REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA Chapt 10.

Reflections On King Solomon And The Buddha - Section 1

Chapter 10 - Rebirth

by Ira Rosenberg

Practicing Buddhist detachment on the 8-fold Noble Path doesn't mean guarantee that you end the dukkha in this lifetime. The great enterprise may take longer than one lifetime. Even devoted practice may be insufficient to overcome the momentum of the self from its past lifetimes. Because the "stains" of craving, aversion and delusion are so deeply embedded, taking many incarnations to dig their way in, the illusions sustaining the self take many lifetimes to extinguish. Even the great meditation masters had to do continuous battle over myriad lifetimes to maintain selflessness The Buddha himself had been reincarnated many times before.

Besides, Subhuti, I recall that during my five hundred previous lives, I had used life after life to practice patience and to look upon my life humbly as though it was some saintly being called upon to suffer humility. Even then my mind was free from any such arbitrary conceptions of phenomena as my own self, other selves, living beings, and a universal self.

(Diamond Sutra 4 b)

So much seems to depend on rebirth. How do the Buddhists sustain this odd belief? They maintain that the illusion of a constant self itself makes us think that it all ends at death, whereas the self never has had permanence and is constantly being annihilated and renewed every second in life, and death is just an extension of that. What we consider the end of life is just another part of the oscillation of arising/subsiding. Even in life we exist and cease to exist and exist again many times a second. Death is just another such momentary hiatus. What appears to us who observe the deaths of others to be a total ending to the Buddhists is just a rearrangement of energies, a throwing off of the material component of the five aggregates that define sentient life.

When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every moment you are born, decay and die.

Here we hit the Achilles heel of the East. What assurance do we have that we have innumerable lifetimes before us? What if we only have this one? What does this do to our chances for redemption? That's the essential contradiction: eliminate multiple lifetimes and the Eastern approach falls into turmoil. The whole karmic system is shaken to its foundations. We have to face up to despair. This takes us right back to Ecclesiastes. King Solomon specifically rejects an afterlife in likening man to a beast and placing him in the animal kingdom.

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

(Ecc. 3:19-20)

There's no karmic system here, there may be complex causal consequences playing out over time, but they're not strictly sequential or knowable and they do not lead to release from suffering.

The radical onceness of life makes a crucial difference in our understanding of suffering and our response to it. Where the Buddha proposes a total elimination of dukkha through a deep understanding (and practice) of the impermanence and non-self nature of reality over many lifetimes, Solomon, starting with the same dukkha, but stuck with one lifetime, accepts the pain in life, mitigates it where possible, and maintains an active sense of involvement guided by ethical principles of choice. The prescription is for less renunciation and for more courage, more for accommodation than for inner spiritual revolution. For Solomon the task is not so much to eliminate attachment as to hone it to an acceptable, irreducible minimum consistent with full engagement in life -- family, sexuality, livelihood, community, love, wisdom -- at every stage of life.

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Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)