Self And Meditation In Indian Buddhism

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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142/ Johannes Bronkhorst
Deeds constitute the decisive factor that cause rebirth to take place and that determine what the new life will be like: good deeds lead to a good rebirth, bad deeds to a bad one. The religious movements of ancient India that accepted this fundamental belief shared in common that their highest aspiration was not to obtain a good rebirth, but to avoid any rebirth whatsoever. How could this aspiration be realised? Moral behaviour would obviously not be of any help, given that good deeds were thought to lead to rebirth, even a good one. What, if not deeds of some kind, could prevent rebirth from taking place?
Two solutions presented themselves. The first one is as simple as it is straightforward. If deeds bring about rebirth, one will have to abstain from all activities whatsoever if one wants to prevent rebirth from taking place. This solution requires people aspiring for liberation to engage in ascetic practices in which motionlessness of body and mind plays a central role. Indeed, perfect liberation will be obtained by the ascetic who manages to immobilise his body and mind completely right until death. Death will be hastened by the fact that the ascetic abstains from eating and, during the last minutes of his life, from breathing. There is certainly the added complication that deeds carried out before the ascetic enters his immobile life-style will still carry fruit. These deeds, however, were believed to reach fruition in the painful experiences which the ascetic evokes by his difficult life-style. The store of earlier deeds having been exhausted, the ascetic can concentrate on his death, which he invites through fasting and the interruption of breathing, as I said above. The moment of death is, for the successful ascetic, also his moment of liberation.
A different solution was accepted by others. If the deeds of persons bring about their rebirth, it becomes important to know which deeds really belong to a person and which don't. This entails the question: what exactly is the person? A number of thinkers answered that the real self of a person is different from all that acts. The real self is different from the body to begin with, but also