Buddhist belief in past lives is ridiculous, especially for Zen Buddhism

Let’s celebrate No karma day
For one day
You assume whatever happens in one day will have no consequence, do it

To the Zen seeker, the only reality is inward. He does not deny outer reality, but he is not concerned with it. That is the work of science—to inquire into objective reality.

Authentic religions should be confined to the inquiry into the subjectivity of consciousness: from where arise your life, your love, and your dance; from where this whole existence arises, and where you disappear.

Now we know that even existence does not allow anything to remain stable. Even the greatest stars, which may have lived for millions or trillions of years, one day have to die. Every day great stars die, and every day new stars are born—but from where? What is the source of all life? Whether it exists in the humble blades of grass or in the greatest and richest stars does not matter; the source of life is the same.

And the only right inquiry is to go inward, to find your roots, to find your center, to go as deeply into your being as possible. Finally, you will be surprised to discover that as you go deeper, you start disappearing. A moment comes when you disappear, and the whole universe opens all its mysteries to you.

The individual is a fiction; the whole cosmos is the reality. We are just dewdrops on lotus leaves, very beautiful in the early morning sun. But a small breeze comes, and the dewdrop slips into the ocean. It does not die; it simply becomes infinite and eternal. As a dewdrop, it was going to disappear sooner or later. As individuals, we are all going to disappear into the universe.

Before we disappear, the only way to live a life of joy and blissfulness, a life of gratitude and prayer, is to find our eternal roots. And they are so close, within our grasp, that we do not have to go anywhere—neither in time nor in space.

At this very moment, you are breathing the universe. Your heartbeat is in tune with the universe. At this very moment, your roots are being nourished by the universe; you have simply never looked within. You have been unnecessarily begging for small things, while inside you are an emperor.

The splendor within you is unimaginable; the treasure is incalculable. Just a single look inside, and a new dimension of existence opens up. And this is your reality—authentic reality. It is so blissful and ecstatic that once you have tasted it, you will carry this taste with you around the clock.

In Zen, this is called the experience of the Buddha. Everybody is a buddha. A few buddhas are looking outward; hence, they are unaware of their inner treasure and majesty. And a few buddhas have looked inward and are amazed: what you are seeking outside is trivial—the real treasure is within. And you were born with it. It is not something to be achieved; it is something to be recognized, something to be remembered. It is a forgotten language.

Zen can be reduced to a simple definition: it teaches you the forgotten language. It teaches you the language of the inner world. The steps are simple; there is no complication. You do not need great intelligence. All that you need is a little courage—a little courage to forget all the desires that lead you outward, and a little courage to look inward, into an unknown and untraveled territory.

In the beginning, it will seem very dark, and you will feel very alone.

— Osho 💖💖
The Language of Existence
Chapter 8: “Please, Settle for No-Self”

All the spiritual traditions, including all the teachers and teachings are only relevant as far as they help to make clear what it is one believes one is searching for.

Also, where a teaching doesn’t reflect the actualities of life, then dump it. That goes for teachers as well. Putting any of them on a pedestal whether it’s Zen, Osho, RSSB or whatever, is a ticket to disillusionment.

Many teachings and teachers need to be viewed as merely crutches to be abandoned as one sees that one is sufficient in oneself.

The issues, whether of free will. Karma etc., become obvious or irrelevant as personal conjecture is replaced with the reality of the only thing we can ever truly know which is that which is always arising in the present moment.

Now we begin to see why Jesus never wrote anything himself for the moreish borish dull apostles and No, the Lord Buddha did not write anything down. During his lifetime in ancient India, writing was not used for religious texts. It would be hard to explain to those numbskulls around them anyway. And I believe this is proof that the writer Bob Dylan is not a lord but he knows how to hum a few bars. The number of breaths are counted as are the hairs on the body so use them while you’ve got them. Don’t waste them on laughing at me. The dharma bums don’t. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of ignorant people who can’t write.

A solid practice of Zen demonstrates how we are reborn and rebuilt by mind many times a day. Reincarnation is not only a fact, it is happening to us all the time. And we undergo a death, even if Invisibly, often. And neuroscience demonstrates this reality. Our sense of “I” and “me” is a reconstruction. The persistence of all we know of our own life and the world around us is a biochemical reaction. In one life, we live many lives, we die thousands of deaths, and every rebirth is an invisible reconstruction built entirely from the impressions of mind. Some of those memories we cherish. Others were would prefer to never have experienced. But this new you didn’t experience them. That you died a memory death long ago. This persistence of self identity is an illusion.

Yet, unaware of these frequent deaths and rebirths, we carry a sense of self awareness.
Which lives on.

Why comment on life and death and life after death when we haven’t went awareness, our very little, of the births, deaths and rebirths going on in this one body? Which even neuroscience has long reported.

Opinions are just a flag for lack of practice. The reality is far far more astounding, awesome, and our actual fragility, frightening. When you start to make real progress in Zen.

But there is a cost. We must relinquish our favorite opinions as facts gently prove otherwise, when we let them in, when we learn to look and listen, when we learn to just hear, gently. When we learn to go within.

As for the law of karma, it is absolute as far as this biochemical reincarnation we live in, that happens even in this one body.

Our identity and the actions we initiate are entirely the products of impressions, conditioning and genetics of our own past. And as for the treasures and artifacts to be found within the physical body, it is a genetic museum of past relics pieced together, some active but many inactive, from the accumulation of hundreds of millions of lives.

We actually are like a child trapped in a museum /mausoleum of the dead who are buried here and whose remains have been cloned again into this very body. And these dead and long dead pieces from the past create impressions, which haunt us like ghosts, and impel us to behave as we do.

The ghosts within from the ancient past are working all the time twisting sense impressions and memory into the false ideas and triggers driving us. We are, biochemically, slaves whose masters are ghosts from the past. Neuroscience and genetics have long ago proven the truth or these things. Observation through stillness naturally draws us within and there reveals them directly.

You live trapped in a mausoleum. But you must awaken from your dream to see where you are and to find the exit.

Asking AI a question about honorable Wittgenstein, this answer was given:

>>You are quoting the famous final sentence from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Proposition 7) by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The original German text reads:
“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann,
darüber muss man schweigen.”

The core of this thought is the realization of the limits of language and human understanding:

The logical limit:
Language serves to map facts and the world.

Whatever can be expressed logically and precisely can be discussed meaningfully.

The unspeakable:
Metaphysical, ethical, or mystical matters—such as the meaning of life, God, or deep emotions—cannot be captured in exact, mapable sentences.

Attempting to philosophize about them crosses the boundaries of meaningful language.
[ …AND ..for THAT reason, conversation[Um]]

The consequence:
One should remain silent about these abstract or transcendent topics, rather than producing linguistic nonsense with inadequate language.
[….. However eloquent and sophisticated[Um]]

Ludwig Wittgenstein constructed these ideas in his work in the form of a logical “ladder” that the reader must ultimately throw away to see the world correctly.
[OR … to converse with others, delivering an invitation to have a look at reality by themselves..[Um]]<<

Hi Um
Pinch me if I’m dreaming, but didn’t Wittgenstein eventually reject his own rigid writings about the absolute use of language? And accept that language is fluid and situationally and personally relational and relevant?

“Not this, nor this”
Nanak

“Like believing in past lives, whether this be called rebirth, reincarnation, or some other name. Buddhist scholars twist themselves into logical knots when trying to explain how it is that Buddhism, which embraces impermanence and the lack of an enduring self, can also assert that after death, some sort of essence remains of a person that ends up becoming a new person (or animal?).”

The opposite is the case. Buddhism is founded on the principle of liberation from impermanence into the eternal. Impermanence only exists in contrast to the eternal from which it emerges.

The first step is to accept that here everything is impermanent. And therefore we must raise our consciousness to that awareness beyond all this, to be free of the suffering of impermanence, the coming and going,… Hence the eightfold path, the journey from impermanence to liberation into the eternal.

It is modern day Western Buddhism that rejects the entire path and wants to convince you there is nothing but impermanence. But even the eternal laws of physics, electricity and chemistry long ago proved that assertion false.

It there is no soul then what experiences the bliss of nirvana when liberation is gained?
Buddha clearly stated that liberation is beyond both existence (as we understand it} and non-existence (death as Brian likes to explain it).
What exists then? Not the form as we typically define ourselves. Not an identifiable form. Buddha used the example of a cup of water returning to the ocean and in the process eliminating every possible individual identifier. And yet entirely alive, more alive than when limited to that cup.

More conscious, not less. Beyond this tiny consciousness. Raised even beyond universal consciousness. That is liberation.

Emptiness and interdependence don’t negate agency, they reframe it. Katagiri taught this straightforwardly: nothing has separate existence; everything is interconnected and produced interdependently. Buddhism largely rejects both hard determinism and absolute free will as extremes, per the Buddha’s critiques.

This isn’t “nonsense” so much as a middle way: will is conditioned (by biology, history, environment, karma) but not exhaustively determined in a way that eliminates responsibility or transformation. The path is about expanding the space for skillful response, reducing the grip of negative desires. An enlightened being acts with maximal clarity and compassion precisely because the illusion of a fixed, separate self has dropped.

So that’s the Zen way. The question about past and future lives is another issue and certainly worthy of doubt. Nevertheless, the Zen school doesn’t take reincarnation with anything like the seriousness of Tibetan Buddhists and Hindus.

Anyway, once again, you give us the hard determinist strawman. That is, you invoke hard determinism as if it’s been accepted by most scientists and philosophers as true. But it has not.

You claim every action, thought, and “decision” is fully necessitated by prior causes (genes, environment, physics, prior brain states) with zero room for genuine alternative possibilities. It’s a philosophy of no free will, and no ultimate responsibility. Yet you can’t deny that you deliberate about what to eat, argue passionately in debates, get angry when cut off in traffic, feel proud of achievements, advocate for criminal justice reform (or against it), and try to persuade others to accept your views….as if your mind and theirs could actually weigh reasons and shift.

In short, you’re promoting an extreme philosophy that most philosophers don’t agree with. Moreover, it’s a philosophy that you yourself can’t live up to! No one can live up to it. Hard determinism is the most insincere, impractical, and impossible philosophy ever created.

All hard determinists are caught in a classic performative contradiction. If hard determinism is true, their own advocacy is just another determined output, like a rock rolling downhill. Trying to convince others becomes pointless theater. Or at least it should to the hard determinist, but strangely, they go on arguing anyway despite their conviction that arguing is itself an illusion of agency.

Anyone who really and truly believes in hard determinism should be a passive observer watching the universe’s script unfold through their body, without the internal monologue of “I should believe this” or “people need to understand determinism,” or “my political views are very important.”

Talk about what’s truly “worse.” It’s not believing in reincarnation. It’s that every hard determinist I’ve seen — like Sam Harris, or that guy featured here a while back who went to prison for abusing his daughter — never admits to being wrong about anything. Hard determinists invariably blame “society,” “capitalism,” “trauma,” or “bad upbringing” for bad behavior, while implicitly exempting their own clear-sightedness. The language of agency is inescapable. William James mocked determinism as something people profess but cannot truly inhabit without going mad or inert. That’s because no one can live without the phenomenology of choice, which means weighing options, feeling the pull of reasons, experiencing “could have done otherwise” in memory.

So what is the point of hard determinism as the foundation of this church? Hard determinism is only something to pretend to. It can’t be lived. No one can actually practice it, not even Ramana Maharshi.

Hard determinism is really the polar opposite of extreme spirituality. It’s not truth, it’s not actually practicable, and there are significant doubts that it’s a healthy philosophy to invest oneself in.

If anyone disagrees, then shock me and MAKE AN ACTUAL CASE WHY I’M WRONG!

To speak the same language is to share the same blood,
to be related
To live with strangers is the life of captivity

Many are Hindus and Turks who share the same language
Many are Turks who may be alien to one another

The language of companionship is a unique one
To reach someone through the heart is other than reaching them
through words.

Besides words, allusions and arguments
The heart knows a hundred thousand ways to speak

Maulana Rum
[“On Language”],
translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz

Everything in nature is a “gift”
[Gift, as far as the receiver is concerned!!!}

No “gift” can be had by effort

To be a crow .. is a gift.
No effort in the world can change it.
You might catch one and paint his beak yellow,
but that will not make him sing like an blackbird

Hi Um
You wrote
‘No “gift” can be had by effort.’

That’s not what Maharaji taught. He taught that effort leads to grace, and grace encourages further effort.

@ Mr. Tepper

What I have put before you is the outcome of more than a decade of interaction with Maharaj Ji, and many more years more digesting his words, spoken to me in interviews, public gatherings and intensive correspondence.

Having made my point it is up to you whether you can and/or are willing to take it to heart.

Finally … every thing in the narrative of sant mat starts and ends with the grace of the Master .. every single thing is “in the hands of the master” reason for him to advice people they better leave it there.

I caught what was taught …hahahaha

Um
You can read not only what Maharaji wrote and said, but all Saints: your effort goes hand in hand with grace. Do your part. You aren’t there yet.

From His perspective it is all determinism. Every moment of this reality has already happened. It is completely deterministic. But the only way to know that reality is to become it. Until then we are actors here and each has their role. Some to complain about it, to brag or argue they are superior to that, beyond that, and others to remind them they are not.

Mr Tepper

What I addressed was not about the content of the message, nor about the role of the messenger but about the person that hides behind such an role and a message, and how he uses it.

I made my point, ..time for coffee and for you to digest it.

One of things I feel truly ironic when listening now to Sam Harris is that even though he believes we have no free will whatsoever, he has no problem or hesitation calling this or that person an “asshole” and then acting like they could have acted differently or should have acted like him. It is so patently silly, particularly since if he or others really believed and acted like we have no free will, then it would seem to be reflected in their actions and their speech.

Of course, I am determined to say this and I had no other choice.