SO my take-away is roughly that if re-incarnation is taken as the self entering into a new life, then Buddhism does not hold to reincarnation. — Banno
The Buddha once gave a "flower sermon", in which he held up a flower and said nothing. A lot more clear than anything I could say. — Wosret
The Flower Sermon is a story of the origin of Zen Buddhism in which Śākyamuni Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) transmits direct prajñā (wisdom) to the disciple Mahākāśyapa. In the original Chinese, the story is Niān huá wéi xiào (拈華微笑, literally "Pick up flower, subtle smile").
Souls, by their nature, are outside of time and space. And even Greene doesn't deny that Entropy pushes time forward beyond any breading. Not even his strings change that.↪Thanatos Sand Time is a big loaf of bread. Brian Greene said so.
SO my take-away is roughly that if re-incarnation is taken as the self entering into a new life, then Buddhism does not hold to reincarnation. — Banno
In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out.
Why "reincarnation", not "incarnation"? — Banno
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