Waylon Lewis - I don’t believe in Reincarnation. Am I still a Buddhist?

Waylon Lewis at Elephant Journal has a great post on reincarnation and Buddhism - an issue of interest to me because I consider myself a Buddhist who does not believe in reincarnation.

I don’t believe in Reincarnation. Am I still a Buddhist?

by Waylon Lewis, elephantjournal.com on Jun 16, 2009

I grew up in a Buddhist family. As the Dalai Lama says of Buddhism,

Anything that contradicts experience and logic should be abandoned. - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

In fact, the Buddha himself said something along the lines of “Buddhism is what can be experienced, not what I say it is.” And so I’ve never believed in reincarnation—I’ve never experienced it, it strikes me as superstition, as a spiritual hangover from Buddhism’s origins with Hinduism (I also don’t particularly believe in eight-armed green deities).

Still, from a strict Buddhist p.o.v., reincarnation is part of our dogma. Wait, I thought we didn’t have dogma, we only “believed” what we could experience? Well, there’s the rub. If you ask my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the fact that I don’t believe in reincarnation means I’m not, strictly speaking, a proper Buddhist. I say, show me the evidence of it, and why it matters to my Bodhisattva Vow: to be of benefit.

Because that, after all, is the whole point of all this Buddhist stuff (at least as I was brought up to understand it in Chogyam Trungpa’s sangha community): to become sane (Hinayana), work for the benefit of others (Mahayana) and fully involve onself in this short, precious human existence (Vajrayana). And Trungpa Rinpoche himself never emphasized reincarnation, or the six realms (except as psychological analogies).

So call me a dis-believer. But given that Buddhism is a non-theistic tradition, I think that just makes me a…Buddhist. ~ elephant journal editor-in-chief, Waylon Lewis.

Via one of my favorite Buddhist e-newsletters, Upaya, which also has an elegant site that’s chock-ful of events and Dharma:

Shinshu Roberts was looking at Suzuki Roshi transcripts and ran across this....

Read more.

For me, as a Buddhist, my practice and beliefs center on the Bodhisattva Vows I have taken and following the Noble Eightfold Path - and that does not require a belief in reincarnation, only a devotion to helping others to the best of my ability.

The science of reincarnation, such as it is, does not convince me, simple as that.

Tags: Buddhism, reincarnation, beliefs, Dalai Lama, Suzuki Roshi, Waylon Lewis, elephant journal, death, rebirth