(B10)- Liberation or Nirvana for whom?

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The Buddhists have a fantastic theory of existence which neither needs the concept of soul nor the God. They say that there is no one who experiences anything. But still they say that you need to toil all your life to free yourself from all the suffering! That is the focal point of Buddhism. The Brahma supporters ridicule this theory of Buddhists not only as illogical but something that contradicts our day-to-day experience. This is how they pull down the Buddhist theory –

 

“You say that the bodies and minds are momentary. No two instances of the body and the mind last more than a moment. At the same time, you say that it is possible to accumulate Karma, possible to indulge in a series of actions that finally leads to this Karma, and so on. But my dear friend, how can such a thing be possible? 

 

Supposing I am looking at an object using my current body. But before I develop any desire for that object, my body just vanishes only to be replaced by another body. My mind also gets replaced by another one. How is it that the new body/mind combination know what I was looking at before a desire can be formed in this new body/mind? How do you make connection between the previous body/mind with current one? 

 

If you say that you ‘somehow’ transfer that information across successive bodies and minds, does it not contradict your premise that everything perishes every moment? To transfer something across two sets of bodies and mind, both of those sets have to exist simultaneously. If they do, then your claim that a new body/mind replaces an old body/mind is no longer true. Also, your fundamental concept of momentariness gets threatened since you now have more than one body/mind in the sequence that are active at the same time! 

 

Now let us look at other aspects of your fantastic theory. 

 

Is there any cause and effect relation between two successive bodies? If there is, even in that case, the cause cannot just vanish before the effect takes place. For example, when you make a pot using clay, the clay does not vanish giving rise to a pot. The clay continues to remain even after the pot is made. Only thing is that that clay has changed its form. So, nothing in practice vanishes. Things only get transformed. 

 

If you insist that there is no such relation between two successive bodies and they are independent of each other, in that case a person has to appear like a human sometimes and animal some other time! That is what happens if the successive bodies are totally unrelated. Have you ever seen such a thing? A person continues the way he is except for some modifications. The bodies just get transformed over a period of time and not abruptly get replaced by one another as you claim. 

 

You are saying that the bodies appear ‘from nowhere’ and ‘disappear into nowhere’ after a moment. Have you seen anything like that in day today life? In real life, a thing that exists continues to exist in some form or the other. Similarly, a non-existing thing never comes into existence. Such a thing is never seen. Things only get transformed from one form to another but they neither get produced nor get destroyed per se. 

 

And you say that since nothing is permanent, there is no permanent entity called soul as well. If there is no permanent entity like a soul that happens to be a witness to whatever happens in the body/mind sequence, how does one correlate various incidents that happen throughout this sequence of appearance and disappearance of bodies and minds? The absence of such a correlation would lead to ridiculous statements such as “someone ate the fruit sometime ago and I enjoyed it now”. You will never feel that it was the very same ‘you’ who ate the fruit a while ago as well as the one who is enjoying it now. The body and mind which are transient according to you cannot correlate the two acts that happened at two different instances of time. There has to be some witness who keeps track of such a connection between two acts – eating and enjoying in this example. And that witness is what we call as soul which is neither body nor the mind. 

 

What is more ridiculous in your claim is that you have a process that stops the accumulation of Karmic impressions. You recommend a long process that hopefully takes several moments of time. How are you going to achieve that if your body/mind perishes and gets replaced every moment? Before you attempt to erase the Karmic impressions, the body/mind that caused it would have just vanished. 

 

Further, your idea of liberation or Nirvana does not make any sense at all since you say that there is nobody who exists! In that case, liberation or Nirvana for whom? There isn’t anybody according to you! If Nirvana itself is meaningless, then all the teachings of your preceptor go down the drain 😉” 

 

I am sure that the Buddhists in those times justified their theory in some way. Or they might have come up with amendments or altogether a new theory to coverup the loop holes in their explanations. 

 

In the next episode let us discuss another sect of Buddhists who have an equally grand theory of existence which also rejects the notions of soul and God. Please do join me then. 

 

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A series on ancient Indian composition Brahma Sutra. © Dr. King, Swami Satyapriya 2020-21