One feature of Buddhism that seems odd when one first learns of it is this juxtaposition of ideas: (1) reincarnation is real; (2) the soul is not real.
Your ordinary westerner learner this starts up a bit and says, "Waaaaiiitt a minute here. Without a soul, what is it that gets into the new body? What IS reincarnated?"
And that is a good question. Not because it doesn't have a good answer but because it has a very revealing answer: what is re-born is a process, not a substance. Reincarnation is the continuance of a chain of causes and effects.
It is rather like a flame that passes from a lit match to the wick of the candle. Something real did happen when, as we say, the candle "caught" the fire. But that doesn't make fire a substance.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to an airport to pass out pamphlets explaining this.
I don’t agree with your analogy between a soul and a flame. I don’t know what you mean by a fire is not a substance, but, if it’s not a substance, it’s still SOMETHING. I can see it, and it will burn my finger if I touch it. But a soul, according to Buddhism (and to me) is NOTHING. Therefore, it cannot act as a connection between a body that died and its reincarnated version.
ReplyDeleteA flame is simply the light and heat thrown off by combustion in certain circumstances. Our minds naturally but subjectively associate the light AND the heat with each other and call the resulting association a "flame." We reify incidental facts about combustion as we perceive them. Whatever exactly a substance is, it is a res itself, not something that has to be called into being by reification. That is what I mean by saying it is not a substance. A Buddhist might well respond that nothing at all is a substance in the sense I'm invoking. But whether or not that is true: the flame is not substance.
DeleteOne might say the same thing about subjectivity. Don't use the heavy word "soul" here. Just subjectivity. Whatever it is to be a bat. Whatever. Or to be a perceiving human. We may imagine that it is the heat and light thrown off by neuronal firings. I suppose we can imagine a world in which the senior doctor in a delivery room regularly dies. The "heat and light" throw off by the dying doctor's neurons may set off a process in the nearby and plastic head of the newborn.
I suppose the Buddhist idea of reincarnation to be much like THAT. Of course in the real world, rather than in the fanciful world I just imagined, the connection between the dying person and the born person must be less ... proximate.
Christopher, I have a question -- an honest question, not a rhetorical one, and I'm not trying to make any point. Would you say that water is a reification of hydrogen and oxygen atoms and not a substance? If you would not say that, then how would you distinguish it from denying that a flame is a substance? If you would say that, then you'd agree with the Buddhist who believes that nothing at all is a substance, though perhaps for a different reason from the Buddhist's.
DeleteI appreciate the question. The simple one-syllable answer is "no." Water is not a reification of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
DeleteBut more might be said about this, and it does NOT immediately follow from that denial that water is not ANY sort of reification. Water might be a reification of, say, thirst-quenching and cleansing. Water hits us as observing beings in a number of ways, but we will just take two, for the sake of the analogy with flame. We use water to cleans clothes, dishes, etc., and we drink it when we feel thirst. You could argue that we hypothesize the combining of hydrogen and oxygen atoms as a way of rationalizing the way those two neat things get done. THAT would be the nothing-is-a-substance view. But for today I will take a different view. There really is a certain stuff, in the world outside my head, and prior to the development of any social conventions on the point. This certain stuff DOES the two neat things I just described. So water is a substance.
In this sense, fire and subjectivity are NOT substances, though. The underlying reality behind fire is the chemistry of combustion. Or, what I think is roughly the same, the chemistry of oxidation. Heat and light sometimes come about as a result. Sometimes not (as when metal slowly rusts.)
The substance is the stuff that lies underneath the processes. Metal is the substance beneath oxidation/rusting. Firewood, or candlewax, is the stuff behind combustion/fire. Water is the stuff behind cleaning and thirst quenching. Atoms and the compounding or dissolution of molecules is the scientific story we tell ourselves about all of this, a story with massive pragmatic utility. But common sense keeps us coming back to substances, processes, and consequences.
In this light we might say that the human body is the substance, subjectivity is a process, pain and love are two side effects of the process. We "might." But ... maybe not. Anyway, if we did what we might we could make sense of the Buddhist position on reincarnation.