Agnostic Buddhism without Karma or Rebirth

January 2010 After reading Buddhism Without Beliefs  by Stephen Batchelor, as well as critiques by Sangharakshita and Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, it strikes me that Batchelor's understanding of Buddhism corresponds roughly to what I privately worked out for myself many years ago when I first read about Buddhism and the Four Noble Truths.  I grew up in a protestant Christian family in Texas.  In my early teens I became aware of an apparent conflict between the religious cosmology of Biblical times and modern scientific cosmology.  For example it bothered me that dinosaurs were not mentioned in the Bible.  Then one day in my bedroom while reading about the gentle pantheism of Spinoza, the thought surfaced, "Would God be angry with me if I stopped believing in Him?"  I was silently asking for permission to disbelieve. Suddenly I realized that my belief had vanished.  I felt light headed.  I put my book down and went out for a walk.  Somewhat later, on coming across a history of the Buddha and Buddhism, I embraced it for three reasons: the dramatic personal example of renunciation by Siddhartha and his subsequent heroic struggle for enlightenment, the compelling logic of the Four Noble Truths, and the absence of a requirement to believe in God.  The Buddhist literature available in my community in those days (circa 1956) was nothing like the wealth of information available now on Internet.  For many years I did not know that the Buddha believed in rebirth, karma and divine beings.  I only understood that he did not believe in the reality of a personal self. In my twenties, I practiced yoga a few years with Swami Satchidananda at the Integral Yoga Institute in New York City, then moved on to a working career as an electrical engineer.  On retiring early at age 50 I returned to my early interest in Buddhism. At age 53 I took the three refuges and the eight precepts at  a Theravada monastery, Wat Metta, surrounded by avocado orchards near Escondido, California.  Only then did I began to read the Suttas and delve into Buddhist teachings.  However, since my early practice never required anything more than a grasp of the essential core teachings of the Four Noble Truths, which were enough to give meaning to my life, I never saw a need to embrace the additional beliefs in karma and rebirth.  Believing in them would not have changed my practice significantly.  Moral conduct, for example, does not really need to be reinforced by a karmic fear of hell or a desire to accumulate merit for a favorable rebirth.  It can be sufficiently motivated by an understanding of the suffering resulting here and now from mental states of lust, aversion and ignorance, and from unwholesome actions such as harming others, taking what is not given, acting unchastefully, speaking falsely or drowning in intoxicants. The universe is vast; much of it is unseen and unknown.  Recent astronomical discoveries about the accelerating expansion of the universe require a quantity of "dark energy" in addition to the "dark matter" required to explain the rapid rotation of galaxies.  Adding up total mass due to the sum of dark matter and the equivalent mass of dark energy results in a figure of only 5% of the universe visible, 95% invisible.  This scientific admission of 95% ignorance gets worse.  Science has not explained what is consciousness, a gorilla in the scientific living room.  Furthermore, ordinary perception can be distorted by drugs which raises doubt about the reality and depth of normal experience.  Altered states of consciousness reveal severe limits to ordinary perception. Therefore my own experience strongly suggests that my concepts of the universe are not complete. This includes the culturally conditioned materialistic view that consciousness must depend on a physical body.  The Buddha rejected both extremes of eternalism and nihilism (materialism).  Beyond the limits of my knowledge, for all I know multiple levels of heavens may be occupied by hierarchies of deities.  Divine laws of karma and rebirth might operate across multiple lives and worlds as far reaching and fine grained as the law of gravity.  The heavenly abodes might be located in the invisible regions of the universe.  The Buddha once instructed some villagers who were confused about deciding which doctrines to believe, that in the absence of certainty, a belief should be adopted if it has wholesome results (see MN 60: The Incontrovertible Teaching).  Therefore if believing in the concepts of karma and rebirth would benefit my life and practice, I would soften my stance into provisional acceptance, but the need for this has not been strongly felt. As mentioned above, for most of my life I did not enjoy contact with other living Buddhists.  Even now my life continues solitary with few Buddhist friends or daily contact.  Therefore the issues raised by Batchelor and Sangharakshita and Ven. Bodhi about the future of Buddhism as a social institution or community lie outside my field of view.  The way in which Western Buddhism may evolve does not concern  me personally.  Before his passing, even the Buddha himself expressed equanimity concerning the future of the Order.  He told Ananda that if anyone was concerned about leading the Sangha, then that person should give out the instructions.   Even so, regarding the Sangha community, I do wonder if my practice would have been reinforced by more contact with other Buddhists. I think Batchelor should emphasize the importance of moral conduct more strongly (i.e. the five precepts). In my experience, meditation practice will not obtain relief from suffering without a firm basis in moral conduct to quiet the agitation of emotions and the mind.  The conventional "religious" Buddhist communities firmly support rules of behavior such as the five precepts.  Good conduct begins with physical and verbal restraint and should progress to mental restraint such as abandoning lustful thinking.  European existentialism or merely intellectual agnostic Buddhism may fail to emphasize the importance of morality before wisdom.   In my case I did not make any progress until I finally began understanding this. Among the three Refuges, the practice of agnostic Buddhism in my life has depended mainly on the Dhamma teachings and the personal example of the Buddha, more than contact with an absent Sangha community, especially a traditional community devoutly believing in karma and rebirth which were not part of my heritage.  The historic absence of Sangha in my life has conditioned my practice along the dry lines of agnostic Buddhism.  It may be enough to understand the Four Noble Truths but it has not been easy.  I think of Rahula who was guided at every step by his father.  He was nicknamed "Lucky" by his many friends because of his fortunate birth as the Buddha's own son. Update October 2010 WSU Terrell Library, Pullman, Washington State.  I have come across a very interesting book in the archives of this library: Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, 2nd edition 1974, by Ian Stevenson MD, University of Virginia.  It is the first time I have ever actually read details of verified reincarnations.  Until now I had assumed reports to be based mainly on hearsay, or in the Buddhist literature, on the assertions of the Buddha who remembered his former lives on the night of his enlightenment.  The cases are reported in this book in great detail (7 in India, 3 in Ceylon, 2 in Brazil, 7 in Alaska among the Tlingit Indians, and 1 in Lebanon).  All of them were verified personally by the author before or after the young child was brought to his or her former family and correctly identified many relatives and objects which he or she had no way of knowing.  In some cases, especially among the Tlingit Indians, certain birthmarks also suggested reincarnation.   Stevenson goes to great length to discuss and exclude four alternative explanations: fraud, cryptomnesia (former knowledge forgotten then remembered as if new), extrasensory perception with personal identification, and possession by a spirit.  The topic is one I never paid much attention to because of apparent incompatibility with my scientific background and my skeptical outlook in general.  I have never understood the mechanism by which a personality may continue in a subsequent birth if there is no permanent self, and what could be the medium where former memories are stored.  The Buddha described the rebirth cycle by an interlocking process of twelve steps called dependent origination.  He compared it to the transfer of one candle flame to another.  To explain phenomena which have no obvious explanation, such as these verified cases of remembered former lives, it may be necessary to postulate invisible subtle bodies which support consciousness (since Buddhists deny that consciousness can exist independently of any body, which is the eternalist belief in a permanent soul).  After all, if physicists can postulate that "dark" matter must exist, then why not "light" matter as well?  Divine beings are supposed to have bodies of light.  If humans can not perceive deva bodies, then maybe the devas in the lower heavens can not perceive the devas in the heavens above them.  My resistance to investigating the subject is an example of a natural tendency to ignore data which does not conform to a particular world view, until enough evidence accumulates to require a better explanation. Now, however, I am coming around to accept the possibility of reincarnation, or as Buddhists prefer to call it, rebirth (the difference being in the belief in a self).  In my own case, I sometimes wonder whether a certain large hairy birthmark extending across my right shoulder may suggest a former life as a Theravada Buddhist monk.  The monks in tropical climates wear light cotton robes exposing the right shoulder to view.  One reason I may not have chosen to become a monk in this life, in spite of lifelong interest, could have been reluctance to expose that blemished shoulder to public view.  Supposing that in fact I happened to be a Theravada Buddhist monk in a former life, then I wonder if this unattractive birthmark signals a karmic consequence following on some moral failure, or whether it might have served as a spiritual thorn to inhibit the normal pursuit of sensual pleasures leading to marriage.   My disgust with this physical body was increased further by internal injuries sustained in a nearly fatal motorcycle crash at age 21, even though I managed to recover the use of my broken legs and later walked on them twice from Mexico to Canada. On the whole, my life has been healthy and prosperous.  Anyone who is reborn as a human being has by definition obtained a favorable destination as a reward for at least some meritorious conduct, but that is not a reason to be complacent or smug.  It is a reason to see some good in everyone.  The idea of rebirth is, in a way, a consolation which gives me hope for a favorable rebirth to continue my spiritual quest, so that lessons learned in this life will not be totally lost. References Wikipedia biography of Stephen Batchelor Batchelor's web site A Canadian thesis about Batchelor's agnostic Buddhism Sangharakshita's essay Bhikkhu Bodhi's critique   Bhikkhu Punnadhammo's critique   Home Page (jwleaf.org)