Post #754

"Altogether, rebirth is a virtually inseparable part of Buddhist thinking. It is quite impossible to compress the richness of the Buddhist Rebirth and the Western Buddhist worldview, with each being evolving through a limitless variety of states over countless aeons, into the impoverished mental frame of those who deny it. Since amateur writers on Buddhism never tire of making the absurd claim that the teaching of rebirth is somehow contradicted by the principle of Selflessness, we should point out that this is a thorough misconception. In the main, as Har Dayal points out, "This difficulty has arisen from the regrettable mistake of translating atman by the English word 'soul.'" Since "soul" means, among other things, "the spiritual part of man regarded as surviving after death and as susceptible of happiness or misery in a future state," it is hard to see how it could ever have been considered a possible translation for the changeless, partless and independently self-existent atman that the Buddhists deny. Such an atman would be incapable of acting as a soul. The principle of Selflessness negates certain deluded views of how such a soul, or anything else included in or imputed upon the aggregates, exists, but certainly does not deny that they exist at all. The nihilistic misinterpretation of Selflessness is the most dangerous of wrong views: "It were better, Kasyapa, to abide in a personality-view as big as Mount Sumeru, than the emptiness-view of the nihilist." Exactly as my personal continuum follows on from year to year in this life, each moment of my body and mind arising in dependence on the preceding moment, so it follows on from life to life, always changing." Martin Willson, Rebirth and the Western Buddhist