Mindful Life or Mindful Lives? - Exploring why the Buddhist belief in rebirth should be taken seriously by mindfulness practitioners

Mindful Life or Mindful Lives? - Exploring why the Buddhist belief in rebirth should be taken seriously by mindfulness practitioners

This is the introductory chapter of my PhD thesis, submitted by Jacob Andrew

Lucas, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, June 2018.

The last thirty years have seen enormous growth in mindfulness based therapies derived from Buddhist meditation techniques. In January 2015 the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness in the UK published an interim report, Mindful Nation UK, with recommendations on mindfulness in the areas of health, the workplace, education and the criminal justice system. The techniques of mindfulness, in both their traditional Buddhist forms and in their modern secular forms, aim to give us access to a perspective on our emotions and thoughts that is universally therapeutic, yet do modern secular techniques of mindfulness free mindfulness from the burden of its outmoded Buddhist cultural baggage or deprive it of the essential humanising vision that should be at its core?

This abstract was for a panel discussion titled ‘Buddhism, Mindfulness and Being Human’, organised by the University of Bristol as part of the InsideArts Festival of Arts and Humanities, held on the 18th of November 2015. The panel was composed of David Leech, a philosopher of religion; Michael Houser, a psychiatric nurse; and Venerable Amaro Bhikkhu, a Buddhist monk. David Leech began the discussion by highlighting some of the issues facing mindfulness as a practice that originates within Buddhist meditation techniques but has been adopted and adapted for clinical use in psychological therapies and has become increasingly popular within the wider context of secular selfhelp techniques. For some, the sort of mindfulness practised in clinical and selfhelp contexts is becoming too heavily secularised; it is not “Buddhist enough”, having lost its ethical emphasis. For others, mindfulness is still “too Buddhist”, with its adoption being tantamount to an attempt to covertly convert vulnerable people to Buddhism. As the discussion progressed it became clear that the secularisation of mindfulness does not render it ethically empty. We can reasonably assume that secular teachers and practitioners of mindfulness are not operating within a valueless vacuum that only Buddhist ethics can fill. Any practitioner, Buddhist or not, will be embedded within a culture or way of life that has a rich and complex ethical framework. Nor can we claim that secular ethics are incompatible with the Buddhist origins of mindfulness. It would be uncharitable to flatly deny that Buddhist and secular teachers and practitioners of mindfulness are alike in their intention to increase happiness and reduce suffering. And yet, while the sides of this debate were not defined by the outright presence or absence of an ethical approach, one could argue that the specific emphases and details of their respective approaches determined how they viewed mindfulness practice. In this way, a key issue was the fact that mindfulness is a technique with its origins in a distinctly Buddhist way of life. This way of life is not homogeneous; a quick glance at any book on the varieties of Buddhist culture and life will attest to that.

Nevertheless, there are some foundational features, some roots from which the variety of Buddhist cultures, practices and ways of life have grown. Foundational features include the four noble truths, the basic analysis of suffering, its causes, and its cessation, which structures the path of Buddhist practice. The fourth of these noble truths is the disclosure of eight intertwined practices that lead to liberation from suffering, of which the correct application of mindfulness (Pali: sammā-sati, Sanskrit: samyak smṛti) is one. The Buddhist approach to mindfulness is rooted in its own analysis of suffering and its distinctive understanding of the path to lasting happiness.

Listening to the panellists, I realised that in discussing the question of how “Buddhist” mindfulness should be, when adapted for a secular context, they were fundamentally discussing how much it should remain structured and directed by those approaches to overcoming suffering and achieving happiness that are foundational to Buddhism. And yet, while they discussed this issue, there was one distinct feature of the foundational Buddhist approach, not only to mindfulness but to life in general, which was never mentioned let alone discussed. Where the discussion highlighted some of the differences between mindfulness as understood within Buddhist traditions and outside of them there was no mention of the fact that mindfulness and other techniques were originally practised within a temporal framework of multiple lifetimes.

The Buddhist vision of reality includes as one of its foundational features the cosmological assumption that every being is caught in a cycle of perpetuating rebirths. Insofar as a secular approach to mindfulness removes any reference to rebirth, it cannot approach suffering and liberation from suffering in the same way that Buddhists traditionally have. Foundational to the Buddhist analysis of suffering and its causes is the cycle of dependent origination (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda Pali: paṭiccasamuppāda), a cycle of birth, death and, most importantly, rebirth. But what does it mean to talk of foundational features of Buddhism? Given the diversity of Buddhist cultures throughout history we must be careful not to assume that Buddhism is a monolithic and historically static phenomenon. Buddhist ideas and practices have changed and developed throughout history and so do not give us an unmediated sense of what Buddhism is and what the Buddha taught. Particularly when it comes to the recent reception of Buddhist ideas and practices in the West, there has been a great deal of interpretation that has led to the manner in which they are presented and understood. That said, I do wish to claim that one can meaningfully refer to traditional Buddhist beliefs, beliefs that are part of a shared Buddhist heritage. To do so I wish to draw on the work of Buddhist scholar Rupert Gethin.

1.1 The Foundations of Buddhism

In The Foundations of Buddhism Gethin points out that it is both fashionable and accurate to say that ‘there is not one Buddhism but many Buddhisms’. With this in mind he nonetheless confirms that there are ‘fundamental ideas and practices that constitute something of a common heritage shared by the different traditions of Buddhism’. These include the story of the Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama; a textual and scriptural tradition; the framework of the four noble truths; the monastic and lay ways of life; and, most importantly for our concerns, a cosmology based around karma and rebirth. The common heritage also includes the teachings on no self and interdependence; an ethical way of life leading from good conduct to meditation and understanding of the nature of reality; theoretical systems on this nature of reality; and the altruistic ideal to which this all leads.

To take this common heritage as providing the basic features of the traditional Buddhist perspective is not to claim that these constitute the essence of Buddhism. As Gethin points out, different Buddhists might talk about these features in different ways depending on their location and context. Nonetheless: [W]hatever the nature of the Buddhist terrain, one cannot dig much below the surface without coming across some trace of the patterns of thought and practice outlined here, even if at different times and in different places the constructions built on their foundations present their own distinctive and peculiar aspects.

These patterns of thought and practice are, in Gethin’s words, ‘the foundations on which Buddhism rests.’

In using the term ‘traditional Buddhism’, I am referring to the attitudes, values and practices that have historically framed the lives of Buddhists in countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Tibet, Bhutan and Vietnam and continue to do so in increasingly diverse locations. According to this framework, the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, was an awakened being who taught that suffering arises due to a fundamental ignorance about the nature of reality. This ignorance takes the form of an assumption that there is an enduring, independently existing self. This assumption gives rise to attachment towards that which belongs to the self and aversion towards everything that threatens it. Motivated by ignorance, attachment and aversion we engage in activities (Sanskrit: karma Pali: kamma) that lead to being reborn again and again in lives of varying quality. In these future lives we could be a human, or a non-human animal, or we could be reborn in any one of a variety of heavenly or hellish realms. Only the realisation that all things are interdependent and impermanent can bring an end to the cycle of birth, sickness, decay, death and rebirth.

This foundational framework is the shared heritage common to all Buddhist traditions and by not touching on the key cosmological features that define this framework, the panel discussion could not get to the heart of what is at issue here. The core issue is whether one thinks that ‘modern secular techniques of mindfulness free mindfulness from the burden of its outmoded Buddhist cultural baggage’ or one thinks that they ‘deprive it of the essential humanising vision that should be at its core’. Surely, I thought, a discussion of the essential humanising vision at the heart of Buddhist mindfulness practice must at least mention rebirth.

Without addressing the multi-life context in which mindfulness has traditionally been practised, one of the key distinctions between the secular modernist and traditional Buddhist practitioners of mindfulness remains untouched. This key distinction is whether they consider traditional Buddhist cosmology, which includes rebirth, to be outmoded baggage or an essential feature of the Buddhist understanding of suffering and the path to happiness. Insofar as we overlook this key distinction we risk presenting Buddhist cosmology as irrelevant to practices associated with the Buddhist path. This is a risk whether we are engaging in a panel discussion or any of the other aspects of the general conversation around Buddhism’s relationship to modernity. If such discussions consistently overlook the multi-life perspective, the impression is given that rebirth is ultimately irrelevant to the humanising vision at the heart of mindfulness practice.

Such an approach to the relationship between Buddhist cosmology and practice might become tempting given the fact that, over thirty years, a Buddhist meditation technique has been successfully adopted for use in clinical therapy. After all, Jon Kabat Zinn and others writing about mindfulness during the 1980s and 1990s were highly successful in adapting Buddhist practices to fit within the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) model introduced by Aaron T. Beck. One might assume, given the success with which traditional Buddhist meditation techniques were adopted into psychotherapeutic practice, that the distinctive Buddhist cosmological framework is not particularly important when it comes to the successful practice of core techniques. This may well be at least partially true. The evidence strongly suggests that one can gain benefit from the practice of mindfulness without any familiarity with the traditional Buddhist framework. This is not surprising given that both Buddhist tradition and modern psychology seem to be using mindfulness techniques in order to overcome the same phenomenon: suffering, conceived of as the various forms of mental and physical misery that we might experience. What is important to the successful adoption of mindfulness for clinical benefit is the compatibility between the overall interests and orientation of Buddhist and modern psychological traditions.

Nevertheless, this essential compatibility need not go any deeper than the shared interest in suffering, its causes and its cessation. Such compatibility need not even mean that these different traditions share similar accounts of what suffering is at its deepest level and how best to overcome it. As one explores the analysis of suffering, its causes and its cessation found in most Buddhist traditions, one will eventually come across cosmological ideas that are simply not found in modern psychological approaches. These cosmological ideas are found because Buddhist practitioners have not traditionally considered suffering to be the problem of a single life. Within the foundational Buddhist framework suffering is understood to be a condition of existing in saṃsāra, the cycle of involuntary birth and death. To suffer, according to this understanding, is to be trapped by psychological tendencies that will pull one from life to life without end. Liberation from suffering comes once these tendencies are extinguished.

The differences between this approach to suffering and happiness when compared to modern psychological approaches are too numerous to list here. Needless to say the multi-life perspective gives Buddhism a distinct approach to what mindfulness practice amounts to. Its distinct analysis of suffering includes very subtle analysis combined with a vast cosmic and temporal scale. For each practitioner, their path to happiness and their history of suffering takes place over multiple lifetimes in a variety of different types of body and world. Therefore, when we discuss the ‘essential humanising vision’ of Buddhism we are discussing a vision with a high degree of breadth and complexity. The successful adoption of mindfulness does not rule out the possibility that something valuable and beneficial is lost when mindfulness practice is disconnected from a Buddhist cosmological framework.

1.2 Bringing Rebirth into the Discussion

My aim in challenging the terms of the panel discussion on mindfulness is to highlight the undue absence of the traditional Buddhist cosmology from the wider discussion regarding Buddhism’s relationship with modern secular culture. This absence unduly limits discussion regarding the relationship between the respective philosophical frameworks that ground Buddhist and modern secular culture. Discussions regarding secularism and Buddhism rarely entertain the possibility that the Buddhist cosmological framework, specifically its account of the afterlife, might be a serious alternative to the widespread assumption within secular culture that death results in annihilation. There are a great many avenues that we might explore and questions that we might ask about the possible influence that such a cosmological framework might have on ethical and political attitudes, self-understanding and self-help practices, as well as educational and clinical interventions. But these avenues will only be explored and questions asked if the Buddhist cosmological framework is taken seriously. I aim to explore this framework in order to discover what arguments might be put forward to suggest that it be taken seriously by non-Buddhists. I am using non-Buddhist practitioners of mindfulness as my chief example because they represent a subset of non-Buddhists who may wish to engage with Buddhist tradition but who may find its cosmological ideas inaccessible. Ernest mindfulness practitioners steeped in a secular worldview are likely to have some basic respect for the tradition from which the technique originates whilst also requiring good reasons to take traditional ideas such as rebirth seriously. This allows me to imagine that they might be willing to engage with the philosophical ideas that ground Buddhist cosmology.

I will begin by exploring the marginalisation of the Buddhist cosmological framework within modern approaches to Buddhist practice in order to show how it is rooted in a rejection of the multi-life perspective traditionally adopted by Buddhist practitioners. I will suggest that, if we are to reject this cosmology, it should be because of weaknesses in the philosophical support for rebirth as an afterlife possibility not the result of disengaged scepticism or uncritical adherence to modern western philosophical assumptions. Genuine engagement with Buddhist philosophy as it relates to Buddhist cosmology is required in order to determine whether cosmological features such as rebirth should be taken seriously.

1.3 Buddhist Modernism and Buddhist Cosmology

The process of peeling mindfulness away from other aspects of Buddhism did not begin with modern clinicians. The successful adaptation of mindfulness into a psychological therapy is due in part to a wider historical trend in which the Buddhist culture surrounding and permeating meditation techniques like mindfulness is stripped away. In The Making of Buddhist Modernism, David L. McMahan investigates how a distinctly modern form of Buddhism developed as traditional ideas and practices entered into dialogue with the narratives of scientific rationalism, romanticism and protestant Christianity. For the past onehundred-and-fifty years, this dialogue has resulted in various forms of what McMahan calls Buddhist Modernism, interpretations of Buddhism that are to various degrees de-traditionalised, demythologised and psychologized. McMahan describes the detraditionalization of religion as ‘the shift of orientation from external to internal authority and the associated reorientation from institutional to privatized religion’. He uses the term demythologization to describe ‘the process of attempting to extract – or more accurately, to reconstruct – meaning that will be viable within the context of modern worldviews from teachings embedded in ancient worldviews.’ A key aspect of this process is that ‘elements that are incompatible with modernity are relegated to “myth” and shorn of literal truth-value.’ Such “mythical” elements are then psychologized, that is, reinterpreted as being purely psychological in nature.

We can find another excellent investigation into the development of the division between ‘mythical’ and ‘essential’ Buddhism in Donald Lopez Jr’s Buddhism and Science. Lopez shows how, at different times in the past one-hundred-andfifty years, different Buddhist traditions have entered into dialogue with different aspects of the natural sciences and, in each case, the process of making a particular form of Buddhism compatible with the science of the day has required the elimination of features deemed essential by previous lay and monastic practitioners.

Prior to McMahan’s comprehensive investigation, Philip A. Mellor also recognised some of the same processes in his article ‘Protestant Buddhism? The Cultural Translation of Buddhism in England’. For example, Mellor points out that the England-based organisation known at the time as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order held the view that ‘a Buddhist ‘essence’ can be distilled from the eastern cultures and traditions in which it has been located until the recent past’. Mellor notes that this view ‘demonstrates certain continuities with Protestant perspectives’ which, having ‘combined with a post- Enlightenment scientific tradition’, ‘present religion as essentially a personal, private matter rather than an issue of culture.’ Here, what Mellor calls Protestant Buddhism involves the same process of detraditionalization as Buddhist Modernism.

It is as a result of this modernising trend that Buddhist ideas and practices have been evaluated to see if they can be rendered meaningful and useful within the context of modern worldviews. Both monastics and laypeople from historically Buddhist countries have been involved in attempts to modernise Buddhism, identifying the “core” teachings of the Buddha amongst so much cultural baggage and making them available to a modern audience. Whilst some Buddhist ideas and practices retain pride of place in modernist interpretations, considered relevant and useful, others are quietly ignored, regarded as antiquated or irrelevant in today’s modern, increasingly secular, culture.

This modernising trend is one of the reasons why the adoption of Buddhist meditation techniques for use in western psychotherapeutic contexts has been so successful. There were enough modernist interpretations of Buddhism around when Kabat-Zinn and others began adapting mindfulness for use in a clinical setting that little more needed to be stripped out. By Kabat-Zinn’s time both mindfulness and the Buddhist path in general had already been prepared for a modernist audience, an audience who did not share the philosophical assumptions traditionally held by Buddhists. The modernist outlook is steeped in its emergence from, and conflict with, pre-modern religious outlooks. As a result, certain religious motifs such as divine beings, miracles and the afterlife present a prima facie problem for modern audiences. This secular disposition, along with the material advances brought about by the empirical sciences, has shaped modernist interpretations of Buddhism and, through them, secular approaches to mindfulness.

Whereas the traditional Buddhist framework is rooted in philosophical arguments combined with meditative insights, modern approaches are rooted in philosophical arguments combined with empirical observations. This allows for a successful narrative to take hold according to which the modernist has a poorer knowledge base when it comes to the ‘inner world’ and the Buddhist has a poorer knowledge base when it comes to the ‘outer’ material world. The space that has been carved out for Buddhism within the modern worldview is as an “inner science” that can augment the “objective” sciences whilst also meeting some of the secularist’s unmet spiritual needs. This would explain why Buddhism is so often identified with meditation: techniques of inner observation epitomize the way in which Buddhist practices can augment the modern approach. This is likely to have helped to develop the profile of mindfulness, which was described by Nyanaponika Thera as ‘The Heart of Buddhist Meditation’ in his book of the same name.

While modernising movements tend to identify mindfulness as epitomizing the Buddhist path, practices for cultivating compassion and doctrines such as noself and impermanence also find a place within modernist views of what is central to Buddhism. The successful retention of these additional practices and doctrines is not surprising when we consider their compatibility with other modernist motifs. Teachings on no-self, often glossed as the no-soul doctrine, fit comfortably with a secular, even anti-religious, culture. Equally, practices for cultivating universal compassion are highly compatible with the universalising values of enlightenment morality. Meanwhile, the doctrine of impermanence chimes well with scientific discoveries in physics, the recognition that we are all part of a ceaseless flux of forces.

Rebirth, on the other hand, represents a paradigm case of an aspect of traditional Buddhism that does not fit with the secular scientific aspirations of modernist approaches. The traditional Buddhist cosmology, including the belief that sentient beings are reborn after death, is taken by many modernisers to be an example of Buddhism’s religious baggage.21 While aspects of Buddhist psychology and the term “karma” might be utilised in some modernist approaches, the core assumption is that the cosmology around rebirth is not particularly relevant when it comes to core Buddhist practices. This attitude to rebirth comes in a range of strengths. At one end of the spectrum we have those who adopt particular Buddhist ideas and practices but remain genuinely agnostic regarding rebirth. Jon Kabat-Zinn is a good example of someone in this category. Although Kabat-Zinn does not identify as a Buddhist, he describes what he does in terms of practising the ‘Buddhadharma’. But KabatZinn never mentions rebirth, and this omission carries the implicit assumption that rebirth is not particularly relevant to practising the Buddhadharma, even if it is not completely implausible.

At the other end of the spectrum we have full-on revisionists who adopt Buddhist ideas and practices whilst trying to fit all of this into an explicitly secular or naturalistic framework. In such a framework, traditional Buddhist cosmology and belief in rebirth are considered far-fetched and implausible as well as irrelevant. Those at the revisionist end of the spectrum sometimes take the cosmology to be a contingent aspect of ancient Indian culture that became mixed in with the Buddha’s core teachings after he died. Such core teachings are taken to be aimed simply at reducing suffering and so are perceived to have no necessary connection to belief in the afterlife. Owen Flanagan, philosopher and author of The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, is an excellent example of someone who does not self-identify as a Buddhist but nonetheless wishes to transform Buddhism into a secular ethics. Other revisionists, like Stephen Batchelor, identify as Buddhist whilst having a similar goal.

Batchelor’s interpretation of Buddhism offers a good example of the kind of modernist revision that McMahan describes. Batchelor is highly critical of the traditional approach to Buddhist practice insofar as it presents rebirth as being an important feature of reality. In works such as Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, Buddhism without beliefs and After Buddhism he is keen to reinterpret Buddhism for a secular age, presenting Siddhārtha Gautama as a thoroughly anti-metaphysical man and his teachings regarding rebirth as being for the sake of those trapped in the belief-system of their time.

Batchelor’s approach is aimed at those who engage with Buddhist teachings and practices outside of the traditional framework and for whom its cosmology appears strange and irrelevant to their concerns. For these practitioners the suggestion that they might be reborn after dying does not ring true, enrich their lives, nor act as a motivating factor for their engagement with Buddhist practices.25 Such practitioners might consider the dearth of empirical evidence for future lives as a serious obstacle to taking it seriously. They might also find the very idea that the mind could continue to exist without a brain hard to believe given scientific evidence suggesting that mental processes depend on brain function. For some, belief in rebirth may be viewed as an excuse to disengage from life and its suffering by seeking solace in a pleasant afterlife.

By jettisoning Buddhist cosmology, the whole framework of Buddhist practice fits more comfortably into the worldview of a new audience. The easiest way to do this is to psychologise the cosmology, to interpret teachings about rebirth or about heaven and hell realms as making reference to extreme mental states and the way in which they condition one’s experience of the environment. The extent to which such an interpretation does actually psychologise the Buddhist cosmology is debatable. Whether we are discussing heaven, hell, hungry ghost, animal or human realms, within the Buddhist cosmology all such realms are taken to be the results of particular mental states.29 As Rupert Gethin points out:

The key to understanding the Buddhist cosmological scheme lies in the principle of the equivalence of cosmology and psychology. I mean by this that in the traditional understanding the various realms of existence relate rather closely to certain commonly (and not so commonly) experienced states of mind. In fact Buddhist cosmology is at once a map of different realms of existence and a description of all possible experiences.

If this is the case, what does it mean to give the traditional Buddhist cosmology a psychologised interpretation? The key to such an interpretation seems to be the claim that the Buddhist cosmology is purely psychological, that it describes all possible experiences but not actual realms of existence. The easiest way to make this claim is to offer a psychologised interpretation, not of the whole cosmology but simply of rebirth. If rebirth is simply the name given to the moment-by-moment transformation of one’s experiences throughout a lifetime, rebirth in a heavenly or hellish realm refers to the transformation of experience into an extremely pleasant or an extremely unpleasant form and nothing more. According to such an interpretation, rebirth in the human realm comes to describe a particularly reflective and balanced mental state in which there is awareness of both happiness and suffering. The central claim required for such an interpretation is that all these “rebirths” are psychological states that occur within a single lifetime. Once rebirth is psychologised in this way, the whole Buddhist cosmology becomes purely psychological.

Here we find the dividing line between a psychologised and a traditional interpretation of Buddhist cosmology.

While a traditional understanding of rebirth includes the idea that a being is reborn moment-by-moment it also, most importantly, involves the claim that this stream of momentary experiences does not cease at death.32 According to the traditional view, a being can be reborn within any of the realms of possible experience after death. A psychologised view of Buddhist cosmology simply side-steps this claim and focusses on a single lifetime. In this way, the key to a psychologised account of Buddhist cosmology is the rejection of the multi-life perspective as either accurate to reality or relevant to Buddhist practice. Once an interpretation of Buddhism has marginalised or ignored the multi-life perspective, the traditional cosmology disappears.

Conversely, once rebirth is established, we can recognise a range of possible afterlife experiences and sketch a rough cosmology. Our cosmological map would consist of all possible rebirths and would include realms ranging from the heavenly to the hellish. It would also include human and animal life along with other possible embodiments. This cosmological map would rapidly come to resemble something like the traditional Buddhist cosmology.

This is why rebirth is foundational to Buddhist cosmology. Buddhist cosmology can be rejected automatically if the multi-life perspective is incoherent or implausible. If one cannot continue to experience anything after death, there is little weight to cosmological claims that one will go on to experience heavenly, hellish or human realms. Batchelor’s rejection of traditional Buddhist cosmology seems to be precisely on these grounds. He rejects rebirth as a core feature of Buddhism on the grounds that it does not have the demonstrability that other features of Buddhism do. And once rebirth is side-lined, the cosmology that depends upon it is side-lined as well.

According to Batchelor, the claim that a being continues to undergo the full range of experiences after death is not demonstrable in the experiential way that other foundational Buddhist claims are. Claims to the effect that life involves suffering, that one can achieve peace through certain practices, or that mindfulness cultivates concentration, would count as core Buddhist ideas for Batchelor insofar as their accuracy can be experienced after a certain amount of practice. What Batchelor attests to in Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist is that despite years as a Buddhist monk, he never found the kind of evidence for the Buddhist afterlife that he found for the value of a Buddhist way of life.

The need to experience the truth of traditional Buddhist claims constitutes a key aspect of what makes Batchelor’s approach to Buddhism distinctly modernist. David McMahan highlights an emphasis on individual experience as one of the key features of Buddhist Modernism. Modernist Buddhist practice involves open inquiry into the nature of oneself and reality that need not take account of traditional Buddhist doctrines, scriptures or monastic authorities. Such detraditionalised approaches to Buddhism rate the reliability of individual experience above claims made by traditional Buddhist authorities. The value of traditional Buddhist sources comes to be determined by their relevance to the individual practitioner rather than the merits of the source itself. McMahan argues that this is a notable departure from the way in which Buddhism has been traditionally manifested. In countries such as Thailand, Myanmar, Tibet and Sri Lanka, Buddhism involves rituals and beliefs about karma and rebirth that are not presented as open to question. He claims that the conception of Buddhism as a matter of individual inquiry free from institutional and authoritarian constraints has been heavily influenced by attitudes originating in the reformation and the enlightenment, in which the status of the individual was elevated and appeals to traditional beliefs and authority were challenged. However, in discussing the contrasts between traditional and de-traditionalised modes of Buddhist practice, we would not want to fall into the trap of assuming that the Buddhist Modernist is supremely rational and the traditionalist is a superstitious dogmatist. It is important to remember that there are reasons why the doctrinal, scriptural and monastic authorities to whom one might appeal if living in a traditional Buddhist country are perceived to possess this authority. Both the Buddhist scriptures and the monastic community are able to offer doctrinal insights as well as practical instructions to the Buddhist practitioner. The monastic life is also considered by Buddhist standards to be the most conducive to the development of the ethical conduct and mental stability needed to generate the insights towards which the Buddhist path leads.

When appraising the traditional approach to Buddhist practice, it is important to bear in mind that it presents the Buddhadharma as a path. It follows from this that one person can be further along the path than another and therefore more reliable as a guide. The foundational doctrines of Buddhism such as no self, dependent-origination, karma and rebirth are taken to be the result of profound insight. They are not generally taken to be self-evident truths equally comprehensible to all.39 It is assumed that the full meaning of Buddhist doctrine requires extensive study and reflection to be clearly understood. The vast majority of traditional Buddhists, who lack the time to engage in such extensive study, place their trust in those who are presumed to have developed a greater amount of insight. This generally leads them to accept the doctrinal convictions of monastics, advanced practitioners, or the wider Buddhist community. Nevertheless, we must accept that there are dangers involved in placing too much faith in authority derived from what we could call spiritual achievements. It is to be expected that achievements such as psychological wellbeing, meditative prowess or doctrinal expertise would draw a certain amount of respect. But an individual or group may have mastered a range of psychological or intellectual abilities without this increasing their ability to verify the truth of metaphysical claims. The risk is that we assume that the accumulation of scriptural knowledge and the development of meditative skill automatically leads to the capacity to directly verify the truth of Buddhist cosmological claims.

In his account of living as a Gelug Tibetan Buddhist monk, Batchelor provides an example in which the connection between spiritual development and prestige can actually decrease overall interest in pursuing or supporting honest inquiry into the truth of claims. He describes how the educational paradigm that was in place during his monastic training did not encourage open inquiry in which every possibility is equally considered. Rather, there was a correct doctrinal answer and other viewpoints were presented simply to be ruled out. This meant that failure to completely accept the truth of certain claims was viewed as an educational failure. Batchelor claims that insofar as he genuinely questioned the doctrine of rebirth, he was seen as an embarrassment to his teacher. His teacher, Geshe Rab-ten, feared that he would develop a bad reputation through being responsible for such a poorly educated monk. As a result, Batchelor claims, he was pressured into keeping his doubts to himself.

Interestingly, the particular approach of Geshe Rab-ten is explored by Georges Dreyfus in The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: the Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. According to Dreyfus, Geshe Rab-ten took the view that debate was merely a method by which students could internalize the teachings of the tradition. He explains how Geshe Rab-ten saw the student-teacher relationship as ‘a context for the transmission of the truth, all of whose details were decided by the tradition.’ But Dreyfus is clear that this pedagogical perspective was not adopted by every teacher in the tradition and only gained popularity due to a sectarian revival in the early twentieth century.

Whether we consider Batchelor’s experience to be the result of a particularly dogmatic teacher or the tradition itself, it doesn’t take a great deal of investigation to discover that, where a belief is considered by a group or institution to be a fundamental doctrine, pressure is often exerted on individuals to share that belief, regardless of the strength of arguments in its favour. As a result, a belief can receive widespread support and inform people’s practices without being particularly plausible. It makes sense, then, to be sceptical when it comes to religious or institutional doctrines regardless of the character and qualities of those who advocate them. If we find that a particular Buddhist tradition has quashed genuine debate by discouraging practitioners from questioning the truth of rebirth, this provides a reason not to take its claims about the afterlife seriously.

However, although we should maintain vigilance regarding the cultural and institutional context in which different claims have been espoused, we cannot justify the assumption that the quashing of genuine inquiry has been the norm within every intellectual tradition throughout history, Buddhist or otherwise. Even in the Tibetan Tradition we find a spectrum of teachers who range from the dogmatic to the inquiring. Dreyfus dedicates an entire chapter of The Sound of Two Hands Clapping to exploring the differences between Geshe Rab-ten, for whom debate was simply a means to learn the key texts, and Gen Nyi-ma, for whom debate was a way to scrutinise those texts. Buddhism, in general, has a rich history of philosophical inquiry that, thanks to recent translation and scholarship, is increasingly accessible. This history stretches back to the lively debates between Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools of thought in ancient India. Buddhist philosophy developed in a milieu of debate that included different Buddhist, Hindu and also anti-religious materialist schools.

Although there might be times and places where Buddhist practitioners become somewhat insular, failing to debate with those who disagree fundamentally with their views, Buddhism could not have thrived in India if this approach was the norm. It is for this reason that we can use the work of Indian Buddhist philosophers in order to defend key Buddhist claims. There are no automatic reasons why the principles and premises used in Buddhist arguments for key metaphysical and cosmological claims should not be persuasive today. We should not ignore these arguments even if we can find evidence that they are not always being tested as forcefully as we might wish. Nor should we assume that every one of the assumptions and arguments that grounds modernist discourses is beyond question.

A respectable modernist interpretation of Buddhism should critically assess modernist discourses, particularly scientific ones, whilst also critically engaging with the Buddhist philosophical framework aimed at justifying and making sense of traditional cosmological ideas such as rebirth. Such interpretations should neither assume a triumphalist position, according to which modern intellectual culture has superseded all possible alternative philosophies, nor sink into a disengaged scepticism regarding the kind of metaphysical questions that Buddhist philosophy has attempted to answer.

Interpreters of Buddhism should certainly resist the tendency, evident in the work of Batchelor and others, simply to tell a story about the Buddha or Buddhism, which reinforces certain philosophical assumptions without actually engaging critically with them. By conceiving of the Buddha as a modernist with no interest in anything metaphysical or cosmological, Batchelor and secular modernist interpreters who take a similar approach are able to avoid engaging with the metaphysical arguments that exist for and against rebirth. This involves appealing to the authority of the Buddha, a weak argumentative approach given that our only knowledge of what the Buddha taught comes from sources that suggest he taught extensively about rebirth.

Insofar as revisionist interpreters present the Buddha as an anti-metaphysical sceptic who completely rejected the cosmology of his time, they must likewise advocate a sharp dividing line between the Buddha and those who compiled and transmitted the earliest scriptures. But it is only through the earliest followers of the Buddha that we have any impression of what he taught. Buddhist scholarship suggests that even the earliest Buddhist scriptures were very unlikely to have been transmitted verbatim as fixed texts from the Buddha’s own mouth. This is why, as Rupert Gethin points out, ‘the task of identifying sharp fault lines between what the Buddha taught and what his early followers tell us he taught is far from straightforward.’ The scriptures suggesting that the Buddha’s teachings offered a cosmological framework that included rebirth are from more or less the same sources as those scriptures that suggest that the Buddha taught anything.

We have little reason to take the claim that the Buddha taught about rebirth and a cosmology influenced by karmic actions any less seriously than claims that he offered teachings on the path to liberation from suffering. This is why relying on the Buddha’s support to establish a fault line within Buddhist teachings between “serious practice” and “metaphysical nonsense” is such a flawed approach. As Gethin warns, ‘The danger is that we begin to see the fault lines where we want to see them.’ Here it is interesting to consider the words of E.P. Sanders, who wrote about the many attempts to discover the historical Jesus: ‘People want to agree with Jesus, and this often means that they see him as agreeing with themselves.’ As Gethin points out, the same could be said of the historical Buddha.

Rather than invoking their own vision of the historical Buddha, those who wish to partition Buddhist teachings in this way should come up with independent reasons for rejecting its cosmological aspects. Some Buddhist modernisers might, for example, be justified in making such a partition in virtue of their audience. If the audience of Buddhist teachings doesn’t want to hear about karma or rebirth, if they cannot connect with such teachings, this may be a reason to leave out certain cosmological aspects. This is one of the reasons why those attempting to introduce Buddhist practices to non-Buddhist audiences tend to de-emphasise and perhaps even re-interpret traditional Buddhist beliefs that may get in the way of people benefitting from Buddhist practices. Practices such as mindfulness are often presented in this “agnostic” manner, being aimed chiefly at wellbeing in this life without reference to traditional Buddhist doctrines which make reference to an afterlife.

While this is clearly a noble motivation, some believe that this should be recognised simply as a pragmatic way of helping others and not a rejection of foundational Buddhist ideas. That there are good reasons for taking a pragmatic approach to teaching newcomers about Buddhist practices does not automatically justify taking the same approach to Buddhist teaching and practice as a whole. When teaching a student how to practice, it makes good sense to distil over two-thousand years of Buddhist theory into just those aspects that are relevant to the student’s situation. But this does not make sense when presenting the Buddha’s teachings, as we understand them, to an audience who wish to know what Siddhārtha Gautama taught. If the audience wants to understand such teachings, on what basis can we justify leaving out foundational features that have been central to over two-thousand year of Buddhist theory? It would be a disservice to the audience to present them with only those features of Buddhism that fit with contemporary intellectual attitudes. It would be downright dishonest to present them with only those features that fit with our own attitudes or to misrepresent certain features as less significant because we do not take them seriously. Those interpreters of Buddhism who have philosophical reasons for not taking Buddhist cosmology seriously should be up front about those reasons, presenting and defending them. They should not merely tell a story that fails to engage with the philosophical questions that philosophers, Buddhist and western alike, have long been interested in. Such questions regard the ultimate nature of consciousness and its place in reality, as well as the meaning of life amidst the problems of suffering and death. The same philosophical approaches that touch on these subjects are applicable to the question of whether rebirth is a plausible afterlife possibility. In order to appropriately assess whether the rebirth aspect of Buddhism is mere cultural baggage, one must first engage with these philosophical issues.

Overall, in giving traditional Buddhist beliefs a fair hearing, we should navigate between what might be seen by modernists as an overly credulous faith in Buddhist institutions and what might be seen by traditional Buddhists as an ignorance of modern philosophical weaknesses and of Buddhism’s intellectual resources. These resources include arguments that can be engaged with in their own right. Nevertheless, in engaging with these arguments, we must accept that we will be to some extent de-traditionalising them. It makes sense to approach arguments for foundational Buddhist beliefs such as rebirth from a position of scepticism even though adopting this position means we will miss out on some of the factors that have traditionally supported such beliefs. Neither the compassion nor wisdom of those advocating such beliefs nor any psychological benefits of adopting them can be considered. The plausibility of Buddhist cosmology and rebirth in particular will stand or fall on the strength of arguments for them rather than on appeals to traditional sources such as doctrine, scripture or institutional authority. However, it remains the case that the traditional Buddhist belief in rebirth has been the subject of discussion and debate since Siddhārtha Gautama was teaching. Although we can find various Buddhist schools of thought there is a common heritage regarded as foundational to all Buddhist schools. This common heritage includes a basic philosophical approach to reality and to consciousness that has defined how Buddhists justify the ‘working hypothesis’ that death is followed by rebirth. I wish to bring attention to this basic philosophical approach as a means to bring it into the discussion regarding the modernisation and secularisation of Buddhist practice.

1.4 Mindful Life or Mindful Lives? An Overview

As we have seen, the adoption of mindfulness into clinical and secular self-help contexts has been aided by attempts to modernise Buddhism, which have marginalised and in places psychologised the role of traditional Buddhist cosmology. This marginalisation of Buddhist cosmology is rationalised as an attempt to align with the attitudes of a modern, broadly secular, audience. But such rationalisation only amounts to justification if a modern audience has no reason to take Buddhist cosmology seriously. If a case can be made for the plausibility of rebirth as an afterlife possibility, modern audiences have a reason to take it seriously as well as the de-psychologised cosmology that springs from it.

This is why the debate as to whether ‘secular modern techniques of mindfulness free mindfulness from the burden of its outmoded Buddhist cultural baggage or deprive it of the essential humanising vision that should be at its core’ turns on the question of whether a secular mindfulness practitioner can be given good reasons to take the Buddhist belief in rebirth seriously. The debate would, therefore, benefit from an investigation into the traditional Buddhist philosophical system to see if it can be used to offer reasons for a non-Buddhist to believe in rebirth, specifically when this system is approached using relevant concepts used in modern western philosophy. The aim of this project is to attempt such an investigation.

This investigation will involve engagement with traditional Buddhist philosophical systems but will also attempt to ensure that the key principles and ideas of these systems are accessible to non-Buddhists. Where it helps, I will relate Buddhist philosophical ideas to relevant ideas within contemporary Anglophone philosophy, often referred to as western philosophy, which includes analytic and continental philosophical traditions. Overall, I will attempt to be sympathetic to the traditional Buddhist multi-life perspective, seeking reasons for its plausibility. Where existing arguments struggle or fail I will highlight this and attempt alternatives that might be compatible with Buddhist philosophical principles. In this respect I will be acting as something of the consultant for traditional Buddhists who wish to present their cosmology as plausible.

In the next chapter I will explore the historical Buddhist arguments for rebirth and identify the key philosophical principles that support them. I will argue that, despite the historical debates that took place between the adherents of different early Buddhist philosophical Abhidharma systems, three basic principles can be found that seem to be used within the earliest known argument for rebirth made by Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti. In the third chapter I will survey some of the works of scholarship that have evaluated Buddhist ideas and the arguments and assumption behind them. What should emerge is something of an overview of how the Buddhist multi-life hypothesis has been approached in philosophical works that have sought justification for key Buddhist ideas. While an increased interest in Buddhist philosophy has not been accompanied by a deeper engagement with Buddhist claims about the afterlife, this is despite the fact that views regarding the potential for phenomenal consciousness to persist beyond death rest upon increasingly contested assumptions about the nature of consciousness.

Chapter Four will explore how consciousness is understood within both western and Buddhist philosophy. These approaches to consciousness will be explored with particular regard to Dharmakīrti’s argument for rebirth. This argument relies on two key premises: (1) Consciousness is distinct from other non-conscious phenomena, particularly physical phenomena. (2) An instance of consciousness must be preceded by a cause with the same intrinsic nature. I will then examine Evan Thompson’s treatment of Dharmakīrti’s argument for rebirth in Waking, Dreaming, Being in order to show what needs to be established in order for it to be successful. This will involve showing why empirical methods requiring objective evidence fail to support claims about the nature of consciousness and its capacity to survive death. What are required are metaphysical arguments about the nature of consciousness and what can or cannot bring it into existence. Chapter Five will then show how, within contemporary philosophy of mind, the kind of metaphysical argumentation used by Dharmakīrti can be found in arguments to support panpsychism. In his argument for panpsychism, Galen Strawson denies that the physical processes of the body and brain are devoid of consciousness by defending what is essentially the second premise of

Dharmakīrti’s argument for rebirth. According to panpsychism, consciousness cannot emerge from intrinsically unconscious phenomena but it can arise from purely physical factors as long as these factors are intrinsically conscious. I will argue that Strawson’s argument is persuasive and provides support for the second premise of Dharmakīrti’s argument for rebirth.

In Chapter Six, I will address Evan Thompson’s alternative to panpsychism in which phenomenal consciousness emerges from mere potential for consciousness. The chapter will present reasons for rejecting Thompsons view. It will then go on to address the fact that Galen Strawson’s constitutive version of panpsychism presents a threat to Dharmakīrti’s argument for rebirth. In particular, the view that a single stream of conscious experience survives death and continues into future lives is not compatible with constitutive panpsychism. Arguments against constitutive panpsychism will be presented in order to show that the singular conscious subject of our current experience cannot be produced from multiple conscious subjects.

Chapter Seven will then explore reasons for believing that the core conditions for conscious experience can only ever arise as a single “cluster”. These core conditions will be shown to consist of an individual instance of phenomenally conscious apprehension, anticipation, retention, and immediate recollection of objects embedded within a temporal structure. It will be argued that every instance of phenomenally conscious experience requires these factors and that the separation of any one of them from the others not only makes phenomenal consciousness impossible but also makes every remaining factor incapable of accounting for the particular characteristics found in conscious experience. In this case, the division of a consciousness cluster would preclude any possibility of that phenomenal consciousness ever existing. This is why we must assume that, for every instance of phenomenal consciousness, there is a cluster of factors that have never, in the history of reality, arisen in isolation from one another. This justifies believing that any instance of conscious experience involves an indivisible consciousness cluster and that this instance is part of an unbroken stream of such instances. Such a stream would continue even through physical death.

Chapter Eight will address some of the questions that remain once we have reasons to believe that our stream of phenomenal consciousness can continue after bodily death. The first part of the chapter will address the neuroscientific evidence suggesting that our psychological traits are dependent upon particular brain functions. This evidence poses a problem for traditional Buddhist claims that wholesome mind states can be developed across multiple lives. To address this problem, I will argue that the capacity for retaining passing experience, which is inseparable from consciousness, results in the experiential history of a stream of consciousness becoming embedded within its structure. This embedded experiential history influences the precise quality of presently occurring conscious experiences. Examples will then be offered to suggest ways in which the impact of mind training practices in one life could influence the character of psychological factors occurring in later lives.

The second part of the chapter will address the question of how a conscious event, with its embedded history, interacts with physical events. In particular it will suggest ways in which we might try to understand the relationship between the physical processes and the illuminating, retaining, and temporal structuring processes of consciousness. At this point the question of mental causation will be addressed and it will be argued that physical events must be, by their very nature, responsive to conscious events. From here the chapter will touch upon the question of what might happen within the stream of conscious events after bodily death and why this suggests that streams of consciousness can be reborn in newly developing bodies.

This investigation will conclude that we have good reasons to take seriously the view that an instance of conscious experience is preceded by a prior instance of conscious experience and that this stream of instances is unbroken. Taking such a view, physical birth cannot be considered the point at which conscious experience emerges from non-conscious factors nor can bodily death be the point at which the stream of consciousness transforms into completely different non-conscious factors. Some concluding thoughts will then be offered regarding post-mortem consciousness, further possibilities for exploration, and the significance of this argument for non-Buddhist practitioners of mindfulness.

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