmm.
Right? But my reading was that that the bodhisattva is an enlightened being in a sense that it has got rid of ignorance and craving like Dalai Lama, who is supposed to be the combination of— But theoretically, you can be I mean, you can be a Bodhisattva a long time before you’re liberated. Yeah. I mean, you’re not gonna be a very effective one, let’s say. But Bodhisattva eventually becomes a Buddha.
Mean, you can’t say. But then becoming Buddha, it might come back. How do you know he hasn’t come back? Because he said so. Well, he’s but he’s a Buddha and he But he’s not coming back.
But if he is not going to come back for his followers to basically glom onto something that they can say, oh, yeah, is teacher. But, I mean, there are many Buddhists who believe that the Buddha is emanating in all kinds of forms now to teach beings. It is. It is. Yeah, yeah.
I know. There’s a difference. I know. And the Bodhisattvas make prayers so that they will be able to rouse them from their slumber and say, come on, guys, pull your finger out. There’s a whole lot of beings down here still really, really if they are enlightened beings, meaning that they have great bodily harmony, for instance.
And by the law of karma itself, it says Well, there’s no karma to take contaminated aggregates. That’s for sure. But there is still- there’s still a form element that travels with the mind element and that is something that, you know, can be purified. I mean, is pure in the Mahāyāna. They’re different.
They’re different. But, you know, when I started thinking about it and got one sort of like mini zap of, you know, what it was, what it would, you know, what it would be like to actually take this on as a as a program. The thing that the thing that I came to is, you know, well, what else is there? There isn’t anything else except that. You know, what else can you do?
Well, the the best thing you can do for for the sangha is to become enlightened yourself. It’s got one less to say. So you would come back. So it’s got one less to save. Yeah.
But my old mother, you know, and my old father and all my old friends and all that sort of stuff. And if they’re all becoming again, I I I I’m I’m just as I’m I’m pretty controlling, really. I want to make sure that they’re okay. Should we have a break? I don’t know that there is actually much mileage in going too far into birth and aging and death at this point, because if you have the potential to become and you come into being, then from the moment you come into being, you have the fact that you’re changing and you’re impermanent.
So way I have a tendency to think of this is as it’s sort of lineage specific patterns. Patterns. How you grow, how you grow, what your maturation is likely to be, its trajectory, how long you’re likely to live, and how you age and how you die, really depends upon what type of aggregates you assume. You know, whether you’re a human, whether you’re a frog, whether you’re a bird, whether you’re, in my case, a bacterium. You know, this trajectory, you know, in yes, I’m a bacterium.
Yes, they are cognitive. How this plays out is specific to a lineage. What I think is going to be quite interesting, because I believe in rebirth, I believe that it’s not beyond science. If and when the transition period is determined and some sort of something is detected, which I think is entirely likely, then what will be interesting is seeing how your potential to be gets cashed out here. Like, you know, how do you end up being a human?
How do you end up being a frog? How do you end up being a nematode? You know? Because each being has completely different sensory apparatus, Each being has completely different ways of drawing certain inferences about their environment, which gives you degrees of freedom, depending upon the kinds of causal inferences you can draw about your environment. And every creature has a very, very different kind of set up in terms of choice making, whether to what extent you actually have choice, what are your degrees of freedom in terms of being able to make decisions, and so all of that’s built in here.
But, as we’ve seen all the way through, our own setup, even though we have incredible capacities for going against the stream, which is how the Buddha described his teaching. The stream is incredibly powerful. You know, there’s a lot of this, you know, a lot of this stuff is biological. A lot of this stuff is evolved to be the way it is. A lot of this stuff is part of our development from an embryo to a baby to an adolescent to an adult.
A lot of this has to do with the kind of culture we’re born into, the kind of language we speak, our life histories. There are all these things that go into making our path really automatic, you know, so that we just slide right in and we just go along. And calling that under the power power of ignorance and volitional tendencies or volitional dispositions is just about as useful as anything else to call it, because it’s all channeled. So basically coming up against, you know, the kind of feeling that arises when the senses come in contact with an object, whether it’s an object of hearing or sight or touch or smell or some product of your mind. You know, the kind of, you know, recognizing the kind of feeling that is generated.
Recognizing the action of attachment, you know, or aversion, and then the strengthening of that into clinging or grasping and saying this is mine or I want this to be mine. All of that goes against recognizing this, being aware of it, attempting to apply an antidote to it, making sure that you do it over and over again so that the repetition will make that stronger. All of that is going against the stream. So it’s really, really hard because everything in you is kind of, I mean, we have stacked the deck, it’s definitely stacked, you know, it is definitely stacked. So going against that is a pretty brave thing to attempt, really.
But the fact that we are as malleable as we are, I mean, you know, I mean, if just talking about the human brain, I mean, the human brain has just got incredible plasticity. I mean, we can change, really change the way we think about things. And there’s a good, there’s a really good physiological explanation for why we can do that. You know, the fact that through repetition the synaptic weights on the neurons change, you know, the growth on neurons, the dendrites change and instead of going down this automatic pathway suddenly it’s going this way. That’s still pretty strong. But the fact that you can actually tailor, you can tailor your setup, your physical setup into a different sort of automaticity.
I mean, you’re still under the really deeply ingrained influence of ignorance, but you start making some changes that start to weaken the weaken the habitual responses so that at least the volitional tendencies start to alter. Even if ignorance itself is still running the show, you can alter the profile of your tendencies to act. Does that make sense? So, when I first studied the Wheel of Life, the first time I heard it, I think I heard it, I would have heard it at Buddha House. I would have received a teaching at Buddha House, but when I went and I studied this at Sarnath in a text, in the form of a text, I just thought, this has got nothing to say to our lived reality because of the whole rebirth thing.
Do you know what I mean? Because in commentary that I was reading it was very, very highly, you know, it derived a lot from Mahāyāna readings of, you know, the three kayas and all this sort of stuff. It was a highly doctrine specific rendering of, you know, this wheel. And I just thought, it’s fascinating and I love it. It it grabbed me in some way that I still can’t quite explain.
But I really didn’t think it had much to say to us, you know, on a basic level. But when I started looking at biology and when I started looking at science, it became, that’s when I really started loving this so much because there really isn’t anything in this that can’t be cashed out in its basic form. You know, like the original form, not the amplified form commentaries and that sort of stuff. I mean, whether or not those hold water, those are really a lot of that is philosophical debate, right? Like scholars today, you know?
But the basis of this, I think, is just so beautifully consistent with science that I have to believe that that’s going to be cashed out too because everything else works really beautifully. Now what I would like to do now, besides thanking you for persisting through this, is I’d really like to generate a bit of discussion on what you might have thought was useful out of this and what you are coming away from this thinking you didn’t quite get or it’s something that you would have wanted to hear more about, something I might have skated over that, you know, too quickly or something like that. Because I didn’t, I don’t have a form for you to fill out and those aren’t very useful a lot of the time anyway. So, what I’d really like to do, if you don’t mind, is switch off the mic and talk a little bit