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33. Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in Buddhism with Roger Jackson
62 Plays2 years ago
In this week’s episode, we welcome Roger Jackson to the show. Roger is a Professor of Asian Studies and Religion at Carleton College. He has nearly 50 years of experience with the study and practice of Buddhism, particularly in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. His areas of interest include Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, meditation, and ritual; Buddhist religious poetry; and modern Buddhist thought. Along with receiving his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Roger has trained under some of the great Tibetan Buddhist masters. He has written a ton of books on the subject, but today we’re going to talk about his new book titled Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World. The book mainly takes on the task explaining Reincarnation, or as Roger refers to it, Rebirth, within different Buddhist sects and cosmologies.
Buy Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World:
https://www.shambhala.com/rebirth.html
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Transcript
Introduction to Roger Jackson
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. In this week's episode, we welcome Roger Jackson to the show. Roger is a professor of Asian Studies and Religion at Carleton College. He has nearly 50 years of experience with the study and practice of Buddhism, particularly in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. His areas of interest include Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, meditation and ritual, Buddhist religious poetry, and modern Buddhist thought.
00:00:30
Speaker
Along with receiving his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Roger has trained with some of the great Tibetan Buddhist masters.
Exploring Rebirth in Buddhism
00:00:38
Speaker
He's written a ton of books on the subject, but today we're going to talk about his new book titled Rebirth, A Guide to Mind, Karma and Cosmos in the Buddhist World.
00:00:48
Speaker
The book mainly takes on the task of explaining reincarnation or as Roger refers to it, rebirth within different Buddhist sects and cosmologies. But before we get to it, if you like what we do and you want to support the show, we really appreciate a follow or a sub as well as a five star rating and maybe even some kind words of encouragement in the form of a review. These things really help us to expand our reach and credibility, which is so much appreciated.
00:01:14
Speaker
If you really want to show us some next level love, you can become a patron at patreon.com slash pursuit of infinity, where you can donate as little as $2 a month to support what we do. Check us out on YouTube. The channel is up. All of our episodes are there. So if you prefer some visuals and to put some faces to the names, subscribe and keep up with us.
00:01:33
Speaker
We're also on Instagram at Pursuit of Infinity Pod. So give us a follow and reach out because we would love to hear from you. And without further delay, thank you so much for listening and please help me to welcome to the show, Roger Jackson.
Journey into Buddhism
00:02:10
Speaker
Today we're here with Roger Jackson. Roger, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure, Josh. Thanks for inviting me.
00:02:18
Speaker
Now, I really like to talk to people from the West, from the United States, who were infatuated with Buddhism, and I like to ask them how they became infatuated with it. So in my case, it was a healthy dose of psychedelics, Alan Watts and Ram Dass. So what was it for you? What made you fall in love with Buddhism and Eastern thought?
00:02:44
Speaker
Well, I would agree that psychedelics had a role in it way, way back in my college days when I probably took a little too much LSD once and thought that I had had an enlightenment experience. And in the wake of that, however, I decided that
00:03:03
Speaker
if enlightenment really was a possibility for human beings, probably psychedelics were not the easiest or most obvious way to get at that. And so I increasingly began to think in terms of getting into some kind of a spiritual or mystical tradition. And while I was still in college, that could have been Advaita Hinduism, it could have been Zen, it could have been Taoism.
00:03:30
Speaker
could have been some version of Buddhism. And after I graduated from college, my girlfriend, now my wife and I moved to the Bay Area and sort of spent a year working for the post office, making quite a lot of money and sampling the spiritual smorgasbord of the era then, you know, John Lilly, Alan Watts, Sufi dancing, whatever it might be, and decided, having saved up a bit of money, that we would
00:03:59
Speaker
go to Asia to try to study with somebody somewhere. And so we made our way back to the East Coast, visited our families there. We're both from the New York area. And then flew over to Europe on Icelandic Airways, which was as cheap in the 70s as it often is these days. Hitchhiked all through Europe and then went over land to India.
00:04:23
Speaker
by various buses and trains. It took us, there was about a month to do it and cost us maybe $25 in transportation. Once we were in India, we went to various spiritual locales, Rishikesh, which is of course a very important Hindu pilgrimage center, and Varanasi, the sacred city on the Ganges in Eastern India.
00:04:51
Speaker
We went to Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama was then, and still is, living in exile. But there was nobody around because he was down in Bodhgaya, the most sacred place in the Buddhist cosmos, giving a big initiation. So we kind of miss out on things. Nothing really seemed to connect. And so we went to Nepal.
00:05:12
Speaker
for a bit and did some trekking and we were about to head down to South India to check out again a Hindu kind of utopian community called Auroville founded by actually by the successor and heir of Sri Aurobindo, a very great Hindu yogi of the first half of the 20th century. But we ended up reading a brochure for a month-long meditation retreat
00:05:40
Speaker
in Tibetan Buddhism that was happening outside Kathmandu. We did that retreat. It sort of completely changed our lives and our minds. We then spent time in Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama was around and where we could take classes at a library he'd founded. We went back to Nepal eventually in the fall of the same year. This is 1974 and did a
00:06:07
Speaker
did some more tracking, another month-long retreat. And at that point I had decided I wanted to pursue Buddhism academically. And so there was a Tibetan geshe, a very highly realized and highly educated.
00:06:24
Speaker
Tibetan monk who was also a professor at the University of Wisconsin. So we moved to Madison where I could study with him and we also helped him to found a Buddhist center in Madison now called Deer Park Buddhist Center.
00:06:38
Speaker
where because of a connection between our teacher and the Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama visited many times over the years.
Meeting the Dalai Lama
00:06:45
Speaker
Anyway, that's the sort of short answer, although it seems rather long, as to how I got into it. I would say that the thing, you put it in terms of infatuation, and I would certainly say that in our initial enthusiasm for Buddhism,
00:07:04
Speaker
when, as I said, it kind of turned our lives around. What struck us most about it probably, well, for one thing, the sophistication and the complexity of the teachings, but also, and I think above all, the degree to which the lamas, the spiritual teachers with whom we were studying, seemed really to embody what it was they were teaching. They seemed to embody the ideal that Buddhism laid out.
00:07:34
Speaker
you know, on further reflection, even a year or so later, I recognize, well, there are plenty of Christians who embody Christian values, Muslims who embody Muslim values, Jews, Jewish values, and so forth. But for us, for whatever reason, having, you know, some suspicion of the West and Western culture in the late 60s, early 70s, it was this connection
00:07:58
Speaker
with these Buddhist teachers above all that kind of put us on some version of a path. It's amazing. You met the Dalai Lama then? What was that like?
00:08:09
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's remarkable. I mean, it's not like we're, you know, fast friends or bosom buddies or anything like that. Some of my friends can say that. But, you know, one of the Tibetan terms for the Dalai Lama means something like the presence.
00:08:30
Speaker
And you really do feel that in his presence, that here's somebody who is, you know, on the one hand, he clearly kind of conveys a spiritual feeling, and yet he's very, very down to earth.
00:08:48
Speaker
I mean, we've seen him in different contexts where he's giving, you know, ritual initiations or where he's giving complex philosophical teachings. And a few years back, maybe 10 years ago, I was on a panel with him at the University of Minnesota.
00:09:04
Speaker
uh, talking about various issues, sitting right next to him. And he kind of used me as a foil at various points. Um, so he's, you know, he's very, very down to earth, very direct. And yet you, you, and he feels, it's not only that he is a presence, but that he feels utterly present as well. And I think it's not just people like me who, of course,
00:09:26
Speaker
are predisposed, I think, to think and perhaps feel that. But I've talked to kind of grizzled journalists. For instance, a long ago, New Delhi correspondent for Time magazine who said that, and this guy was tough, but he says, you know, I went and interviewed the Dalai Lama and I sort of melted.
00:09:50
Speaker
Not everybody reacts that way, of course, but he's remarkable and his intellect is astonishing. And even now at what age? 87. He's still got his wits very much about him. He still gives teachings, maybe not quite as lengthy as he used to. He doesn't travel as much as he used to, but he's very much there.
00:10:18
Speaker
We hope not going anywhere anytime soon Yeah, I think I've heard a quote of his that is My life is my message and it sounds like from your depiction of him. He definitely lives up to that Yeah, yeah. Yeah, certainly as much as any human being I've ever been around Mm-hmm. Yeah So you've written a slew of books your newest book being one that I have right here called rebirth so
Rebirth and Western Perceptions
00:10:45
Speaker
Among all of the subjects and topics that are covered in Buddhism, what landed you on the subject of reincarnation and rebirth for this newest book?
00:10:55
Speaker
Well, it's kind of a long story and a short story where there's a long-term answer and a shorter term answer. So the long-term answer is that when my wife and I first did this month-long intensive meditation retreat in Nepal, and it was meditation, but it was also a lot of teachings on various Buddhist topics, the very first assertion that was made in the very first
00:11:21
Speaker
discourse by the lama who is doing most of the teaching was, mind is beginningless. And you start to think about this, and you realize that if you've grown up in a typically scientifically flavored Western cultural context, you don't believe that for a second.
00:11:43
Speaker
You believe that the mind, if we can even say that there is such a thing, is a product of the brain, an epiphenomenon of the brain, a function of the brain, perhaps, or maybe it just is the brain as some really hardcore types want to claim. And what's more, again, if you're not particularly religiously inclined, you're likely to believe that once we die, that's it.
00:12:13
Speaker
You know, the mind dies. So in that sense, many Westerners, I think, came into this course or courses like it thinking, you know, your your mind begins, you know, maybe when you're a few years old, arguably at birth and it ends at death. And yet here was a very serious and basic claim to the effect that mind mind is beginning less in the sense that
00:12:40
Speaker
What we are above all is a kind of continuum of mind or mental events that can be traced back before not only our birth in this life, but before our conception in this life and can be traced back into a life before that. And in fact, lives are going back infinitely before that, because in many Indian ways of thinking about the history of the cosmos, there simply is no beginning.
00:13:09
Speaker
The universe may come into existence, go out of existence, come into existence, go out of existence, but in a way these rainbow strands of consciousness or mind that we are have no beginning and in some ways they will have no end.
00:13:26
Speaker
So it's not just that we have lived before in some sense, but that after this life, we will likely live again, although there's an important asterisk associated with that statement, because at least in some versions of Buddhism, particularly the style of Buddhism practiced in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Theravada Buddhism,
00:13:49
Speaker
which uses the polycanon as its main source. The ideal actually is to put an end to mind and consciousness and to attain a state of nirvana, which may involve something like consciousness, but not consciousness as we possibly understand it. Anyway, this basic assertion at the beginning of the course was suddenly sort of blew out both ends of what I assumed was life.
00:14:15
Speaker
and particularly the life of the mind. And I took this as a kind of koan, and honestly, I didn't buy it initially. And when I kept asking the lamas, and then eventually when I moved to Madison and began asking my teacher there, Geshe Sopa, about this, they constantly referred me
00:14:36
Speaker
to a very important 7th century Indian philosophical text by a Buddhist pundit known as Dharma Kirti, who in a particular chapter of his most influential work, basically argues philosophically, not just on the basis of faith, not even on the basis of religious experience, but argues rationally and philosophically to the conclusion that there must be past and future lives. And so I took that as my dissertation topic.
00:15:07
Speaker
and worked on a Tibetan commentary on this particular chapter, you know, eventually finished the dissertation, which was like a thousand pages long, not even the longest at the University of Wisconsin, but it was long. And that eventually turned into a book. But then,
00:15:24
Speaker
you know, at least not the whole dissertation, but at least part of it. And then I, you know, sort of went off for many years and studied other things, wrote about other things, you know, ranging from Tantric Buddhism to Buddhist theology, to Tibetan literary genres, to a particular interest of mine, the
00:15:46
Speaker
practice known as the Great Seal or Mahamudra, a very important Tibetan Buddhist meditative and philosophical tradition. But in, I don't know, about three or four years ago, somebody I knew who was an editor at Shambhala Publications said that she and somebody else were putting together a kind of edited volume on secular Buddhism or secularizing Buddhism as the title eventually became.
00:16:16
Speaker
and asked me if I'd contribute something. And because I had, even though I had been a long time since I'd worked very specifically on these questions about rebirth, I thought, well, you know, this is clearly something that Western Buddhists struggle with a great deal. And so I said, okay, I'll write you an article that talks about
00:16:37
Speaker
sort of contemporary stances on rebirth among particularly, say, North American Buddhists. And I set out to write this, and as you may have already gathered, I tend to write long rather than short. And by the time I had finished my draft of the article, it was probably two or three times longer than it should have been.
00:16:59
Speaker
the editor said, well, this is way too long for this volume. Why don't you carve out a little bit? We'll put that in the volume. And why don't you take what you have left and turn that into a little book for us? So this is about the time just before the pandemic started. And this little book turned into my pandemic project, if you will.
00:17:21
Speaker
And so I submitted it. You know, again, it was longer than they wanted, so it couldn't really fit into the series, but they liked it. So they published it pretty much as it was. And I submitted it in late 2020, and it came out early this spring. So that's how I came sort of, as it were, back around to rebirth.
00:17:42
Speaker
It's a juggernaut of a book. It is so deep. I was so surprised at how much I don't know about Buddhism and rebirth and reincarnation. I had no idea the depth at which the different sects of Buddhism differ in their ideas of their cosmologies and rebirth.
00:18:03
Speaker
But people who are in the West who have no conception of Buddhism or what reincarnation is, what do you think we're missing here? Because it seems that there's like a woo-woo-wee sort of like magical interpretation of what reincarnation is in the West. So again, what are we missing here? Well, I think we're probably missing a lot, quite apart from the depths of any particular tradition when it comes to ideas like rebirth.
00:18:33
Speaker
which I should know parenthetically is not limited to Indian-based traditions.
00:18:39
Speaker
traditions of rebirth found in many sort of, as people put it, small-scale societies, Inuit societies, Igbo societies in Africa, and so forth. And there's also kind of subterranean traditions of rebirth or reincarnation in some Western religions, though they're certainly written out of the main story for the most part.
00:19:06
Speaker
But i think i think i think one of the things that often is missed your reference to approaches to reincarnation. I think one of the things that i used to be back in the day i used to refer to this as to this is the kind of surely mcclain version of.
00:19:26
Speaker
of reincarnation, but that dates me a bit because I don't think Shirley Maclean's ideas on various psychic phenomena are all that current these days. You might describe it more that what we see in the contemporary West among people is something more like a theosophical
00:19:43
Speaker
idea of reincarnation. The Theosophical Society was a very important spiritual movement that began in the 19th century in Europe with a visionary Russian woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky, who claimed to be in contact with hidden masters beyond the Himalayas who taught to her the religion behind all religions, namely theosophy. And reincarnation was very much a part
00:20:08
Speaker
of theosophy, but the notion of reincarnation in theosophy was basically what I would call evolutionary. That is, you only ever go up. You only ascend from life to life, continuing to sort of burn off karmic debts and afflictions of one sort or another.
00:20:30
Speaker
the logical conclusion of this pretty quickly as well. If I've been born a well-educated, affluent Westerner in this life, wow, it's only going to get better next time. And I think this is the way still that many people do tend to think, in what I would roughly call new age circles, tend to think about
00:20:52
Speaker
what they would call reincarnation. However, I think it's very clear if you even go a little ways into any of the important Asian and particularly Indian traditions of reincarnation or rebirth that you only can understand rebirth as being part of a kind of circle.
Karma and the Cycle of Existence
00:21:14
Speaker
And the image that I use for this sometimes is that of a ferris wheel.
00:21:20
Speaker
I don't know if people go on Ferris wheels anymore, but I think everybody knows what it is. And you go on a Ferris wheel, and you know, one time you may be up, and you've got this amazing view out over the whole fairgrounds, and you think, wow, this doesn't get any better than this. This is my destiny. But then, you know, somebody cranks the thing, and next thing you know, you're down at the bottom.
00:21:42
Speaker
And rebirth and reincarnation ideas in India are such that it is not assumed that if we have this, what we might describe, as Buddhists like to describe as this kind of perfect human rebirth with so many opportunities, there's no guarantee that that will be the case next time. Because where we go in this sort of circle of reincarnations or rebirths, if you will,
00:22:08
Speaker
is fundamentally dependent on our karma, that is our actions of body, speech, and mind. And actions of body, speech, and mind in turn are
00:22:19
Speaker
governed almost completely by the kinds of attitudes and understandings that we bring to everyday life. And in the analysis of most Indian thinkers, most of us most of the time are really quite deluded. We are fundamentally ignorant because we don't understand who we are.
00:22:44
Speaker
And therefore, we don't understand what the cosmos is, what the reality behind the cosmos or within the cosmos really is. And granted, Hindus and Buddhists and Jains say we'll all disagree on what it is we're ignorant of, and they have some real...
00:23:02
Speaker
philosophical scraps over that question, but everybody agrees that we are severely deluded beings and that therefore we mostly have subtly or in overt ways, mostly negative attitudes where we're governed by desire and anger, for instance, and that then most of our actions tend to be based on those. So actually,
00:23:25
Speaker
We may have this wonderful human life, but we have to check up, as my first mama liked to say, and notice what actually is motivating our actions, what is the nature of our actions, and the kind of fundamental
00:23:41
Speaker
role of karma or the fundamental nature of karma is simply, it's, you know, as the biblical phrase goes, as he so, so shall you reap. The quality of a particular action will ensue eventually in a particular and appropriate result. So to take, you know, to take an example from within this life,
00:24:04
Speaker
If I, you know, continuously insult somebody who thought I was their friend, the karmic payback for that will, at the very least, be that the friendship will come to an end and there may be some kind of retribution from that person if they feel they've been injured.
00:24:24
Speaker
uh, seriously enough. But of course, in, in these systems like Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, uh, uh, traditions, it, it, it kicks beyond this life such that, you know, to take, you know, kind of a, an extreme, but, but important example, if I kill some being in this life, um, even if I do it with my last breath,
00:24:51
Speaker
You don't get away from the karmic consequences by dying because it will come in the next life or in some life beyond that. So all of this, this is a very different view of rebirth. There's no guarantee.
00:25:08
Speaker
that we might not be headed to some fairly dire and distressing realm. And within Buddhist cosmology, there are such possibilities. There are higher or at least more pleasurable and powerful realms than the human, but there also are ghostly or hellish or for that matter animal realms that are considered far inferior to the human. So this is at least one thing.
00:25:35
Speaker
that I think often people in the West miss about at least traditional Indian views of reincarnation.
00:25:45
Speaker
You mentioned, say, murdering someone with your last breath. And I know that in the book you have mentioned that on your deathbed, depending on the frame of reference or the frame of consciousness that you have, it can really make a big impact on what your next incarnation, or which realm your next incarnation exists in. So can you make up for
00:26:12
Speaker
a lifetime of bad karma with like a simple, like, uh, say spiritual awakening before death. It's a, it's a really interesting question because of course it evokes something like deathbed confessions in Christianity, right? That are supposed to wipe away all accumulated sin. I would say, I think the answer is complicated. I think that on one level, there certainly are many teachings and traditions within
00:26:39
Speaker
what I know best, which is Buddhism, to the effect that, yes, the state of mind, as the Bhagavad Gita actually puts it in a Hindu context, the sphere of consciousness that you're intent upon at the moment of death is, to a large extent, determinative of what will happen in the next life.
00:27:01
Speaker
that it's a big but, that doesn't wipe out the accumulated karmas that have come in this lifetime and previous lifetimes. And so even if you have the fortune, let's say, to be guided through the moment of death or you simply have a beatific vision or feel deep faith or have something approaching an understanding of reality, though not fully understanding it,
00:27:28
Speaker
That may help with your next rebirth, but that doesn't wipe out until you're a fully enlightened being, or at least a being who is destined for enlightenment.
00:27:41
Speaker
a very, very high being, you don't wipe out that stuff. So it's, you know, within the context of something like Christianity, there's just one life. So if sin is removed through the grace of God at the moment of a deathbed confession, you know, the theology is complicated here and it's beyond my ken for sure.
00:28:09
Speaker
that single life way of thinking about things doesn't apply in Buddhism. So you can't, it's not like you, even if you sort of have a great death and have a good rebirth the next time, it doesn't guarantee, you're not off the hook completely for previous karma by any means. So there's a bit less consolation there in the idea. Nevertheless, it should be said that
00:28:35
Speaker
throughout Asia, whatever culture we're talking about, Buddhists are almost always understood to be the specialists in death. Not only that they do great death rituals, if I can put it that way, but that they have kind of delved into the nature of death, the lead up to death, the moment of death, and the aftermath of death, the way
00:29:00
Speaker
almost nobody in any other tradition has. And the tradition that I'm most familiar with, because I've studied in it the most, the Tibetan tradition is particularly famous for this. The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, which many of your listeners certainly would have heard of, is, after all, a guidebook that is to be read to a deceased person for the 49 days maximal between death and the
00:29:27
Speaker
and the sort of transposition of consciousness into a new body, assuming that that happens. It can be less, by the way, than 49 days, but the ritual goes on typically for 49 days when it does. That's just one example, just a way of... And, you know, again, if you study in Tibetan Buddhist traditions, everybody will teach you all these death meditations,
00:29:54
Speaker
you know, simply reflecting on the inevitability of death, how you'll be alone at death, how you can't take anything with you, and all that standard kinds of meditations. But also, in some traditions, very specific techniques that you can perhaps master. This is particularly within tantric or Vajrayana traditions that will help you to prepare mentally and
00:30:20
Speaker
almost in a bodily way for your own death, so that when it comes, you can use the experience for your spiritual benefit. That's really what the Tibetan Book of the Dead is trying to do for people who have already died. Anyway, that's at least something of that.
00:30:39
Speaker
So is this sort of where the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path come in as a way of ensuring that you can sort of complete your karma and positively transcend into a rebirth that's maybe in
00:30:56
Speaker
the same realm or a better realm. And, um, also that sort of brings in the, uh, idea of free will. Um, do we really have free will within the system? But it seems like it's dependent upon that. Yeah, this is okay. Two, two very good questions. A little bit separate, but I, I see, I also see where you're making the connection. Um, I mean, the, the first point is yes, the, the four noble truths, the eightfold path, those,
00:31:23
Speaker
fundamentals that all Buddhists accept as having been taught by the Buddha in his very first discourse, you know, seven weeks or so after his enlightenment. That's certainly the base because what the Four Noble Truths and especially the Eightfold Path ask of us is that we have, you know, for instance, the Eightfold Path is a matter of having right views, you know, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood.
00:31:52
Speaker
right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. All these, if we follow them through sincerely and practice them, will at the very least guarantee that in a next life, as you say, we'll maybe have another human rebirth or perhaps we'll get a heavenly rebirth of some sort. So yes, I mean, particularly for folks like us who are
00:32:19
Speaker
It seems in this life, beginners at Buddhism, to get these moral and also contemplative basics down is absolutely key. Also, especially to be generous is a very important quality.
00:32:36
Speaker
to get a higher rebirth or even a human rebirth in the next life. If you're moral and generous, that's probably the basic prerequisite. And if there's not too much other bad stuff that comes up to kind of erode that, then those are kind of the basis for a human rebirth. And if you want a heavenly rebirth,
00:33:01
Speaker
then particularly adding meditative accomplishments of some sort to that, it doesn't guarantee it 100%, but it's a basis for it. So sort of switch to the issue of free will. This is of course one of the great philosophical questions in the Western tradition.
00:33:28
Speaker
And it probably ought to be said that it is not, in an explicit sense anyway, a big question in Indian traditions, or perhaps in other Asian traditions.
Dependent Arising and Free Will
00:33:43
Speaker
It's tricky, okay, because some people would say the basic teachings of Buddhism is, broadly speaking, cause and effect. It's what Buddhists will call dependent arising or dependent origination.
00:33:58
Speaker
the sort of pithiest formulation of this is simply this being that arises. From the arising of this comes the arising of that. This ceasing that ceases. From the ceasing of this comes the ceasing of that. This is a broad causal law about how everything operates in the cosmos, but it's particularly important in a Buddhist context
00:34:22
Speaker
in thinking about the ways in which the things we do, the things we experience all arise through causes and conditions. Really, there's causation everywhere. And if there's causation everywhere, the logical question for a Westerner to ask is, well, then everything is cause. Does that mean everything is determined? And therefore, do we not have free will?
00:34:46
Speaker
Again, this isn't a question precisely that Buddhists often ask. I think it depends a lot on what your definition of free will is going to be. If your definition of free will is complete independence of any causes and conditions, any contingent factors whatsoever,
00:35:08
Speaker
as if you were completely isolated in some booth somewhere, then the answer is obviously no, because who we are, our consciousness, our various mental factors, our body, our emotions, all these are constantly affected by both external and internal causes and conditions, by tendencies we bring over from the past, habit patterns.
00:35:35
Speaker
But if you're going to define free will in a looser sense by saying that, yes, everything does arise through causes and conditions, but right now, right in this moment, in fact, in any moment, if we have sufficient appreciation for the ways in which causation works,
00:35:55
Speaker
And from a spiritual standpoint, Buddhists will say the Buddha had it analyzed best. Then we can at least we can at least say that, OK, I will I will determine here and now and today that I will not act out of anger and that I will I will develop patience instead. And that's
00:36:16
Speaker
Okay, that's granted. If you're going to analyze in an absolutist sense, you have to say, well, your decision to be patient rather than act angrily is itself a conditioned phenomenon. But I don't think Buddhists are absolutists about this. In a meaningful sense, there is free will because we can, particularly as humans, the human realm is
00:36:44
Speaker
not exactly unique in this respect, but it's certainly the best of all realms in this respect, because of our, at least when all things are going well, our intelligence, we're able to discern, you know, sort of skillful from unskillful actions, we're able to understand
00:37:02
Speaker
the way karma works. And if we're not sure about past and future lives, well, we can understand how it works right in this world. All of us have experiences of the way karma works in our own lives. So in that sense, in a looser way of understanding free will, the answer would be yes.
00:37:24
Speaker
Otherwise, it does become fatalism and then you fall into the view that some contemporaries of the Buddha had, which is just that, well, it all just has to roll out like a ball of string and there's nothing we can do about it. That was certainly not the Buddha's view. It's certainly not the view of most spiritual traditions. So whatever their particular philosophical take on a question like free will, I think about Muslims, for instance, who often have a very
00:37:52
Speaker
strong sense of predetermination, predestination, and a very strong sense of God's omnipotence, and yet do assert free will in a meaningful sense. Because, of course, from a Muslim standpoint, if there isn't free will in some sense, then our being judged on the Day of Judgment is unfair and meaningless. So, yeah, anyway, maybe more than you bargained for on that.
00:38:21
Speaker
No, definitely answer my question 100%. And yeah, it does seem to me that any absolutist view on free will is sort of going in too far in one direction. Um, but so if you, if you complete your karma, if you do everything right in life,
00:38:38
Speaker
theoretically, you can sort of escape the cycle of death and rebirth, which is referred to as samsara.
Escaping Samsara
00:38:47
Speaker
So does that mean that like a permanent state of spiritual realization is possible? Well, okay, so here we get into
00:38:57
Speaker
Yeah, into some tricky areas in differences within and among Buddhist traditions. So I would be a little cautious about using the phrase, completing karma. I mean, I think I understand what you mean by that.
00:39:14
Speaker
Um, in a way though, what you want to do is you, because, because if we've just, just think of it this way, if we've, as was claimed that first day at that course, I took in 1974, if mind is beginning less than quite literally. There is no end or beginning of Karmas that we carry along in our mind streams. So.
00:39:37
Speaker
You can't exactly complete your karma, but you can transcend it. You can just sort of leapfrog out of it, out of the need to experience the results of karma. And the way you do that is by changing the way you live, the way you act, changing your emotional attitudes, and above all, changing your understanding of reality.
00:40:03
Speaker
which, importantly, in the Buddhist tradition, involves recognizing the absence of any permanent, independent, partless self, such as was asserted by many other Indian traditions. So in this sense, you just sort of – you just sort of leave.
00:40:21
Speaker
So I think I would answer your question by saying yes, or at least cautiously saying yes. It is believed in Buddhist traditions of all sorts that it is possible to attain a state where you no longer are creating karma that will have any results. You will be in a state of perpetual spiritual realization.
00:40:47
Speaker
And then where you begin to get, you know, this is what we would call nirvana, enlightenment, awakening, liberation. There's many different terms and they get used in various ways in various traditions. We don't want to go down into the weeds with that. But I think it is important to recognize that there is a fairly basic divide within the Buddhist world.
00:41:13
Speaker
Between on the one hand, the so-called Theravada traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, which, as I mentioned before, are based in the Pali Canon, a 2,000-year-old collection of supposed teachings by the Buddha. We don't know historically how much of that he actually taught. It doesn't matter.
00:41:33
Speaker
And within the Theravada tradition, in any case, the ideal is the attainment of what they call Nibbana or Nirvana. And this is, as I suggested briefly before, a state that completely transcends mind, body, emotions, transcends rebirth.
00:41:51
Speaker
And the Buddha really wouldn't characterize this state, especially after we pass from this particular life in which we attained nirvana. He basically said it's like trying to ask, what happens to a fire when it goes out? Do you say it went east, west, north, south?
00:42:12
Speaker
The question just doesn't even apply, and by the same token, what Nirvana or Nirvana is like, he really wouldn't say. He just said that it's beyond anything that any of us can conceive. He didn't say that it's a state of absolute permanent existence. He denied that. He said it's not a state of non-existence. He said it's not both of them, and it's not neither. And it's just sort of, boom, you know, you really got
00:42:38
Speaker
You've really got no place to hang on to, no notion to hang on to as to what nirvana really might be like, but it's clear from the context of the text and the tradition that follows those texts that it means you don't come back. So from the standpoint of Theravada Buddhism, once the Buddha passed into final nirvana in the life in which he attained,
00:43:01
Speaker
enlightenment at the age of 35. And then he passed away into final nirvana at the
Nirvana Across Traditions
00:43:07
Speaker
age of 80. So he had a 45-year teaching career. At that point, he was not returning.
00:43:13
Speaker
He would not take birth again. And similarly, other accomplished disciples of his, they didn't become Buddhas per se, but they attained this state called Arhat, a worthy one, which is similarly a state of transcendent accomplishment that gets you out of the cycle of samsara and rebirth completely.
00:43:38
Speaker
Okay, so that's more or less the view in the Theravada tradition, which reflects, I think, much of early Buddhism, but we don't want to get into historical debates too much because it's complicated.
00:43:51
Speaker
But there is the other kind of main tradition of Buddhism, the Mahayana, the so-called great vehicle, which arose only slightly later perhaps than the Theravada and other earlier traditions, has as part of its sort of conceptual framework, the very important idea, particularly of the bodhisattva. This is a term in Sanskrit that literally means
00:44:22
Speaker
a being inclined towards awakening or a being headed towards awakening. And it's a term that's used everywhere in Buddhism for a future Buddha. And in the Mahayana, in the early traditions and the Theravada, there aren't that many bodhisattvas, actually, because Buddhas are very rare.
00:44:40
Speaker
In the Mahayana, on the other hand, the notion is that Buddhas are everywhere and all the time, and all of us will sooner or later become Buddhas. And in that case, if a Buddha is defined as, in effect, a future Buddha, we all must be bodhisattvas.
00:44:55
Speaker
And the key element of the bodhisattva ideal is this term in Sanskrit called bodhicitta, which means the mind of awakening or the thought of awakening. Or some people will gloss it as the altruistic aspiration to enlightenment, which is the idea that we will become enlightened.
00:45:16
Speaker
But we do it not for our own sake, so much as for the sake of aiding all sentient beings. And if this means taking birth in lower realms even, once we have sufficient spiritual awareness, we'll do that. And so while the ideal in the Theravada tradition is to get out completely, the ideal, to put it
00:45:42
Speaker
A little too simply in the Mahayana tradition is to hang around, but you don't hang around as someone who is deluded. You hang around as somebody who is aware and awakened and compassionate and skillful enough that you can do all sorts of things for all sorts of beings in all sorts of places and times.
00:46:06
Speaker
And it's what in Mahayana tradition is called. You attain if the nirvana that I've described for the Theravada tradition is this complete transcendence of samsara, the nirvana that's often described in Mahayana texts is what's called non-abiding nirvana, where you no longer really abide in samsara.
00:46:29
Speaker
deluded, you don't have the emotional afflictions that ordinary beings do, but you don't, on the other hand, abide
00:46:38
Speaker
just in Nirvana and leave everybody else behind. So in that sense, you don't abide in either. You can go between each of them. And that's kind of the Bodhisattva ideal. And eventually you become a Buddha with your own pure land and retinue and all these things. So to bring this back to your original question, the answer is yes, there is
00:47:04
Speaker
a state of, if you will, permanent. I'm using the term permanent in a loose sense, not in a tight philosophical sense, but a state of spiritual attainment from which you will never fall. But the question, the debate among Buddhists is, does that mean completely leaving samsara behind you, such as you're no longer involved at all, or do you continue to interact with beings, involve yourself in it, act for the benefit of others, and so forth?
00:47:34
Speaker
And again, and I should add, I don't want to.
00:47:39
Speaker
caricature or overly characterize actual Theravada Buddhists, many of whom act in ways that are profoundly compassionate and loving and effective and all that. I'm just, I'm only describing the kind of hypothetical ideal. There are plenty of Mahayanas who don't really act very well at all. And there are plenty of Theravadans who are, you know, a Mahayana might say, oh, they're bodhisattvas. So
00:48:07
Speaker
So if the ideal and the goal is to transcend samsara, does that sort of mean that rebirth is like a bad thing, so to speak? Yes and no.
00:48:26
Speaker
It is a bad thing, and I think that in the earlier Buddhist texts, it tends to be seen that way more. I would say that rebirth is a bad thing if you don't have sufficient spiritual attainment and control, that you can do anything about your own rebirth.
00:48:44
Speaker
If you're reborn willy-nilly, as it were, just at the whim of your karma, if you will, then you're taking a pretty big chance, because you don't know whether you're going to go up or down. You can think to yourself, oh, I've lived a very spiritual life, but we delude ourselves all the time.
00:49:07
Speaker
We don't understand our own hidden motives much of the time, so we really can't be sure. So in that sense, the fundamental rhetoric of Buddhism is to the effect that rebirth is something to be. You don't want to have to do it.
00:49:25
Speaker
You don't want to take rebirth. You want to be free of—I love Jack Kerouac's phrase from Mexico City Blues. This is a paraphrase, perhaps. I want to be off this slaving meat wheel dead in heaven. Well, he's mixing some religious images there a bit because he was a Buddhist who was very Catholic or a Catholic who was occasionally Buddhist.
00:49:48
Speaker
But the notion of completely getting out is definitely fundamentally there. But again, if you are a bodhisattva with sufficient realization, power, control, then rebirth is a good thing because you can keep taking births in which you can assist beings.
Lower Realms of Rebirth
00:50:06
Speaker
But this is presuming a level of attainment that probably most of us don't have at this point.
00:50:13
Speaker
And I would say, especially if you are, if you find yourself in one of the lower realms, then a rebirth gives you the opportunity to ascend to a higher realm. Well, that's tricky. That's very tricky because, um, if, as, as you raised earlier, and we've discussed a little bit the nature of a rebirth.
00:50:34
Speaker
from one life into another is at least significantly dependent on the state of mind at the time of death. And if you are in, let's say, one of the hell realms, which the Buddhists endlessly delight in describing, I mean, Dante has got nothing over Buddhist descriptions of various hell realms, hot, hot, hells, cold, hells, etc, etc. If you die in a hell realm, the chances are that your death there will be
00:51:04
Speaker
and an angry, a fearful, a basically negative one. And so the odds actually are great that you will be born into another low realm in the next life.
00:51:19
Speaker
Once you're down in these realms, according to the Buddhist theory, it's really hard to get out. I mentioned in the book this wonderful game that was developed. It really is based on snakes and ladders, which in our culture eventually became something like parcheesi.
00:51:36
Speaker
in Tibetan culture, and they have this in Korea, they have it in a number of different Buddhist cultures, but there was a game that was developed in, I don't know, like the 12th or 13th century in Tibet, which you could call the game of rebirth, in which you, by throws of a die, you go from one realm to another, and you kind of learn about the different realms, and you learn a lot about Buddhism along the way, but one of the really illustrative
00:52:05
Speaker
moments in this game is if you get into one of these really deep hells, they were like throwing a six, you to get out of that, you've got to go like throw one, one, two, twos, three, threes, four, fours, five, fives and six, sixes, it's going to take a while. So, so it's not again, it's not like you
00:52:29
Speaker
Sometimes people, you know, let's leave hell out of it for the moment, right? Sometimes people in this life, this is maybe another misconception or at least a misunderstanding of Indian traditions. I don't, you know, I don't, I can't say people are right or wrong in their thoughts about X or Y. I would just say that people will often say, well, okay, I just had this really terrible experience and I got rid of that karma. I know plenty of Buddhists who say that.
00:52:58
Speaker
purified that karma. But again, there's no end, no beginning to the karmas that we're going to have to purify. So the fact that you had an auto accident, you survived it unscathed, let's say, or even just were slightly injured. It's not like you can't watch what's coming around the next corner because you just don't know.
00:53:21
Speaker
Um, there's, there's just too many imponderables, too many uncertainties and, you know, only a being with supernal vision or omniscient mind could see that. And that's not most of us. Um, so, um, you, you can't really be content, uh, that, that by, uh, sort of getting rid of one particular karmic cause you're, you're sort of on, on the golden road to, to getting rid of all of them.
00:53:52
Speaker
Yeah, and speaking of on the road to getting rid of Karmic cause, it reminds me that I am an American. My country has committed atrocities throughout the world and I currently participate in a capitalist system that abuses people left and right.
00:54:15
Speaker
Is that sort of a representation of a collective sort of karma that we are all responsible for shedding? In a way, yes. I mean, the whole question, and I have not researched this deeply enough to give you an answer that I'm completely confident of, but
00:54:36
Speaker
there definitely is a notion of what we might call collective karma. And so you just described something of American collective karma, which I think probably all collective karmas are kind of mixed karmas for the most part. I mean, obviously there are, I'm sure I would probably agree with you on many political and social issues, but you know, clearly to be born an American is to
00:55:02
Speaker
enjoy certain privileges and freedoms, but also, as you say, to participate in a history that does involve both being of benefit and of harm to other people, other nations, and so forth. An instance that's perhaps more germane to the Buddhist world
00:55:23
Speaker
is an explanation that Tibetans will often give, karmically speaking, for the fact that the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950 initially and then took over completely in 1959 and sent many Tibetans into exile and oppressed many Tibetans, I think, by any objective measure.
00:55:47
Speaker
And they will say, well, as we were born as Tibetans, and this is a karmic or karmic comeuppance, if you will, for the fact that in the eighth century, an early Tibetan emperor invaded Western China and occupied the capital of China for, I don't know, a period of 50 or 60 years, maybe. And so the Chinese are just paying us back. It's a way of
00:56:15
Speaker
You know, who knows, right, whether things really work this way. But it's a way of, I mean, all of karmic thinking is really a way of helping us to gain some sense of justice, that there's some kind of justice in the cosmos. So, you know, you might say, oh, the Chinese invade us. What do we do to deserve this? Well, you look back in Tibet and here's you say, wait, okay, we invaded China in
00:56:44
Speaker
You know, the middle of the eighth century. You can then debate proportionality and various things like that. But it's part of karmic thinking that insists that, in effect, the universe must be just. And I think this is part of almost all religious thinking.
00:57:03
Speaker
But so there is a way of thinking of yourself as a part of a collective. I mean, it's not only that you can say, oh, I'm an American, you know, I'm male, I'm of this political persuasion, I'm of this social class. All that is collective karma. These are all sociological categories.
00:57:22
Speaker
Indians and Tibetans recognize social and political and other categories just the way we do. But in a kind of technical sense, it is open to question whether there is any such thing as collective karma that exists above and beyond as kind of a synergy of
00:57:42
Speaker
individual karmas. It may simply be that all of us who have been born American created particular sets of conditions in previous lives such that we all were born American in this life. And that collective karma is simply, it's a kind of an index or a way of talking about that fact.
00:58:04
Speaker
the karma is really individual. It's not like it exists in some miasma in the Akashic record or anything like that, that we are collectively, it's not like, say, something like a Jungian collective unconscious, maybe. And again, I'm not all that versed in Jung, so please don't push me on that particularly. But anyway, my own
00:58:31
Speaker
In my own reading of Buddhist tradition, collective karma is simply a way of talking about the fact that individuals in their own karma have found themselves in circumstances that make them parts of what we would call groups, and therefore we talk about, oh, a group or a collective karma.
00:58:52
Speaker
So it's not that like I share the karma of the country. It's more or I share the karma of the group, whichever group that I want to narrow it by. It's more or less a description of where we've come from and kind of where we've ended up as an individual. I think so. I think so. I mean, of course, who we are as Americans or males or.
00:59:15
Speaker
you know, whatever it may be, is itself something that has an effect on the way we think, the way we act. So in that sense, you could say that collective karma has its effects. But again, it's just, it's an index more than anything of belonging to particular groups. And if you get down to the kind of very fine psychological and philosophical
00:59:41
Speaker
analysis of what's going on with us. I don't think, in my reading anyway, that there is some extra entity there that, oh, here's the American-ness, the category of American-ness. This is the kind of category that Buddhists, as philosophers, typically denied. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah.
01:00:01
Speaker
Roger, I want to be respectful of your time. And it seems that we've hit about an hour here. I just would like to ask you one more sort of multifaceted question. So the future of rebirth and reincarnation. As it were.
01:00:19
Speaker
We see religions with revisions, and in my opinion, Buddhism stands up under the scrutiny of revisions quite well. And I guess the question is, do you find that in our current state of our physicalist paradigm, is there a way to sort of prove or have more of a collective faith in the concept of reincarnation and rebirth?
Science and Rebirth
01:00:52
Speaker
The short answer, I think, is no. But there's a lot of qualifications that need to be made. Again, it depends on what we mean by physicalism. Most philosophers of mind these days are what we might broadly call materialists or physicalists in that they are
01:01:14
Speaker
assumption is that what we call mind, and this is a point I began with, you know, way back earlier in this conversation, the assumption is that what we call mind is a function in some way of a properly operating brain. The brain arises, you know, starts developing
01:01:39
Speaker
shortly after conception, develops at an astronomical rate in the early years of life, reaches maturity at a certain age, and then begins perhaps a process of decline. And regardless of whether one's decline is rapid or very long-term, at bodily death, the brain will cease to function.
01:02:03
Speaker
end of mind. So those are the parameters in which I think physicalists, to use that term, or materialists tend to operate. It seems to me there are only a couple of ways of
01:02:21
Speaker
cutting at the edges of a view like this, if you're inclined to accept the kind of scientific paradigm, the standard scientific paradigm, and scientific reasoning.
01:02:35
Speaker
ways of kind of chipping away at this. It's pretty hard to chip away at the certainties of sort of hardcore physicalists or materialists, but there are a number of approaches that can be used. One of these is to argue on the basis of
01:02:58
Speaker
various kinds of religious or spiritual or just extraordinary experiences. Probably the most famous of these are instances where young children have reported experiences from supposed.
01:03:15
Speaker
This became a very interesting and fruitful topic of research, particularly by a University of Virginia scientist by the name of Ian Stevenson, who wrote a number of books on cases suggestive of reincarnation.
01:03:32
Speaker
And you might say that in a related sense, experiences people have around the time of death, people who, quote, die but come back near death experiences, people who have out-of-body experiences.
01:03:47
Speaker
any of these sorts of extraordinary experiences that seem at least subjectively to the experience or to point to some kind of survival of the mind, the soul, call it what you will, of the death of the body or the dysfunction of the body are suggestive. I would say
01:04:13
Speaker
From my point of view, that these are really intriguing. A few of the cases, particularly of past life memories, are perhaps the most striking of all. But there still are questions of whether the experiments
01:04:30
Speaker
that revolved around these particular children and their memories were rigorously enough conducted that they can stand as proof of reincarnation more generally, let alone the Buddhist version of reincarnation.
01:04:52
Speaker
you know, there are possibilities there. You know, another type of extraordinary experience that people sometimes will cite is the, if you will, the deliverances of deep meditative states.
01:05:04
Speaker
It's a sort of standard assumption, not just in Buddhism, but in many yogic traditions in India that people who are able to concentrate their minds sufficiently will naturally have memories of past lives and will be able to see what future lives might be like. In fact, this is actually two of the experiences that the Buddha had on his night of
01:05:30
Speaker
the Night of His Enlightenment were exactly of this nature. But these are extraordinary experiences. They can't really be checked in an empirical way. And we have to acknowledge that mystics in other traditions have extraordinary experiences, have remarkable attainments, and may come to very different conclusions about what happens before we're born and after we die. So again, it's all suggestive and interesting, but hardly
01:06:00
Speaker
conclusive. Another way of coming at this is to try to work within a sort of modern
01:06:11
Speaker
paradigm of physics, but pushing a bit toward the edges of physics. And again, I never took physics even in high school, so I'm way out of my depth here. But there are certainly approaches to physics. The late physicist David Bohm was one who
01:06:31
Speaker
who suggested this. There are other contemporary physicists who suggest this as well. And among, say, Buddhist teachers, Alan Wallace, who has a degree in physics, as we said, as an undergraduate, has sort of emphasized this argument to a considerable degree that if we think, if we only want to think of something like mind as a product of the physical,
01:06:57
Speaker
then maybe we got another thing coming because as you begin to dig in various directions or maybe expand towards various horizons in physics, you begin to wonder whether actually matter is all that basic. Some physicists will suggest that actually information or even something more like mind is
01:07:23
Speaker
is more fundamental than matter. That matter is simply a function of a kind of energy that itself may be likened to the mental, more to the mental than the sort of hard physical. And if that's the case, well, then all bets are off. But again, it has to be said,
01:07:43
Speaker
for the moment, from what very little I understand, that this is something closer to the edges of physics, and that it's certainly not the standard paradigm of physics at this point. But as we know, paradigms in physics, as in other scientists, are replaced every now and again.
01:08:04
Speaker
It's not impossible by any means that we may completely flip the physicalist understanding on its head. And it may turn out that Buddhists who were talking about the universe being sort of mind-only going back 2,000 years were in some sense right about it. But again, these are only a couple of
01:08:31
Speaker
a couple of suggestions as to how you might kind of work within slash against scientific ways of approaching these things, which again are typically physicalist and kind of hardcore materialist.
01:08:47
Speaker
Well, I'll say that I really deeply resonate with the experiential aspect of your answer because again, to bring it all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, psychedelics and psychedelic experiences brought me to a place where I can understand and appreciate the potential of, uh, of rebirth and reincarnation and, uh,
01:09:07
Speaker
man, Roger, your breadth of knowledge in this topic just blows me away. Uh, I appreciate your time so, so much. And, uh, thank you for coming on the show today. Um, would you please just, uh, inform the audience of any place they can find you if they want to contact you? Yeah. I mean, the, the easiest way is by email. Uh, my, my email is R Jackson.
01:09:30
Speaker
J-A-C-K-R-J-A-C-K-S-O-N at Carlton. Carlton is C-A-R-L-E-T-O-N dot E-D-U. So that's the easiest way to contact me and I'm happy to correspond within reasonable bounds with anybody who has observations, questions, or whatever it may be. We've only scratched the surface of this, but I really appreciate the
01:09:59
Speaker
know, both the depth and the breadth of your questions and I've really enjoyed the conversation and I hope your listeners have too.
01:12:37
Speaker
you