Thoughts on Nine

On the surface, this chapter is about reincarnation and its undesirability. It has been pointed out by Steve Hagen that reincarnation cannot be real because our own selves do not persist intact from moment to moment, so in what sense could they persist after death? Even if we were reborn, we wouldn't be the same person, and so we wouldn't really have been reborn. However, just as we believe that we have a self that persists from moment to moment, some people believe---particularly the people of ancient India---that there is a self that persists across lifetimes. A revolutionary aspect of Buddha's teaching is that we should not desire to be reborn, and in fact, in some sense the goal of Buddhist practice is not to be reborn---this is Nirvana.

In this chapter, Buddha goes beyond this. His promptings of Subhuti indicate that although we wish to seek enlightenment and Nirvana, if we actually grasp at these goals, we will not attain them. Part of the state of enlightenment is not to grasp at it, entertaining the illusion of a sense of self.

The various stages that Buddha asks about "entering the river, returning once more, returning no more, freedom from rebirth (nirvana, enlightenment)" seem to me to represent stages in one's progress. First you embark on the journey, entering the stream. When you "return once more," you have progressed quite a bit, but you still do not live totally in the moment, and you still have some concept of self. "Returning no more," you have progressed still further, and finally when you are "free from rebirth," you have achieved the ultimate goal of selflessness and freedom. But it is not the ultimate goal, because if we try to achieve the goal we will not achieve it. Thus it is called 'the ultimate goal.' the image that occurs to me is that during meditation, we release some of the junk surrounding our mind, letting it drop into the river a bit and letting the river carry it along.

I heard on NPR that studies of meditating Buddhist monks have found unusual brain activity. Clearly meditation has some effect. The question is, do we have the faith to relinquish control and let the river take over?