Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Samsara. Date and Artist unknown

All reli­gious scrip­ture speaks on many lev­els, in a mul­ti­tude of ways. Some who read scrip­ture believe them to be lit­er­ally true, while oth­ers see them as poetic, sym­bolic, alle­gor­i­cal. They see metaphors where oth­ers see his­tory. And all writ­ers of scrip­ture no doubt real­ized this vast sea of dif­fer­ence. They all real­ized that their work would be inter­pre­tated dif­fer­ently, given the con­text, the cul­ture, the times, the lev­els of lit­er­acy and edu­ca­tion. The best of them wrote in such a way that mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions could live har­mo­niously and effec­tively, side by side, for centuries.

Buddhist scrip­ture was, of course, no different.

The con­cept of “rebirth”, for instance, lends itself to a great many inter­pre­ta­tions. For me, as a Western novice, as one who views Jewish, Christian and Moslem scrip­ture as lit­er­a­ture, not his­tory or fact, the Buddhist con­cept of “rebirth” car­ries the weight of metaphor, not physics. I see it as an aid toward a pro­foundly kinder, more gen­er­ous and com­pas­sion­ate ethics, not an actual, phys­i­cal hap­pen­ing. And I also see this as per­fectly in tune with evo­lu­tion and what we now know about DNA.

“Past lives.” We all con­tain mil­lions of lives in our DNA. We carry the con­scious­ness of lit­er­ally mil­lions of beings in our bod­ies, all the way back to sin­gle cell life forms. A past life is a part of that stream that led from them to us, and a “rebirth” is the con­tin­u­a­tion of that stream of life in our chil­dren, their chil­dren and all the merg­ers between the end­less suc­ces­sion of fam­i­lies into the future.

The metaphor of “rebirth” and the stream of life car­ries us back to our own brief time on this planet. While we are the sum total of pre­vi­ous lives num­ber­ing in the mil­lions, the call toward Karmic rebirth is a call for this one and only life. All great reli­gions demand it. All great art demands it. You must change your life! And within the short span of time given us on this, our one and only planet, the Buddhist idea of rebirth extends to every sin­gle day, hour, minute. Living a holy life, liv­ing accord­ing to the Dharma, or Way, nec­es­sar­ily involves the rep­e­ti­tion of new begin­nings. Zen adds the idea of a beginner’s mind, or orig­i­nal mind, which opens the door for end­less renewal. Starting over, again and again, for­ever mind­ful, for­ever aware and atten­tive to the moment, to now, here.

The jour­ney, of course, is all. Yes, even clichés hold wis­dom at times! With Buddhism, espe­cially Zen Buddhism, right prac­tice turns those rebirth-​​waves (along that jour­ney) into one ocean, and we dis­cover that those waves were never sep­a­rate from any­thing else in the first place. They were always a part of the same energy field, the same water of life, and the Wheel of Samsara is always right here, right now, not in the past or the future for us. Nirvana is already here, too, like the statue wait­ing inside Michelangelo’s rock. The rock and the statue are one, just as Samsara and Nirvana are one.

The art of carv­ing out one’s life. The art of releas­ing the forces already there .…

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Past lives .… We all have them. We all undergo rebirths. The key is to choose them when­ever pos­si­ble, lead them from a posi­tion of strength and wis­dom, will them into being with joy and utmost com­pas­sion, accord­ing to the light of one’s own lamp of marvels.

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