Soul split when reborn?

NDQ SG

Hello all,

Per Master Hsuan Hua below, a person born into animal realm would be splitted into multiple animals. He also mentioned that one could be reborn as a plant, or rock... which are not one of the 6 realms (heaven, asura, human, animal, hungry ghost, and hell) that the Buddha described a being could be born into.

http://www.dharmasite.net/bdh59/whatghostsare.html

Sexual misconduct: In terms of causes and effects, sexual misconduct is the most serious offense. It’s punishment is the most severe. If a married couple gets divorced and each one remarries, then according to the law of cause and effect, their bodies will be cut in half after they die. This is because when they were alive, they had two relationships. So after they die, their karmic retribution manifests. A huge saw slices people in half from head to toe. Their bodies are sawed into as many pieces as the number of offenses they committed. If they were married a hundred times, they are sawed into a hundred pieces, so each of their former partners can have a tiny share of them. What’s so bad about being divided into pieces? If the soul becomes fragmented like that, it’s very difficult to make it whole again. Probably those people won’t regain a human body again for billions of eons. When their nature is split and their souls are incomplete, they become dull and insentient, like plants. When their inherent nature is scattered, it’s hard to become a sentient being again. Even if they became a sentient being, they might be a mosquito. But one human body can transform into 84,000 mosquitoes, and it’s not easy to get all those mosquitoes back into one being. Most of the time, mosquitoes are reborn as mosquitoes. So they bob up and down in the cycle of birth and death, not understanding how to turn away from the dust and unite with enlightenment, or how to renounce confusion and return to the proper. It’s said, "Once the human body is lost, it cannot be regained in ten thousand eons." If you truly understand this principle, how could you not be afraid?

http://www.dharmasite.net/2001/5.htm

Venerable Master: On the body of one single animal are a hundred thousand, in fact several million little organisms. These organisms are fragments of what was once an animal. Why did they become organism? Because they did not believe in Buddhism.

All animals are fragments of the consciousness of people. The spirit of a human being at death may split up to become many animals. One person can become about ten animals. That’s why animals are so stupid. The spirit of an animal can split up and become, in its smallest division, an organism or plant. The feelings which plants have, then, are what separated from the animal’s spirit when it split up at death. Although the life force of a large number of plants may appear sizeable, it is not as great as that of a single animal or a single mouthful of meat. Take, for example, rice: tens of billions of grains of rice do not contain as much life force as a bit of meat the size of a grain of rice. If you open your Five Eyes, you can know this at a glance. If you haven’t opened your Eyes, no matter how one tries to explain it to you, you won’t understand. No matter how it’s explained, you won’t believe it, because you haven’t been a plant! Do you understand?

For a while, whenever I look at an animal, this idea sometimes came up. Then I started wondering. Is that animal only a portion of a reborn of someone? Where the rest of that 'soul" splitted into? And then it leads me into nihist view. How could one mindstream splitted into several independent mindstreams? Which one is the original one? You could see my confusion there. This has been a bother to me for a while...

So, I've done some researching about rebirth from/into animal realm, the references came across clearly don't match what the Master said above. In these cases: a monk was a fly in his past life, a frog was reborn as a deva after death, a father reborn as a dog. I'm sure there are several other accounts to show that one person reborn as one animal or vice versa... Master Hsuan Hua, a very high practitioner, should know about this. So why is there a contradiction?

PS: My purpose of posting this thread is not to defame the Master, it just this has been an affliction on my mind I want to clearly get rid of.

http://www.lamayeshe.com/index.php?sect=article&id=832

The Buddha then explained how this old man had created the karma to be a monk. He explained that unimaginable lifetimes ago he was a fly and there was a stupa there. There was cow dung around the stupa and the fly didn’t have any knowledge or understanding that there was a stupa there and that it was a holy object, a very precious holy object. The fly had no idea and no education. An uneducated fly! So anyway, totally with the attachment of clinging to the pleasure of the smell of the cow dung, by following the smell of the cow dung, the fly went around the stupa, and so it became a circumambulation by following the smell of cow dung. There was cow dung around that stupa, so maybe we should also have cow dung around the stupa here, so that many flies can circumambulate and they can become enlightened

http://www.vipassana.info/ma/manduka.htm

A deva. In his previous birth he was a frog on the banks of the Gaggarā, and, hearing the Buddha preach, was attracted by his voice. A cowherd, who stood leaning on a stick, drove it unwittingly into the frog's head and it died immediately, to be reborn in Tāvatimsa in a palace twelve yojanas in extent. Having discovered his previous birth, he appeared before the Buddha, revealed his identity and worshipped him. The Buddha preached to him, and the deva became a sotāpanna. Eighty four thousand others realized the Truth. Vv.v.1; VvA.216ff.; Vsm.208f.; Sp.i.121; Mil.350.

http://www.oocities.org/sxibss/ehi/0303.html

Because of his love for the dog, he went to see the Buddha and asked Him, "You are the most compassionate person but why when you walked past, you scolded my dog?"

The Buddha answered, "You care about the dog because in his previous life, he was your father and because you care for him he loves you too."

The merchant did not believe the Buddha and asked Him, "How can you prove that he is my father?"

"His mind was attached to his wealth. When you were young, he was greedy that he might lose his wealth. So he decided to keep his wealth somewhere. Because of his attachment to his wealth and after his death, he was born as a dog in your house. He normally won't leave his place where he has sat in past life. If you don't believe, go back and ask him where he has kept his wealth.

Aik TC SG

In the Anuradha Sutta - SN 22.86, The Buddha says:

…….."Very good, Anuradha. Very good. Both formerly & now, it is only stress that I describe, and the cessation of stress."

The ending of stress is what Buddhists should work towards, whether one is a Mahayanist or a Theravadin. In some quarter of the Theravada tradition, the subject of literal rebirth is not even considered to be the teaching of the Buddha as the ending of stress resulting in no further rebirth is the final aim for them.

Of course, rebirth is an important subject for the Mahayanist, as without rebirth the doctrine of the Boddhisattva Ideals and vows would be made redundant and so would be the whole tradition itself.

But to be able to go into such details on the consequence of karma and the resultant kind of rebirths that follows sounds rather speculative and debatable however enlightened the Venerable happens to be.

A human lifespan is rather short and it would be best to concentrate one’s time on the purification of our morality, purification of our mind through meditation and at the same time work towards the realization of non self and emptiness.

Getting sidetracked on such speculative topic and details on what one could turn out to be in our next life may made for interesting reading, but it is in no way going to help one in the attainment of the main objective on what Buddhism is trying to teach us.

tripsky SG

If a married couple gets divorced and each one remarries, then according to the law of cause and effect, their bodies will be cut in half after they die. This is because when they were alive, they had two relationships. So after they die, their karmic retribution manifests.

seriously?

2009novice SG

imo...
i think it's 表法... some representative...?

the karma we done leads us to all possibilities - the "fragments of soul" that i read seems to me as bad or good karma implanted in the consciousness leads to different realms

An Eternal Now SG

I don't believe in some of the things that Ven Hsuan Hua said. Just because it is said by a venerable doesn't mean it should be blindly believed.

BlurKok SG

It would at least have made some sense if people's soul are splitted because they are prominscious and have multiple partners. But if they remarried, I don't see a problem. Marriage is a serious commitment (and a major hassle to annul).

Besides, speculating on causes and consequence of people's act/state is verging on superstitious. And Buddhism does not encourages superstition. In fact, it even encourages you to ask questions. If you've read at least the first section of most of the suttras, it usually begins with Buddha's disciples asking him questions. There's no harm asking a question you already know the answer, because it helps you to verify your answer, and allow those people listening to also learn.

Today, your car broke down while on the way to rush to the airport. You start speculating that you've hindered someone in your past life, and hence you deserve this bad karma. Then, hours later, the plane you've missed crashed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, with no possible survival. Then you start speculating that those people had a shared negative karma in the past, which you plays no part in, hence they all died. Poor souls. Yet a few days later, rescuers miraculously find a little girl floating on the surface because her parents managed to her put on the life jacket quickly. And once again, you start speculating that the girl and her family must have done really bad things in their previous lives, but her bad karma is lighter compared to her dead parents. In the meantime, you heard another story about... blah blah blah. And started speculating blah blah blah.

Seriously? Get real. It's one thing to believe in karma, and another thing to speculate it, when we don't have the supernatural powers or at the level of enlightenment to know yet.

sinweiy SG

Little Buddha

Plot

Tibetan Buddhist monks from a monastery in Bhutan, led by Lama Norbu (Ruocheng Ying), are searching for a child who is the rebirth of a great Buddhist teacher, Lama Dorje (Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen). Lama Norbu and his fellow monks believe they have found a candidate for the child in whom Lama Dorje is reborn: an American boy named Jesse Conrad (Alex Wiesendanger), the young son of an architect and a teacher who live in Seattle. The monks come to Seattle in order to meet the boy.

Jesse is fascinated with the monks and their way of life, but his parents, Dean (Chris Isaak) and Lisa (Bridget Fonda), are wary, and that wariness turns into near-hostility when Norbu announces that he wants to take Jesse back with him to Bhutan to be tested. Dean changes his mind however, when one of his close friends and colleagues commits suicide because he went broke. Dean then decides to travel to Bhutan with Jesse. In Nepal, two children who are also candidates for the rebirth are encountered, Raju (Rajuh Lal) and Gita (Greishma Makar Singh).

Gradually, over the course of the movie, first Jesse’s mother and then Lama Norbu tell the life story of Prince Siddhartha, reading from a book that Lama Norbu has given to Jesse. In ancient Nepal, a Hindu prince called Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves) turns his back on his comfortable and protected life, and sets out on a journey to solve the problem of universal suffering. As he progresses, he learns profound truths about the nature of life, consciousness, and reality. Ultimately, he battles Mara (a demon representing the ego), who repeatedly tries to divert and destroy Siddhartha. Through concentrated non-attachment and final realization of the illusory nature of his own ego, Siddhartha attains enlightenment and becomes the Buddha.

In the final scenes of the movie, it is found that all three children are rebirths of Lama Dorje, separate manifestations of his body (Raju), speech (Gita), and mind (Jesse). A ceremony is held and Jesse’s father also learns some of the essential truths of Buddhism. His work finished, Lama Norbu enters a deep state of meditation and dies. As the funeral ceremony begins, Lama Norbu speaks to the children, seemingly from a higher plane, telling them to have compassion; and just before the credits roll the children are seen distributing his ashes in various places.

At the very end of the film credits, the sand mandala that was seen being constructed during the movie is destroyed, “with one swift stroke.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Buddha
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At the Bed SG

seriously?

WTH

An Eternal Now SG

Indeed. Superstitious people like to speculate... real practitioners only care about real practice and liberation.