Demythologizing Early Buddhist Afterlife Beliefs
Other essays on early Buddhism have not dealt with teachings in the suttas having to do with Buddhist afterlife beliefs. This is because, as I argue: (1) no views about an afterlife can be shown to have a rational foundation when taken literally, but (2) neither is it true that Buddhist beliefs about an afterlife are essential to give Buddhist transformational practice, or claims made about its goals, a sound rational foundation. These are reasons why such beliefs are inessential to the present attempt at a “critical reconstruction” of early Buddhist teachings on a purely rational basis.
Still, some beliefs about the afterlife are important to the early Buddhist “worldview,” and so I think these should not be ignored. This kind of problem is not unique to Buddhism, but is met with by anyone trying to apply modern standards of critical reasoning to afterlife beliefs common to many other religions.
Buddhist afterlife beliefs.
To start with the relevant Buddhist beliefs themselves, Gananath Obeyesekere (in O’Flaherty, p. 139) gives the following succinct description of these beliefs, which he says Buddhism has in common with Jainism and also later Hinduism. These are the basic elements:
A theory of rebirth that postulates a cyclical theory of continuity, so that death is merely a temporary state in a continuing process of births and rebirths.
A theory of kamma that postulates that one’s present existence is determined for the most part by the ethical nature of one’s past actions.
A theory of the nature of existence known as samsara, which includes all living things in the cycle of endless continuity.
A theory of salvation (nirvana), the salient characteristic of which is the view that salvation must involve the cessation of rebirth, and must therefore occur outside of the whole cycle of continuity, or samsara. (See O’Flaherty Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, p. 139)
For present purposes it is important to realize that although on the surface most Buddhists in all life-circumstances appear to share these same beliefs, pragmatically speaking reincarnation plays a role in the worldview of those Buddhists (mostly monks and nuns) actively striving for Nibbana, entirely different from the role it plays in the life of the average Buddhist layperson. For the Buddhist layperson, beliefs in kamma and reincarnation support attempts to live a morally upright life, by promising rewards and punishments at some future time, perhaps in some future life, based on good or bad behavior in the present life.
But for Buddhist monks and nuns actively striving for Nibbana, reincarnation is a curse, and “liberation” is partly conceived as a liberation from this curse. It is a curse because every “world” into which one might be reincarnated is a world in which all conditions are affected by universal, dukkha-causing Impermanence; thus being reborn into another world, or an endless series of worlds, just signifies lack of final liberation from the Distress one will inevitably suffer in any world. Thus Nibbana is nothing like a traditional Christian “heaven” where one is rewarded by enjoying a more blissful existence. Nibbana is escape from all worlds.
In this chapter I want to offer an account of the structure of Buddhist afterlife beliefs, which I would advocate applying to many religious beliefs in other traditions as well. I want to contrast this account with what I think has become the dominant kinds of accounts prevalent today. As I will explain in an appendix, the account I will give develops and provides a more rational foundation, for some basic ideas about “mythological” thinking developed by a 20th century German biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann, as an approach to what he described as “mythological” elements in early Christian teachings.
“God-Given Rights: A Modern Example of “Mythological” Thinking.
For reasons which will become clear later, I want to begin my discussion by reflecting on what I think is one of the few modern survivals of the kind of “mythological” thinking involved here. This is the idea of “God-given” rights, given classic expression in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, this is the idea that “All men are endowed by their creator” with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The main question I want to focus on concerns the structure of this particular set of beliefs. By “structure” I mean “What is based on what?” One might at first suppose that what is most basic here is a belief in an apparent objective fact: At some point, a supernatural being “God,” decided to give people those particular rights that Americans consider “God given” rights. One might suppose then that this fact serves as the basis for conclusions drawn from this belief, that is, that these rights are sacred and untouchable; government did not give people these rights, neither were they given as a result of majority vote. The practical conclusion that follows from the fact that these rights are “God-given” is that no government, and no group of voters, can deprive people of their God-given rights.
But this raises questions. If these ideas have their ultimate basis in some objective facts about God’s decision to give people certain rights, what is the basis of the basis? What basis did Thomas Jefferson have for his apparent assertion in the Declaration of Independence of an alleged objective fact that God decided to give people rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? More importantly, on what basis did Jefferson’s contemporary countrymen find this assertion convincing? And what is the basis on which large numbers of modern Americans still find this assertion convincing, and something to be held onto so dearly? Nothing in the Christian bible mentions God giving people these particular rights. Jefferson certainly claimed no divine revelation as the basis. His claim that God gave people these rights is “self evident” is completely unconvincing from a purely rational and philosophical point of view.
So, if literal belief in an alleged objective fact that God gave people particular rights is a “basis” for American’s belief that these rights are sacred, this appears to be a basis without a basis. The belief seems to appear from nowhere. In this respect, literal belief that God gave people particular rights resembles religious “faith” as commonly understood. Religious believers have certain beliefs from which they draw many conclusions about how to live their lives. But, in a very common view held by many today, “faith” itself has no rationally explainable basis. Religious beliefs–including Buddhist afterlife beliefs described above–also form for believers a “basis without a basis.” Religious believers simply believe what they believe, and no further reasons can be given.
I think this view of faith is implausible. Large numbers of people do not become strongly committed to particular sets of beliefs for no reason whatsoever. This I think is true of belief in God-given rights, of early Buddhist beliefs about kamma and reincarnation, and about Nibbana as escape from reincarnation.
So now to continue pursuing the hopefully illuminating case of modern beliefs in “God given rights,” I want to argue a reversal of the kind of explanation described above. It is implausible that large numbers of individuals, for unknown reasons, come to believe that God gave people certain rights, and on this basis draw the conclusion that these rights are sacred and untouchable. Rather, from a strictly logical and philosophical point of view, it is the reverse: For complex reasons having to do with particular American historical and cultural experience, large numbers of Americans perceive certain rights to be basic and essential to their American way of life, more basic and essential than the structure and processes responsible for establishing government agencies and the administrative decisions of these agencies. Because they are perceived to be so basic and essential, they are also felt to be untouchable. This is what renders it appropriate to use the religious concept “sacred” to describe the place that these rights have in the minds of many people.
My conclusion: It may well be true that, if you ask many Americans whether they believe it is a literal fact that God gave them certain rights, they would say they do; and it may be true that these same people would say that this belief is the basis for their for their regarding these rights as sacred and untouchable. Nevertheless, I argue that this belief is a basis only on a psychological level of conscious thinking. On a deeper level, in most cases the dependency is reversed: The human perception that certain rights are sacred and untouchable is a basis making it feel appropriate to attribute to them a divine origin as “God-given.”
Thus on this view the real function of the image picturing God giving people certain rights, is to give concrete clothing and representation to a (basically ethical) perception that those rights are sacred and untouchable. This close union between this perception and this particular image is evidenced in the fact that, once this image and its associations take hold, any denial that certain rights are “given by God” meets vigorous resistance, not because this contravenes known evidence, but because of its felt practical implications: it is felt as a denial that people have these rights. In other words, what might appear to be a practical conclusion “based on” the belief about God giving rights, is in a more ultimate sense really the basis for the belief itself. People’s real attachment is to the practical conclusion; they are attached to the belief only because in their minds the belief and the conclusion have become inseparable.
One corollary of the above argument concerns the possibility of subjecting belief in God-given rights to rational critique. That is, if the practical conclusion, that certain rights should be regarded as sacred and untouchable, is the real basis, this should be the focus of rational criticism. I emphasize the “should” here to emphasize that this is an ethical claim, so that the kind of “critical reasoning” appropriate here should also be a kind of reasoning appropriate to weigh ethical claims.
I will stop here with this very general argument, because specific reasons why people might be justified in regarding certain rights as sacred and untouchable seem quite complex and would require more space than is appropriate here.
My main point is that this is one example–one of the few examples surviving in the modern world–of the structure of a great deal of thinking that once came naturally to many people in premodern times. I want to now apply the general model, first to early Buddhist beliefs about kamma and reincarnation, then to beliefs about Nibbana as escape from reincarnation.
The Essay Understanding Mythologies in Religious Classics gives further discussions of how to understand mythologies in ancient religious classics, giving more examples from Plato, Hinduism, Daoism, and early Christianity.
The Structure of Buddhist belief about Kamma and Reincarnation.
The structure I will propose for Buddhist beliefs about kamma and reincarnation is not substantially different from beliefs in other religious traditions concerning afterlife rewards and punishments.
Again, it might at first seem that these beliefs constitute a basis for many people, a basis on which they regard it as important to follow rules of moral decency. For many, this is most likely true on the level of conscious thinking. But then we have again the problem: What is the basis for the basis? This leaves unexplained why people have such strong beliefs in afterlife rewards and punishments in the first place.
The discussion above, focused on the example of “God-given rights,” suggests what I think is also a plausible model for understanding specific beliefs about afterlife rewards and punishments very common among premodern peoples.
I think that in this case we have to begin here by considering a broader context, a problem that in monotheistic traditions is called the problem of “theodicy,” otherwise “the problem of evil.” The root of this problem is the observation of apparent frequent injustice in the world: Good people often suffer, and bad people often succeed. This gives rise to doubts: Does goodness really matter?
The theory I argue for here assumes that people know in their hearts that ethical goodness does matter, and in this they are correct. Most people perceive that goodness matters, and in that this perception constitutes valid “empirical evidence,” a basis for well-founded knowledge. (See further on this in Four Principles of Socratic Reasoning)
The problem is however, that, first, ethical goodness/badness is perceived to have a more ethereal existence. In particular, ethical goodness/badness is not in itself causally efficacious. If I try to lift a 500 pound boulder, the weight of the boulder operating in accord with the laws of physics has a causal power physically preventing me from lifting it. But nothing similar prevents me from acting against a moral prescription forbidding me to steal someone else’s car, or violating someone else’s rights. Neither is moral badness in itself causally efficacious, necessarily causing harm to come to me when I engage in morally bad behavior.
But secondly, human psychology makes most people very concrete-minded when it comes to assumptions of what is really real. The assumptions I refer to here consist in the tendency to regard the material objects and their causal powers that we see in the world around us, as the paradigm case of reality. Because of this, much human thinking is governed by an implicit background assumption that only concrete and causally efficacious entities are fully real.
This makes for a conflict in the thinking of many people. On the one hand, most people take seriously their perception that ethical goodness really matters. But this perception stands in some conflict with an implicit background assumption shaping a great deal of human thinking, namely the assumption that nothing is really real unless it shares the kind of reality and causally efficacious powers of material objects. There are instances in which people appear to be rewarded for their good behavior and punished for their bad behavior, and we tend to see some causal relation here. But there are too many cases where the opposite happens, bad behavior appears to be rewarded by success, and good people suffer.
This explains the function of images of afterlife rewards and punishments. Their function is to sustain perceptions that ethical goodness is real and does matter, by giving concrete clothing to goodness-perceptions, that is, by according to this goodness a causal power to bring about future rewards, in the face of frequent countervailing observations of a disconnect between real ethical goodness/badness, and concrete rewards/punishments on the other. (This causal power is actually more evident in Buddhism than in theistic religions, since in Buddhism it belongs to the idea of kamma that good actions have the power to generate “good kamma,” and kamma in turn has power in itself to bring about rewards–all this happens on its own, not through the actions of a personal divine being.)
Intellectually inclined individuals could of course take a more rational approach and maintain a belief that goodness matters, without the need to give concrete representation to this belief. This is the approach that I take in this book. But a kind of concrete mindedness inherent in human psychology makes this difficult for very many people. Thus for psychological (not logical or philosophical) reasons, many people find it difficult to maintain a commitment to true goodness in the face of injustice in the world, without also maintaining a worldview in which a life lived in the present world is enveloped in a more ultimate world or series of worlds beyond this world, where justice is always ultimately done. In the long run (possibly a very long run), goodness is always rewarded and badness is always punished.
I propose treating Buddhist beliefs in kamma and reincarnation in the same way I analyzed belief in God-given rights above. That is, it is probably true that, psychologically and on a conscious level, belief in kammic rewards and punishments serves as a basis sustaining people’s belief that moral goodness matters. But this again leaves unexplained the basis for this basis. To explain this, I propose again that, on a more ultimate level, what appears to be a conclusion (that goodness matters) is really the basis here.
That is, the function of belief in kammic rewards and punishments is that it resolves a dilemma: On the one hand, people perceive that moral goodness matters, and are motivated by this perception to want to maintain the conviction that goodness matters. On the other hand, human concrete-mindedness makes it hard to maintain the validity of this perception unless this perception is given some kind of concrete representation. The function of beliefs in kamma and reincarnation is to provide this perception with concrete representation. In this case, on an ultimate level, as in the case of God-given rights, what might appear to be a basis (beliefs in kamma and reincarnation) is not a basis at all, but is based on what might at first appear to be a practical conclusion, belief that goodness matters. Buddhist believers are strongly committed to belief in kamma and reincarnation because any denial of this belief is felt as a denial that goodness matters.
Nibbana as escape from reincarnation.
The above discussions had to do with the pragmatic significance that kamma and reincarnation had mainly in the life of “householder” Buddhists who in traditional times were assumed not to be actively striving for Nibbana. Now I want to turn to a different topic, the entirely different pragmatic significance of reincarnation-beliefs in an ideal set before a different social group, the original community of wandering samanas or in later times the community of Buddhist monks and nuns. Members of this community were not encouraged to do good deeds in hopes of gaining kammic rewards in this life or in a postmortem existence following reincarnation in another world. One probable implication of the Dependent Arising set-piece is that this desire for a better life after reincarnation is in fact pictured as a form of Craving and Clinging, and that it is this Craving and Clinging that will act as a kind of magnet bringing a person back to life in another world. This is accompanied then by the Buddhist view that all possible worlds into which a person might be reborn, will be a world in which all conditions are Impermanent and therefore dukkha-causing for anyone who might live in this world still in the grip of an underlying tendency to Craving and Clinging. Continuous reincarnations in an endless series of dukkha-filled worlds constitute samsara, literally a “wandering on” in which a person is doomed to wander on through a limitless series of dukkha-filled worlds, until final liberation is achieved.
The liberation which is Nibbana is is then not only liberation from Craving, Clinging, and dukkha in this life. The pragmatic function of this picture of Nibbana as liberation from endless samsara, is to give a more heroic and cosmic dimension to this liberation. As one sutta passage pictures it:
This samsara is without discoverable beginning. A first point is not discerned of beings roaming and wandering on hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving. What do you think, bikkhus, which is more, the stream of tears that you have shed as you roamed and wandered on through this long course, weeping and wailing because of being united with the disagreeable and separated from the agreeable–this, or the water in the four great oceans. (SN 15:[179]; Kindle 12116)
So my focus here is not on literal truth but on pragmatic significance. What is the pragmatic significance of the mythological imagery involved here, of endless samsara and of possible liberation from samsara? In one aspect, its significance lies in the fact that it pictures one’s present life-span as rather limited and minuscule, enveloped in an almost infinitely extended temporal context, an eons-long temporal stretch which is samsara. The conditions of my present life tend to appear to me as a context for seeing my life, for evaluating it as a “success” or a “failure.” But samsara is a temporal representation of a much more ultimate context in which to see my life, and to picture my purpose in this life, ideally determining the meaning of what happens in my life. It determines what ultimately, really and finally matters for me, which is to escape from all worlds.
Early Buddhism is unique among religious worldviews in picturing this ultimate context as completely negative in character. Other religious worldviews tend to picture an ultimate context which is a positive, meaning-giving framework, so that my life acquires ultimate meaning to the extent that I place myself in a positive relation to this ultimate meaning-giving framework.
But Buddhist samsara as an ultimate context determining the meaning of a person’s life, plays an entirely negative role. For true Buddhist samanas, samsara determines the meaning of their lives, only in the sense that that meaning can be pictured as progress toward the ideal of escape from samsara.
Samsara, and the ideal of escape from samsara, is thus a vital part of early Buddhist afterlife imagery. As such, it bears an easily recognizable close relation to other more psychologically oriented images and metaphors for Nibbana described in Metaphors for Nibbana in the Pali suttas.
Central to the metaphors treated there is also the idea of some kind of “escape” from the entire “world,” where “world” includes even the most subtle conditions and processes observable in one’s own internal mental/emotional world. This is illustrated also in the ideal of becoming a human subject who has no “dwelling place” in any aspect of the world-perceived (modeled on the ideal of the wandering “homeless” Buddhist samana). Another striking image relevant here is the image discussed in another essay of an ideal Buddhist whose existence has been so thoroughly severed from any connection to the perceivable world, that when even the all-seeing Gods look for her, they cannot find her. She no longer inhabits any world.
Escape from samsara as a cosmic image.
Seen in connection with these other images of the ultimate Buddhist ideal, we can see that the pragmatic function of the image of Nibbana as “escape from samsara” can be seen as an attempt to give the Nibbana-ideal a more ultimate “cosmic” dimension.
That is, seen and evaluated in the context of normal “worldly” social life and achievements, progress toward Nibbana as “escape from the world” might seem insignificant at best, having negative significance at worst.
The image of samsara, and of the ideal goal of heroic escape from samsara, serves to present a “more ultimate” context in which Nibbana can be seen as the ultimate and supreme Good in human life which Buddhists perceive it to be.
Of course here we encounter the same kind of problem I dealt with in the essay Nibbana as “Escape from the Mind”. “Escape from all worlds” is indeed a negative image, which must be given some kind of positive content before it can be understood as something that someone would perceive as the supreme Good in human life. In the present case, this same problem can be put in terms of the question: Why would any sensible person devote all their efforts to reach the goal of ceasing to exist?
There is indeed some evidence that some sutta authors felt this to be a problem, and reached about for some solution. One solution, for example, was to explicitly condemn the desire to cease existing as a form of Craving. This shows in some passages (e.g. DN 22:[308]; Kindle 5784) which define the Craving which Buddhists need to abandon, both as “Craving for existence” as well as “Craving for non-existence.” Another solution proposed in the suttas (e.g. MN 63:[426]; Kindle 9443) is to place among “undetermined questions,” the question whether or not an Enlightened Buddha continues to exist after death. This is probably also the point of a passage (MN 72.16-17; Kindle 10514) saying that both the statement “he is reborn” and “he is not reborn” “do not apply” as answers to the question whether an Enlightened Buddha enjoys a post-mortem existence or not.
In other words, sutta authors seem to want to stop at saying very clearly and emphatically that achieving Nibbana means escaping the endless round of rebirths that affect all other people. They resist going any further (1) to imagine an Enlightened person as simply ceasing to exist, or, if he does exist (2) to pose any ideas or images that would allow us to imagine exactly what kind of existence an Enlightened person would enjoy after entirely escaping existence in any world. The most they are willing to say is that such a one is “profound, immeasurable, hard to fathom like the ocean” (MN 72.17; Kindle 10514).
I think we should not minimize this very dramatic character of the image the suttas give us: Their extreme pessimism about normal human existence is extended to life in any world, temporally extended also to endless eons of continued reincarnations into endless dukkha-filled worlds until through heroic efforts one achieves salvation consisting in getting completely free of this curse. This freedom is so completely different from anything resembling normal human existence, that no image is possible representing this freedom. This is the early Buddhist picture of transcendence, what it means to “transcend the world.”
Escape from Samsara as an Image of the “Highest” State.
But I think we also have to keep in mind that Buddhists think of this as also an image representing the “highest” possible achievement. And unless we are to suppose that large numbers of samanas in ancient India were persuaded to buy into this idea on no basis whatsoever, I think we should assume that many had some taste of the exalted Goodness of Enlightened existence that made this extreme image of the highest Good seem entirely appropriate. I hope I have made some moves in this direction in remarks at the end of Chapter 1.3 of Volume One, relying on an essentially Platonic principle of “analogy.” Venturing into more extended speculation, I might suggest the following:
The focal center of the religious vision, both of early Buddhism and of contemporary Hinduism was the idea of a pure human subject, imagined as completely disconnected from the world, but imagined also as the ultimate source and basis of all meaning and Goodness. In the Hinduism of the Bhagavad Gita, this took the form of a divinized Atman, a higher “self,” which is in no way connected to the world and does not act in the world, associated with meditative bliss and imagined as identical with the Supreme Being, Brahman. (See The Pali Suttas and the Bhagavad Gita: Some Hindu/Buddhist Comparisons and Contrasts)
Early Buddhists rejected this association of the highest Good with meditative bliss and with contemporary notions of divinity. But they retained the idea of a transformed human subject, liberated from any essential connection to the world, as the ultimate source of all meaning and of the highest kind of Goodness. The best I have been able to do is to imagine the idea of purely “expressive” motivation: the human subject as ultimate basis of all meaning and goodness, but taking the form of purely and outgoingly expressive interactions and connections with the world, free of imperfections and flaws stemming from any need to nourish and bolster a “self.” (See the ending of Early Buddhism Overview (2).)
Appendix: Rudolf Bultmann’s “demythologizing” project.
I think the above treatment of early Buddhist afterlife beliefs stand on their own. But I mentioned earlier that they are based on an approach to certain kinds of religious beliefs that I first encountered in the thought of 20th century German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). I cannot hope in this brief space to explain all the complexities of his “demythologizing” approach, especially the specific interpretation of early Christianity that resulted. But it may be helpful to place some aspects of my approach to Buddhist afterlife belief in the context of his thought.
Again I draw here on a very formalized set of principles that could be applied to the study of mythological elements in many different religious traditions, yielding very different results in each case. (The specific content and especially the pragmatic significance of Buddhist afterlife beliefs–such as escape from samsara as the ultimate Good–could not be more different from the content of and pragmatic significance of mythological elements of early Christian thought discussed by Bultmann.)
First, even though he wrote as a Christian theologian, a basic starting point in Bultmann’s thought was a very straightforward dismissal of claims about certain central elements of the early Christian message, considered as claims about objective facts about an unseen supernatural world (a “spirit and wonder world” he calls it), and unseen events happening in this world.
As he put it
We cannot use electric lights and radios, and in the event of illness avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means, and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. (Quoted in Ferguson Bultmann, p. 109)
So one important element of Bultmann’s approach is an attempt to construct a version of the Christian message in which the validity of this message is in no way dependent on the validity of claims about the objective truth of a salvation-drama involving the picture of a divine savior descending to earth to save people from a sinful state they inherited from Adam, and also a picture of a soon to come cosmic catastrophe destroying the world as we know it and initiating a perfectly just Kingdom of God.
On the other hand, first, throughout his life, Bultmann thought of himself as a committed member of the Lutheran church, and on occasion preached sermons to Lutheran congregations. In his own mind, he was constructing a version of the early Christian message adapted to the mind-set of modern educated Europeans, which could still sustain some basic elements, and especially some of the more demanding elements, of the traditional Lutheran-Christian view of life, and way of living one’s life.
Secondly, Bultmann specifically wanted to distinguish his approach from the approach of some of his nineteenth century theological predecessors who wanted to simply excise from Christian thought all supernatural imagery, and maintain only a set of ethical ideals that could be shown to have a rational basis. In this light, it is a great mistake to assume that when Bultmann spoke of “de-mythologizing” the early Christian message, he was referring to a policy of just entirely ridding the Christian message of any supernatural “mythical” elements, leaving this message only a rather bland set of ethical ideals that a person should try to live up to. He rightly emphasized the fact that a great deal of mythical imagery is so central to the early Christian message, that entirely dismissing them would also entirely change the character of this message. (On this see the first part of Bultmann’s 1941 essay in which he first introduced his demythologizing approach, reprinted in Bartsch 1953, p. 1-15)
Understanding what Bultmann proposed instead under the banner of “demythologizing” requires some understanding of the use he made of some concepts borrowed from “existentialist” philosophy. (Bultmann was a sometime colleague of existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger at the University of Marburg.) The main such idea is the meaning given to the concept of “Existence” itself by some prominent existentialist philosophers. In this usage, “existence” does not refer to the mere fact of existing (contrasted only with not-existing). As I would describe it, an understanding of “my existence” involves having an image of some overall “ultimate context” in which my life is situated, which also determines how I conceive of the (“existential”) meaning of my life, what sorts of things will render my life meaningful or meaningless.
As I would put it, what this means for interpretation is that when evaluating the truth of the early Christian message, one should not focus on apparent truth-claims about objective facts about events happening in an unseen supernatural world, constituting the early Christian drama of salvation. What is important is not questions about the truth or falsity of claims about the objective facts involved. What is important rather has to do with how I would conceive of “my existence” (what is really important and meaningful in life) if I took the early Christian salvation-drama as an imagistic picture of my true situation.
My way of putting this: We should not consider the supernatural elements of the Christian message as a free-standing basis for some conclusions that believers might draw from this message, and ask about the objective truth of the supernatural facts involved. As I proposed earlier we should rather consider as a single package both the content of the message and the existential impact of this message on the ideal believer, what understanding this would give her of her “existence.” And it is this existential impact that should be the focus of our attention.
In the interests of a thoroughgoing rational critique, I myself would go further and ask of this impact whether it is a “good” impact, understanding “good” here in a broadly “ethical” sense described earlier. But this is where I think Bultmann’s reasoning stops and becomes somewhat circular. He tends to describe what I call the existential impact of the Christian message in terms of a modern version of traditional Lutheranism, mixed at times with concepts borrowed from the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He tends to assume the basic validity of the picture of our existential situation and an ideal of human life based on this picture, drawn from these sources, without going further to develop foundations on which pictures of this kind could be subjected to critical rational evaluation.
But I think, so far as it goes, Bultmann’s approach to “mythological” language and imagery is quite appropriate and helpful when considering early Buddhist afterlife beliefs, particularly when it comes to beliefs about samsara, and Nibbana as release from samsara. This approach directs us not to consider whether these beliefs are objectively and factually true. We should focus our attention instead on the particular understanding it gives a dedicated Buddhist believer of her “existence,” how she should understand the ultimate “situation” in which her life should be lived out. Rather than evaluating her life in the context of standards of success prevailing in her society, she should replace this context with a “more ultimate” context consisting in endless samsara, in which her practice of the Buddhist path can be seen as an heroic and cosmic struggle to free herself from vast eons of continued reincarnations into and endless series of dukkha-filled worlds.
But a question we still have to ask is: Why is this an ethically “good” way of understanding human existence? Ultimately, from a strictly rational point of view, understanding its goodness requires giving ethically positive content to the Nibbana ideal, as an ideal way of being in the world to be lived out in the present life. This is what I have tried to do in the last part of my discussion above, and in the last part of Early Buddhism Overview (2)
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