IB World Religions 2.4.3. Eschatology Without a Creator: Rebirth, the Khandas and Liberation Notes

2.4.3. Eschatology Without a Creator: Rebirth, the Khandas and Liberation

The absence of a creator

1. Buddhist eschatology begins by removing pieces that other traditions depend on. Theravada Buddhists claim no creator god, so there is no maker to bring the world to an end and no judge to sort people at it.
2. The tradition does not argue that the universe began at some point. Buddhists describe samsara, the round of birth, death and rebirth, as having no discoverable starting point at all.
3. The Buddha is presented as declining such questions. Asked whether the world is eternal, the texts have him refuse to answer, on the ground that a man shot with an arrow should have it removed before investigating the archer.
4. Divine beings are not denied. Buddhists accept that gods exist and hold that they are inside samsara like everyone else, long-lived but neither permanent nor in charge.
5. What stands in place of a judge is kamma (Sanskrit karma), action. Consequences are described as following from what beings do, working as a regularity rather than as anyone's decision about them.
6. The end that Buddhist eschatology describes is therefore not the end of the world. It is the end of the process for a particular being, and the doctrine is an account of how that release happens.

Rebirth without a self

1. The difficulty is immediate. If Buddhists deny any permanent self, as anatta (Sanskrit anatman) states, it is not obvious what there is to be reborn.
2. Their answer begins with what a person is. Buddhists analyse a being into five khandas (Sanskrit skandhas): form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness.
3. The five describe a process rather than the parts of a thing. Each is changing continuously, and none is held to be the owner or the possession of any of the others.
4. Death is described as this process breaking up. The Milindapanha compares a person to a chariot, which is nothing over and above its parts arranged in working order.
5. What continues is a causal series rather than a passenger. Buddhists describe the last moment of one life conditioning the first moment of the next, with nothing carried across the join.
6. The tradition therefore prefers rebirth to reincarnation. Reincarnation suggests a self putting on a new body, while rebirth means a process continuing under fresh conditions.
7. Buddhists across the branches accept this account. They differ over how best to describe the continuity, not over whether a permanent self is doing the travelling.

What kamma carries

1. Kamma means action, and Buddhists narrow the term further. What makes an act karmically weighty is cetana, the intention behind it, so the same outward deed can carry very different consequences.
2. The results are called vipaka, the ripening. Buddhists describe wholesome and unwholesome actions as tending towards agreeable and disagreeable results, in this life and in later ones.
3. Nobody administers any of this. There is no ledger and no assessor, and Buddhists describe kamma as working the way seeds work, which is why the vocabulary is agricultural.
4. Kamma does not settle everything that happens. The tradition lists other causes as well, including weather, illness and the actions of other people, so misfortune is not read as proof of past wrongdoing.
5. What kamma shapes is the direction the continuing process takes. Buddhists describe the state of mind at death as especially influential, which is why relatives chant and recall good deeds beside a dying person.
6. Merit can also be directed outward. In punna (Sanskrit punya) transfer ceremonies, families dedicate the good of an act to someone who has died, and the practice is found across all the branches.

Liberation and nibbana

1. The goal is release from the process altogether. Nibbana (Sanskrit nirvana) is the Buddhist name for the ending of craving, and with it the ending of rebirth.
2. The word is an image taken from fire. It means blowing out or going out, and what is said to be extinguished is the burning of greed, hatred and delusion rather than the person.
3. Liberation is also described as the end of maya, illusion. Buddhists hold that awakening removes the misperception that keeps a being grasping, so the machinery of rebirth loses its fuel.
4. Two stages are distinguished. A living arahant (Sanskrit arhat) is said to have reached nibbana with the khandas still remaining, and the breaking up of those khandas at death is called parinibbana.
5. What follows that is left undescribed. The texts refuse to say that an awakened person exists after death, does not exist, both or neither, and Buddhists treat the question as wrongly put.
6. The refusal is deliberate rather than evasive. A discourse compares the question to asking in which direction a fire has gone once it is out, when the fire was never a thing that could go anywhere.

The bodhisattva ideal

1. Mahayana Buddhists reframe the goal itself. They hold that seeking nibbana for oneself alone falls short, and that the aim should be Buddhahood for the sake of every being.
2. The turn is made through bodhicitta, the awakening mind, a resolve to become a Buddha in order to release others. Taking it up is marked by a formal vow.
3. That vow is deliberately unfinishable. Practitioners undertake to keep working until all beings are liberated, a commitment understood to stretch across countless lives.
4. Great bodhisattvas embody particular qualities. Avalokiteshvara (Chinese Guanyin) embodies karuna, compassion, Manjushri embodies wisdom, and the Taras are venerated across Tibetan Buddhism as swift helpers.
5. Amitabha offers another route to the same end. Devotees hope for rebirth in his Pure Land, where conditions are said to put full awakening within reach rather than far off.
6. Mahayana thinkers describe the resulting state as non-abiding. A Buddha is said to rest neither in samsara nor in a nibbana withdrawn from it, and so remains available to beings still inside the process.
7. The practical difference shows in what a Buddhist hopes for. A Theravada practitioner aims at the arahant's release, while a Mahayana practitioner takes on the far longer path to Buddhahood.

Endings across the branches

1. The branches set different targets while sharing one analysis. All of them hold that craving drives rebirth and that ending it stops the process.
2. Theravada teaching keeps nibbana as the goal and the arahant as the model, with the monastic life treated as the setting where it is most likely to be reached.
3. Most lay Buddhists aim nearer than that. Generating punna towards a better rebirth is the ordinary working hope, and nibbana in this life is not usually expected.
4. Vajrayana adds an account of the interval itself. The bardo is the state described between death and the next rebirth, and texts are read aloud to guide the dying person through it.
5. Funerals are where the doctrine becomes visible. Monks chant, merit is transferred to the dead, and the ceremony states in public what the tradition holds has happened.
6. None of this describes a last day for everyone. Buddhist eschatology concerns individual release from a process with no beginning, so its end arrives one being at a time.