Purpose of human life

We have sufficient resources in our future life because of our actions in this life. If we are generous in this life then due to cause and effect we will be reborn in a place that has enough resources for our needs. If we meet with hunger, disease or injustice it is because in a previous life we have not been generous or have harmed others or have been unjust towards them. If someone even in this one life is harmful towards others then others who are not like that person soon shun that person. So we see it in everyday life and as there is no such thing as non-existence then all things continue they just change. We change but we keep the good and bad habits and reap what we sow in the future be it this life or the next.

Buddhas do not create actions the reap effects so they are outside this round of suffering because they have removed the root cause and understand directly the true nature of reality.

That is superstitious clap trap, and you still have not answered the question. Upon what basis do you allege that there will be a "future life?" Upon what basis do you allege that there have been past lives?

Your response assumes a good many premises which are unsupported. Nothing in my questions suggests that the peasant referred to is not liked by his neighbors. Nothing in the question assumes anything about his character.

How can an impoverished peasant who works from sunrise to sunset to feed his family remove their suffering from hunger, disease or injustice through the practice of Buddhism?

See if you can answer that, restricting yourself to the here and now, and without making unwarranted assumptions. Try to answer it without introducing a lot of undemonstrated, superstitious beliefs.

If a peasant is unable to support his family it is due to where he lives and how he is viewed by others who could help him. If he lives in a place that can't support his family and others won't help him it is because he has inherited this lack of resources from the past. If not in this life then from a past life.

I will believe that I only live one life if you show me something that ceases to exist. If you can't then you are believing in non-existence even though there is no evidence for it... an almost religious belief that cannot be proved. Some do this because they want to not face up to what they've done in this life. They want the consequences to end at death.

Prove to me that something, anything ceases to exit?

What reason do you have to believe in more than 1 life?

Well, there's no further purpose in the charade. You're blaming the victim, and you've reached the point which all religious fanatics reach of demanding that your superstitions be disproved, rather than offering any evidence yourself.

You have also demonstrated that you're no different than Spade and Frank Apisa. You've gone through the cylce--contempt, accusations of anger and/or hatefulness, and expressions of pity for me. This is because you are, like Spade and like Frank, dogmatic. As a dogmatist, when pushed into the intellectual corner of no longer being able to support your claims under unrelenting criticism, you are the one who lashes out. You then ascribe that to me. Spade's done it and Frank's done it, and now you.

There's also no further need to go in to this question because, as a dogmatist, you will never respond honestly. You could have said "I don't know." You could have admitted that your Buddhism doesn't have all the answers. Instead, you fall back on your dogmatic supersition (Frank, although a dogmatist, is at least not superstitious, at least for as much as i've ever seen).

You have presented no evidence for past lives for anyone. You have presented no evidence that anyone will live again. The best you could come up with is a feeble "prove i'm wrong." But when someone makes such a claim, they assume the burden of proof--no one is obliged to disprove them. To echo Carl Sagan, those who make extraordinary claims have an extraordinary burden of proof.

When you believe, dogmatically believe, in things which cannot be proven, which have to be taken on blind faith, you are indulging superstition. You are essentially no different--no better and no worse--than the god-ridden superstitious dogmatist who started this thread. I suppose one should be glad for you that you have a delusion which offers you such comfort.

I've been following this thread with bemused resignation.

What "meditators" tend to understand , whether they be Buddhists or otherwise, is that there is no "self" at which criticisms aimed at them have any purchase. Non-meditators have no way of seeing that their self-valedictory responses are merely automatic functions of mundane transactionalism.

The very question about "the purpose of life" tends to lead to transactionalism, because "goals" imply negotiated paths. The meditator might simply point out that life is about "being" not "becoming".

I said that a person finds themselves in their current situation due to their past actions.

I will paraphrase the rest:

You said what evidence do you have for reincarnation and karma i.e. past and future lives and cause and effect.

I said in order to believe that there is only one life we have to find evidence for something that exists becoming non-existent.

You replied with no answer to this. You have currently avoided answering this question.

You said emotively that by saying that what happens to a person is due to their own actions that I was blaming the victim. This is not correct it is a negative way of looking at a law of nature i.e. cause and effect. Science has no problem with this when it comes to physical processes and Buddhism has no problem with it when it comes to mental processes as well.

There are benefits to believing in reincarnation for example. If a mother has her child raped and murdered but the murderer is not caught she understands that the murderer will not escape the result of their actions they will have damaged their mind. The result will be that in a next life the murderer will have a shorter life; born in a place which is more violent with a habit of believing that murder can solve some need. This continues life after life probably getting worse as the habit becomes more and more instinctive and is used in more situations. This also helps prevent murder in Buddhist countries as the people understand that death will not prevent them from experiencing the consequences of their actions.

So people are moral because they believe in cause and effect. If they find themselves in a bad situation the are not overcome by feeling that a god is punishing them or that they are inexplicably being harmed. That it is others that must be to blame for the predicament. They see that just as physical cause and effect cannot be avoided so to can mental cause and effect not be avoided.

Reincarnation explains many of the things that puzzle us. Science has alternate explanation which many will say is not proved but ok for now and will be scrutinized by all that follow to see if it can be improved on or replaced by something which improves on current scientific theory. Reincarnation says that nothing ceases to exist. Science agrees that everything that was created at the ‘big bang’ exists today but is constantly changing. Buddha said the same is true of mind. Mind cannot be destroyed i.e. nothing whatsoever can be destroyed it can only change and that change is seen as cause and effect. So we are not at odds with science we also include the mind. So if mind has to follow the law of cause and effect then mental states have consequences. If you’re a liar for example then you keep that habit and it develops over many lifetimes, mostly it won’t seem to matter, but eventually it will be imperative that the truth is told and then the consequences really have a clear effect. But for those of us who ignore mental cause and effect we think that if we can get away with lieing during this one short life then all will be ok… and many believe that it seems reasonable to believe that they can do that, so they do. Buddhists don’t think that lieing for selfish gain will work out in the long run because the take the long view.

Reincarnation has an alternative explanation or the only explanation for genius, or someone who seems to have been born evil; or how good parents bringing up their children in the same way have one child who is angry and hateful and the other placid and kind. Science has and explanation and so to has Buddhism. Neither can be proved to be superior. But a Buddhist is able to see a cause and effect relationship between mental states and can come to terms with what has happened.

The belief in reincarnation has a whole host of benefits and no real drawbacks for those who believe in it and it doesn’t harm those who don’t. It can accommodate science and the modern world but adds something to ‘the reason to be moral’ or the reason why one should try to give up negative qualities and develop positive ones.

The logical reason is that we cannot find anything that ceases to exist we just imagine that life and mind which are existent become at death non-existent even though science has not found anything that ceases to exist and ignores consciousness as an emergent phenomena.

The Buddha gave at least 84,000 different teaching and in there is a refutation of all types of philosophy every aspect of human life is covered and at deeper levels all is refuted.. a starting point for Zen but some think that doubts can only be removed if one understands the main points using conventional language and not just the esoteric and beyond words approach. There are many many levels of how to understand reincarnation one is called ‘empty dependent origination’ ( a bit like the matrix idea) so your reply setanta is a generic response to a Wikipedia idea of Buddhism. You think you can laugh at it but it's like laughing at special relativity or the standard model after having read a page or two from both. In 2500 yrs countless millions have scrutanized the Buddha's teaching and then followed them this is no blind faith religion it might appear so at a superficial glance but it is not.

I have things to do today so if there are spelling mistakes etc… let me know if you can’t work out what I was trying to say.. what I’ve said has taken about 30 mins… so it is to be expected.

You can peddle your religious superstition to your heart's content, it's not an answer to the question. In fact, it's a dodge to avoid facing the fact that Buddhists don't care about the miseries suffered by those around them.

To repeat, claims about reincarnation are extraordinary claims for which you provide no evidence. No one is obliged to disprove extraordinary claims, as Carl Sagan pointed out, those who make extraordinary claims have to provide extraordinary evidence. You have provided none.

See my initial post on page one. You need to take all your silly jargon and address it to Igm and JLN.

There is no evidence that anything ceases to exist. It is an extraordinary claim to say that anything does cease to exist. As someone once said, "No one is obliged to disprove extraordinary claims, as Carl Sagan pointed out, those who make extraordinary claims have to provide extraordinary evidence." See a couple of posts above this one.

On the other-hand the evidence that everything displays the ability to remain existent (whilst continually changing) is all around us; we witness it continually in our day-to-day lives. To say nothing ceases to exist, as the Buddha did, does not appear to be an extraordinary claim after all... given all the evidence to the contrary.

Not sure why you felt it necessary to bring my name into this, Setanta. I have not been a part of this discussion…and no point you were trying to make required mentioning me. The unnecessary and gratuitous provocation should be beyond you, but obviously it isn’t.



Setanta, hearing you talk about someone else being dogmatic is hearing Rush Limbaugh talk about someone else being a fat, loud mouth.

This is a red herring on your part. The question is whether or not one has lived in the past and will live again in the future. You provide no evidence for this, and no one is obliged to disprove your claim. You're peddling superstition, and doing so dogmatically.

Frankly, it bothers me to see a fellow buddhist emphasize an aspect of popular buddhism that I do not believe in. I see no reason to believe in reincarnation or any form of afterlife. And I am quite convinced that that is not at all central to the teachings of the Awakened One. What really matters in his teachings is the development of self-awareness, of knowledge of reality based directly on experience, on a form of Radical Empiricism.

Another Buddhist practice of the past.



When my wife and I went on a Buddhist Pilgrimage some years ago, her branch of Buddhism required the priests to commit suicide at a certain age, I believe it was in their early 60's. The priest-leader of our pilgrimage told us he would never have become a priest it they still practiced it.

And what does this tell you about the philosophical significance of the deepest teachings and practice of Buddhism? I think the West is saving Buddhism and the East is saving Western classical music.

I even met a Jewish Buddhist many decades ago on a flight from Chicago to San Jose, CA, who travels to Asia for Doctors Without Borders.

Well, you know JLN, i did not come to this thread looking for a fight with the boy. Then he came up with that claptrap about the goal of Buddhism is to eliminate the root causes of human suffering, and that's when i went after him--because it's about the individual's awareness of what is alleged to be reality, and not at all about mitigating human suffering in the masses. He then lead us down the garden path to reincarnation. I have nothing i regret in these exchanges.

One of the shortcomings of Buddhism is that it does very little for the masses--other than the kinds of relief all religions provide their folowers, mixed with the harm they do by encouraging and rewarding ignorance. Its benefits extend only to some of those individuals who are willing to make considerable effort in the PRACTICE of meditative Buddhism. THAT'S what I've been talking about, not institutions we see at the level of the mythical popular "religion" called Buddhism.

One of the shortcomings of Buddhism is that it does very little for the masses--other than the kinds of relief all religions provide their folowers, mixed with the harm they do by encouraging and rewarding ignorance. Its benefits extend only to some of those individuals who are willing to make considerable effort in the PRACTICE of meditative Buddhism. THAT'S what I've been talking about, not institutions we see at the level of the mythical popular "religion" called Buddhism.

So, in your terms, i was objecting to the retailing of the myth.