Rime Shedra NYC Special Events
What’s Next? or, Do I Really Hafta take rebirth? - March 17, 2015
As Buddhism has come to the West, where we don't traditionally have a belief in rebirth, the role of rebirth in Buddhist teaching and practice has sometimes been seen as awkward or even irrelevant. Is rebirth merely a cultural inheritance from the time and place where Buddhism as we have it arose? Is it a metaphor for the way in which the continuum that we experience as a self, like all continua, arises and ceases from instant to instant? Is it the conventional reality that we share as a basis for skillful Buddhist practice? As so many Buddhist teachings remind us, this isn't a matter of idle speculation—whatever Buddhism teaches is meant to be used by each of us here in the present.