How did you come to terms with the idea of reincarnation along with the idea that one goes to nibbana after death being a reality only if you're enlightened?
I don't quite understand.
I think the grammar is not quite correct there.
Okay, so there's the idea that reincarnation and the idea that one goes to nibbana after death
are only realizable if you're enlightened, like you can only know these things if you're enlightened.
So Nibbana is only something you can know if you're enlightened.
As a monk, I think that's what he's saying here, he or she, he.
As a monk, did you just decide to accept Nibbana and reincarnation without any evidence?
Evidence.
Well, there's lots of evidence for reincarnation or rebirth, first of all.
But...
I can't talk about myself and where I am at, whether I'm this or that, but there are different levels.
Even someone who hasn't seen Nibbāna can have great faith, but it still has to be faith, but they can have great faith based on the people that they look up to.
So, for example, my teacher,
It's the kind of thing where many people have lots of faith in him, even though they haven't become enlightened, they haven't seen Nibbana for themselves.
And that's simply because he's unlike anybody else.
He's got something that other people don't have, and people can feel it.
Usually it's hard, if they haven't practiced meditation, it's hard for them to see it.
but they get the idea that something's there and they know that that an ordinary person is not like this it's not as kind as generous as pure as unflappable as constant and steady and
imperturbable as this.
And so there's great faith there.
People who read the Buddha's teachings, simply reading the Tipitaka, gives you an incredible sense of awe and inspiration and confidence in whoever it was who taught these things.
Obviously, much more so if you've actually practiced and realized them for yourselves.
But even without having done that, people become amazed when they see just how profound.
I mean, this isn't like, the Buddhist teaching is nothing like the Bible, for example.
It's nothing like the Christian Bible, nothing like it.
They have very little in common, these two books, for example.
Or take the Koran, very unsimilar.
I guess you'd have a better time comparing them to the Upanishads, for example.
And they are in some ways similar to the Upanishads.
But even the Upanishads, there is something different with Buddhism.
It's much more, what we would say, much sharper, much more mundane even, in the sense of simply dealing with the building blocks of reality.
It doesn't have anything superfluous, it's not flowery, it's not designed to enchant you, it's designed to wake you up.
And so by reading this, many people get faith.
And I think that really just answers your question, because we accept reincarnation with lots of evidence, but we also accept... Sorry, but that's about Nibbāna.
I can say something else about reincarnation.
But we accept Nibbāna on these grounds.
We accept that even though individually we may not have become enlightened, we accept that there's something special about this path.
And so that leads us on.
Now, ideally that leads us on until we practice and once we practice then we see Nibbana for ourselves.
And so it's kind of like when you're walking through the forest and someone comes along who seems to know where they're going and you watch them and you see that they know they can point out things and they know how to avoid beasts and how to avoid pitfalls.
So you say, wow, this person really knows this forest.
Probably they're someone who could take me out of it.
So, you trust them.
And it doesn't mean you have blind faith in them and say, okay, well, I'm just going to sit here because I'm happy now.
I've found someone who knows this forest and can find the way out, so now I can rest in peace.
Obviously, they don't do that.
I mean, that's sort of the picture that you're painting, or many people paint with still blind faith and so on.
Well, that's blind faith.
It's just sitting around and saying, well, he'll save us.
I'll just sit here until he gets me out of here.
But that's not what you do.
A person who believes in this person, they follow them or they follow the path that this person points out and find the way out for themselves.
They're hedging their bets because this person seems to be... It's like that with anyone.
When you choose a teacher, you can only go by seems to be.
Until you know the person very, very well, you just go by what you can see and what you believe and it can be wrong.
But that's where we get the faith in there.
But reincarnation, rebirth is actually different because on the first hand, on the first
In the first place, there is much evidence, not proof, but evidence.
Remember, there's a difference.
There's lots of evidence.
There's no proof unless you remember a past life.
But even then, you're not really proving anything, because of course it can just be a fake memory.
But the evidence of people pointing things out about their past lives, telling, oh, this was mine, and I know that, and I know this person,
calling people by their names and things that they could never know.
There's cases of that, you know, anecdotal cases still, but clinical cases.
So there's lots of well-documented cases.
And second of all, reincarnation is something that comes, you know, I've talked about this before, it's death that requires faith.
And so we can actually turn the tables on people who say this sort of thing and say, well, what we know
is cause and effect.
We know that our experience now and how we react to it and interact with it affects the experience in the future.
We know that that's the case.
So extrapolating that ahead into the future is not a leap of faith.
It's the most obvious, it's the most parsimonious
conclusion.
I got in a real heated argument with the materialists about this.
He ridiculed me and thought, you know, obviously they would ridicule this and say how ridiculous it is, but only if you've already taken for granted that the material world is all there is, if you've already accepted on faith, or not even on faith I suppose, just
But it is kind of, there is a jump there, that this around us is real, that there is something, there are atoms and subatomic particles that actually somehow exist outside of experience.
If you take that, and that is a leap of faith, compared to the Buddhist concept of simply believing in what is experience, but like seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking,
This you can believe in because it's there.
No matter what it is that I'm seeing, you can't deny that there is the experience that is somehow best labeled as seeing.
It's a name and it's an experience.
You can't deny that there's some experience there.
That's the most undeniable thing.
Now, whether we're in the matrix, hooked up to a machine, or a brain in a vat, or whether we're actually in a three-dimensional reality, I'm actually in this room,
that is something that you can't answer, or it's less easy to answer and it's more of a leap of faith.
So materialism do that, and this is what's required to have this idea that when the physical body dies,
because the visible body exists and because it's the cause of the mind, two things which you haven't proved, therefore death equals the end of existence.
So you've actually taken leaps of faith there.
Now reincarnation doesn't require that.
Reincarnation says what we experience now just continues, which is in every case the most parsimonious answer.
So based on Occam's razor,
The law that if it's more complicated without any need, you cut it off in favor of a more parsimonious conclusion.
So the most parsimonious is that what we experience now continues.
and that's that there is no death and so therefore the idea of rebirth well how that works that's more theory and it's and that's really speculation so the idea that the mind you know creates a new body and there's a new new being that we don't have proof of but
It is still in line with the most parsimonious because it's what we observe.
So we have to put these two things together.
What we observe in experiential level and what we see in others.
Oh, that being was born there, seeming out of nothing.
Then we have the idea that they were reborn.
And that is just theory.
Point being that once we meditate, even if we haven't become enlightened, and reincarnation actually isn't proven when someone becomes a Sotapanna or when becomes an Arahant even.
You don't prove it there.
but you understand it and you realize why it's so reasonable once you start to meditate because you see how how the mind works and how reality works how reality really isn't based on the material world it's based on experience once you see that once you break through that and are able to just just let go of all these views and ideas and beliefs and concepts and just see things as their experience your whole paradigm shifts
And the idea of rebirth is just the most reasonable, it's just the most obvious answer.