[Buddha-l] Confession

[JKirkpatrick]

As they say in Bengal, "Bah bah" (equivalent to our hip hip
hurray).

It's reassuring to learn that someone whom I've admired since I
first heard about him, and then read a couple of his books and
intend to read the next one, agrees with my takes on rebirth and
karma as not cosmic laws. It's also reassuring to find that he is
willing to claim that the Buddha was not hood-winked by either of
these ideas. Gotama made use of these ideas to reach a larger
audience than that of the few adepts with whom he started his
brilliant career. If you are going to support your organization
on donations, during and after the death of the charismatic
leader, you must be able to convince a lot of lay people that
their support counts for more than parting with some food or a
bit of land, since you are not paying for any of it. Why could
that not have been a significant motive for including cultural
beliefs of the times (the so-called accretions) even if the
leader (and one might guess, many of the monks) did not credit
such ideas as worth bothering with?

Meanwhile, today one could take the idea of rebirth as Buddhadasa
did,  considering it as a metaphor for falling off the wagon of
practice.  One could take karma as a metaphor for the reality
that in moral life, action, feeling, intentions, etc have
consequences of various sorts. It's possible to take these
concepts as conventional truths rather than as ultimate truths,
so that they no longer operate as automatic magic, but instead
serve as short-hand reminders.

As for dependent origination, all functioning systems are
teleological (circular).  If we decide to take the planet or even
the cosmos and their operations, or say 'society," as a system
(and many of us do not),  then circularity doesn't strike me as a
serious limitation.

My 2 cents 
Joanna