IB World Religions 1.3.3. Where Are We Going? Rebirth, Nibbana, Buddhahood and the Bodhisattva Notes

1.3.3. Where Are We Going? Rebirth, Nibbana, Buddhahood and the Bodhisattva

Kamma and rebirth

1. Buddhists answer the question of where we are going by saying that death is not the end of the process. Kamma (Sanskrit karma: action) is the mechanism they use to explain what happens next.
2. Kamma means intentional action rather than ritual correctness. The Buddha is recorded as saying that it is intention he calls kamma, so the moral weight of a deed lies in the state of mind behind it.
3. Wholesome actions are said to grow from generosity, kindness and understanding. Unwholesome actions grow from the Three Poisons, which Buddhists name as greed, hatred and delusion.
4. Nothing permanent makes the journey, so Buddhists call the result punabbhava, again becoming, rather than the travelling of a soul. Because they teach anatta (Sanskrit anatman: the absence of a permanent self), what continues is a stream of conditioned causes.
5. Most lay Buddhists meet these ideas through punna (Sanskrit punya: merit). Families in Thailand or Sri Lanka feed monastics and then dedicate the merit aloud, often for a dead relative's next birth.

The realms of rebirth

1. Buddhists speak of favourable and unfavourable rebirth rather than of reward and punishment. The realm a being wakes up in is treated as the outworking of accumulated kamma.
2. The traditional map lists six realms: gods (devas), jealous gods (asuras), humans, animals, hungry ghosts (petas) and hell beings. Buddhist cosmology expands these into thirty-one lokas, or planes of existence.
3. Every realm is impermanent, including the pleasant ones, since a god is held to use up the merit that produced its long life. Human birth is therefore treated as the most valuable, because gods are too comfortable to seek release and beings in the lower realms too distressed to practise.
4. Vajrayana monasteries paint the whole scheme at their entrances as the bhavachakra, the wheel of life, with the six realms in its spokes and the Three Poisons at its hub.
5. Buddhists read the realms in more than one way. Many traditional communities take them as actual destinations, while many teachers in modern and Western sanghas present them as states of mind available now.

Nibbana and parinibbana

1. Nibbana (Sanskrit nirvana) is the destination that ends the round of rebirth altogether. The word means blowing out, as a flame goes out when its fuel is withdrawn.
2. What is blown out is craving, aversion and ignorance. Buddhists describe nibbana as the going out of the three fires that keep rebirth burning, not the extinction of a person.
3. Texts describe it mostly by saying what it is not, and the Udana calls it unborn, unbecome, unmade and unconditioned. The Buddha is recorded declining to say what an enlightened person is like after death, and the tradition reads that refusal as rejecting a question which assumes a self.
4. Buddhists distinguish two moments. Sopadisesa-nibbana is nibbana reached during life, with body and mind still running, and parinibbana is the final nibbana at such a person's death, after which no rebirth follows.
5. The goal is presented as available rather than distant. The Dhammapada calls nibbana the highest happiness, and the teaching is called ehipassiko, inviting a person to come and see for themselves.

Arahants, Buddhas and bodhisattvas

1. Theravada Buddhists hold up the arahant (Sanskrit arhat: worthy one) as the model of arrival. An arahant has destroyed the defilements, reached nibbana in this life and will not be born again.
2. The path there is described in four stages, beginning with the sotapanna or stream-enterer, who is said to have at most seven lives left. Each stage cuts more of the ten fetters that bind a being to samsara.
3. A Buddha is not simply a very advanced arahant, since a sammasambuddha rediscovers the path in an age when it has been lost and then teaches it. Buddhahood is possible in Theravada teaching but rare, requiring many lifetimes of preparation as a bodhisatta of the kind the Jataka stories tell of Gotama.
4. Mahayana Buddhists hold out Buddhahood to everyone and place the bodhisattva at the centre. A bodhisattva vows not to take final nibbana until all living beings can be brought along too.
5. Mahayana thinkers ground the vow in karuna (compassion) joined to panna (Sanskrit prajna: wisdom). If wisdom finds no separate self, they argue, then working only for one's own release makes little sense.

Mahayana, Pure Land and Vajrayana

1. Mahayana devotion is directed at celestial bodhisattvas who are held to be already awakened and active. Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, is worshipped as Guanyin in China and Chenrezig in Tibet, and Manjushri carries the sword of wisdom.
2. Pure Land Buddhists in China, Japan and Vietnam call on Amitabha Buddha and hope to be reborn in Sukhavati, his pure land. Enlightenment is said to be straightforward there, so the rebirth is a stage on the way rather than the end.
3. This is a whole tradition organized around trust rather than technique. Japanese Pure Land teachers taught that reciting the name of Amitabha in the nembutsu is enough, since one's own effort is unreliable.
4. Vajrayana Buddhists in Tibet, Nepal and Mongolia hold that Buddhahood can be reached in a single lifetime under the guidance of a lama. Tibetan Buddhists regard the Dalai Lama as a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara.
5. The branches disagree about the shape of the goal rather than about liberation itself. Both hold that rebirth ends in enlightenment, and they differ over whether a practitioner should arrive as soon as possible or last of all.