[dyestymum]

Dear friends,

I found this article at The Buddhist Channel and it was originally in the Sunday Times.

I'm interested in your responses to the article and accept that there might be a range of different views. Its fine if you don't necessarily agree with each other, I'm not looking for any particular position, just curious about what you have to say.



Buddhist reflections on death and rebirth


By Rajah Kuruppu


" From the earliest of times, men have speculated on the question why we are born and why we die. In ancient times, phenomena such as rain and fire were attributed to gods associated with them.

There was a creator god responsible for birth and another for destruction. With the passage of time, there developed the concept of one God, all powerful and omnipotent, who is responsible for our birth and who would judge our life at death and reward or punish us for our good and harmful actions, respectively.

The answer in Buddhism for our birth is that we are caught in a cycle of births and deaths called Samsara, whose beginning is inconceivable. The Buddha declared that it is because of our delusion of the true nature of things, that we have the desire for life at the moment of death where ordinary people grasp for life.

Consequently, we are re-born and continue our journey in Samsara with all its unsatisfactory features characterized by Anicca, Dukkha and Anatta — impermanance, unsatisfactoriness and absence of a permanent, unchanging, eternal, self or soul.


Man consists of mind and body and from a Buddhist standpoint what happens at death is that the physical body ceases to function. But what happens to the mind which is the other part of man? The mind is a flow of thoughts. It has no location in the physical body and the Buddha did not indicate where the mind is actually located.

With the death of the physical body, the mind does not cease nor the mental forces and energies. In fact, in Buddhism, it is said that the will, the desire, the thirst to live is the greatest force and the greatest energy in the world and does not stop with death but continues to manifest itself in another form, producing re-existence which is called re-birth.

Presented differently, the most precious thing for all living beings is their own lives. They would fight to the last or run away to save their lives. Proceeding from the known to the unknown, it could be presumed that at the moment of death although man is physically weak to resist death, he would mentally attempt to survive and is unlikely to face death with calm resignation.

The desire for life is so strong that man will mentally grasp (upadana) another viable place such as the fertile ovum in a mother's womb since the present body can no longer support his life. Thus, the psychological process of life (bhave) will continue in the newly found place and birth (jati) would soon follow.

This is the process explained in the Buddhist Law of Dependent Origination. Conditioned by craving, grasping arises; conditioned by grasping, becoming arises; conditioned by becoming, birth arises; conditioned by birth, old age, disease and death arise."


continued:

http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index....8,9629,0,0,1,0