How do Buddhists reconcile samsara and transmigration with no self?

Bodhisattva here, I think traditionally it is maintained that rebirth is more a matter of cause and effect relationship between aggregates or bundles of perception, not a simple or discrete unit which is continually reincarnated. That said, however, certain viewpoints regarding Buddha Nature do seem to imply that there is a "true self" so take that as you will. A lot of the argumentation is more academic or dogmatic than grounded in experience, so I would advise to not become overly obsessed and instead trust practice to reveal the truth beyond paradox, dialectic, and language.

"Now, in the East the notion of measure has not played nearly
so fundamental a role. Rather, in the prevailing philosophy in the
Orient, the immeasurable (i.e. that which cannot be named,
described, or understood through any form of reason) is
regarded as the primary reality. Thus, in Sanskrit (which has an
origin common to the Indo-European language group) there is a
word ‘matra’ meaning ‘measure’, in the musical sense, which is
evidently close to the Greek ‘metron’. But then there is another
word ‘maya’ obtained from the same root, which means ‘illu-
sion’. This is an extraordinarily significant point. Whereas to
Western society, as it derives from the Greeks, measure, with all
that this word implies, is the very essence of reality, or at least
the key to this essence, in the East measure has now come to be
regarded commonly as being in some way false and deceitful. In
this view the entire structure and order of forms, proportions,
and ‘ratios’ that present themselves to ordinary perception and
reason are regarded as a sort of veil, covering the true reality,
which cannot be perceived by the senses and of which nothing
can be said or thought." -Some crazy physicist

It does but what the graphic means is union with the eternal, blissful brahman

Buddhism is bootlegged Gnosticism.

You're going about this the wrong way if you think language is going to get you anywhere. Buddhism isnt a philosophy in the greek/western sense.

This samsara is without discoverable beginning. Ignorance is conditioned by the taints of delusion, hatred and greed, and they in turn are conditioned by ignorance.

"Is there a way to end this samsara, which is without discoverable beginning?"

There is such a way, and this way is this Eightfold Path, which is right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. This way leads to Nibbana, which is perfect enlightenment in this world.

"Wonderful, excellent! This channer has truly expounded the Dhamma well! But what is the realisation of this Nibbana, which is perfect enlightenment in this world?"

Nibbana is realised when this conditioned being is penetrated by direct perception and perfect wisdom of the impermanence and no-self of the five aggregates and the six sense-bases. Nibbana is unconditioned, perfected and dustless seeing. When this has been realised you will think thus: the work has been done, the spiritual life has been lived, there is no coming back to any previous state.

"Wonderful, excellent! This channer has truly expounded the Dhamma well!"

Upon hearing these words OP immediately attained the dustless, stainless wisdom and saw the Dhamma with perfect clarity.

the re-incarnation cycle happens within maya, the word itself is derived from aryan root "may" for change. so maya itself is a system of changes devoid of reality.

buddhist goal is to break out of maya

Even though Buddhism existed hundreds of years before Gnosticism and has almost nothing in common with it.

that sounds gnostic

>Even though Buddhism existed hundreds of years before Gnosticism
True; but Gnosticism is mostly used as the umbrella term for movements which deem Creation and/or the Creator as unfit/inferior/ not worthwhile.

>has almost nothing in common with it.
I know there are many branches of Buddhism now, but just to refer to some original points from the Buddha's teachings:

>anti-somatic principle
>anti-cosmic principle
>being is suffering
>Maya, the demon-god of the World/Illusion

sure bud, none at all.

gnostics dont question individuation of souls as far as i could discern. they usually want to disengage them from alienated mode but not merge them all into one.

I tend to disagree. Most gnostic belief ascertain that the divine soul / spark which is prisoner in the inferior world of matter must undergo the process or returning to the Pleroma - which literally is "The All". Also, there are very complex cosmogonies in gnosticism which expand upon the Divine Fall, the Genesis of (sub)creations and of Man within, and have a great deal in describing the process of soul individuation (for example in manicheism with the divine tears) and re-integration.

Neither model puts much emphasis on History.

dunno, most gnostic texts i read seem optimistic about some kind of possibility of happiness in an alternative reality, once soul liberation is achieved, while B are all about self-denial and uncompromising pessimism. a G may recognize a fellow comrade in a B, but it wouldnt go both ways.

Meditation

>How do Buddhists reconcile samsara and transmigration with no self?
There is nothing to reconcile. To embrace Buddhism is to embrace process philosophy.

Let me use one of the Greeks whose thought is less foreign to exemplify some of this.

The originator of process philosophy in Western philosophy is Heraclitus, who is the closest to Eastern thought - in the latter process philosophy is the mainstream instead of being historically a minority view.

Heraclitus says that a man cannot cross the same river twice because the river isn't the same and neither is the man. There is nothing essential, irreplaceable about (we would say: the molecules in) the water or the man to ensure that there is such thing as essence/soul/thing in itself of the river or man. Everything is accidental and impermanent, nothing is essential and permanent, specifically for Heraclitus everything is subject to change except for change itself. There is no being, only Becoming.

In Hinduism you have the Atman which is the inner, deepest, immortal essence of the self, as well coincident with the divine immanence present in all things.

In Buddhism you have Anatta which is the rejection of this. Not surprisingly, Buddhism also rejects the Brahman/Ishvara as the originating, transcendent divine, closest to God as understood by Western theism.

Heraclitus, however, does believe that all is one without considering individual essences present within things, he's a monist pantheist, not a panentheist like the Hindu Brahmins. Buddhism rejects essentialism, panentheism and pantheism.

What happens when you trasmigrate in Buddhism? Information rearranges itself, not unlike when you learn new things or forget them, or gain or lose weight. This doesn't require a "self." That you have a first-person perception of continuity says nothing about having a soul or interesting personality.

Buddhism doesn't presuppose individual souls, the unity of all things, or a transcendent originating principle. Something similar happens in Western sciences such as physics and psychology.

Still, Buddhism does believe in the supernatural but becoming a deva doesn't make you God, singular and upper case G, it does not make you immortal, you just live longer, and you still need the Dharma to get out of this mess.

>Gnosticism is mostly used as the umbrella term for movements which deem Creation and/or the Creator as unfit/inferior/ not worthwhile.
Not anymore, read Brakke. Buddhism doesn't care for creation or a demiurge.

>Maya, the demon-god of the World/Illusion
The Pali Canon doesn't even talk about maya beyond Maya being the Buddha's mother's name. It talks about distortion, vipallasa. Maya is not a person in non-Theravada Buddhism.

cont.

What happens when you do get liberated? You stop changing, for starters.

So if I am free from this cycle of becoming, does it mean I start being? Does the Dhamma reveal a loophole through which I can be actualized as eternal, as essential, as a soul? Am I "saved", then? Am I in Heaven?

There is no being, no essence, remember? To answer those questions, according to Theravada Buddhism, you are not. Literally.

Nibbana is when you won't have to worry about either becoming or being.

Congratulations: like the Buddha you have succeded in fucking off.

>Buddhism doesn't care for creation or a demiurge.

Agree, but I am not implying Buddhism and Gnosticism are one. They clearly have different scopes; I am just trying to point out that there are some key concepts which are fairly similar and denote some kind of common nucleus.

After all, you have proved influence of Buddhism in Manicheism and there are clear elements of buddhist concepts in some ancient greek schools of thought (pythagoreics for one). They even found statues of Buddha wearing a toga around Athens / 300 BC.

>Something similar happens in Western sciences such as physics and psychology.

I must say, this all sounds like bringing Dennett in through the backdoor. Neither the reductive talk of Materialism nor the esoteric talk of Buddhism have detracted anything from the immanent Self. The plethora of smoke and mirrors that Materialists say are behind the Self and allegedly disprove it require a Self to operate in any capacity. I have found that nothing in the Buddhist model can escape this predicament either. Process and becoming are strictly apophatic ideas, in relation to the Self. Note that the Self in the Gnostic sense is something like the Self in Subjective Idealism, so not the sum of Phenomenal experience and the curator of memories thereof, but the immanent thread of judgement that is refracted into Personas from and among which entropic things like Time or Space emerge before collapsing under their own impotence to match the Truth and Goodness of pure Self-reflection.

>require a Self to operate in any capacity. I have found that nothing in the Buddhist model can escape this predicament either.

I can't speak for Materialists but as a Buddhist I can easily tell you this is a semantics issue. In Buddhism the self is a far greater concept than an observer or mover. Explanations are muddied by the fact that people often use colloquial definitions of the self when explaining no self or true self which is compounded by the fact that no self and true self refer to the same thing ultimately.

>I must say, this all sounds like bringing Dennett in through the backdoor.
I would think Hume and the bundle theory of self.

I don't feel qualified to debate in favor or against process philosophy compared to object-oriented ontology or more classical substance metaphysics, I simply can't help seeing impemanence all around me, and if I was unchanging I wouldn't be able to learn anything.

>no self and true self refer to the same thing
The "great self" predates the state of Arhat.

The Arhat doesn't acknowledge the sense of both 'I am' and 'this I am.'

If there was such thing as a true self, as per Anicca (impermanence) it would stop being the true self the next moment. Selfhood is illusory.

Buddhists are the ultimate nihilist extinction cult.

Are you implying extinction is bad?

No.

>Buddhism
>creator

Try again

Advaita vedanta is a form of Hinduism, what does the second paragraph that have to do with your question about Buddhism?

>being is suffering

Being is being in Buddhism. It is all and every experience realized at once. When you lean on the table and you, the table, support who is leaning on you. It is push and pull. Nothing is just -this- it is this-that.

I think that poster meant 'Existence is suffering.'

You missed the point. Changing being to existence isn't really all that different from being, for what is existence without being? The idea here is that it is all neutral and it is all encompassing. As one experiences joy, and one suffering, both exist just as well as a part of the whole of existence. No one experience is definitive of existence. This realization absolves one of even suffering as much as it does joy as wingtips of a spectrum but as the body in flight.

As I said earlier, read Siddhartha. Hesse simplified it all very well and understandably. Far better than I can even with my decade of practice.

>read Siddhartha
By Hesse? Why would I read that book for an in depth explanation of Buddhist concepts? You realize that Siddhartha isn't a book about the Buddha and that its protagonist is a man who deviates from the Buddha's teachings while being portrayed positively, don't you? I'm not doubting that you've spent ten years meditating, as I know meditation and theoretical knowledge of Buddhist texts aren't necessarily connected, but please don't insult me like this.

Ven. Dr. M. Punnaji commentary and elaboration on Majjhima Nikaya sutta 38 - Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta (The Greater Discourse On The Destruction of Craving) during the weekly Sutta Class on 5th June 2017 at the Buddhist Maha Vihara.

youtube.com/watch?v=zJfAs9Yqr8k

reminder that there is experience instead of existence

I'm just saying. It's more an in depth of explanation that some people may not ever achieve enlightenment by strict adherence to teachings. Do you not know of Siddhartha's friend Govinda? The whole idea is that for some, true enlightenment isn't achieved through teachings but mistakes. That an answer may never be fully understood if it is simply followed.
I myself had to die very painfully to realize this. But when my body carried on the world was more beautiful than I can ever explain. All of it. The so called good and the bad. It's all as it is supposed to be and I live as I am supposed to. It was something I could read about and understand. But once I experienced it first hand, I realized I never understood even the slightest beyond the surface.
True I had to suffer very greatly for the decade I began my practice heavily. But it was only suffering because I did not truly understand as I do now.

>All these il/lit/erates falling for the "self is real" meme

Zen Buddhist here, you've been played for a bunch of suckers. Enjoy your delusion, famalamalams

Y'all got it all wrong
Trying to compare belief systems like that

Why not instead rejoice in the fact that belief systems stemming from such different cultures share so much (and some things not so much)?

It is in the overlap between religions that truth is found. Not in a particular one.

Shut the fuck up.

Who will bear witness to the disillusioning and of what harm will it be if I am indeed a phantom and will dissipate?

Samsara is Nirvana

>It is in the overlap between religions that truth is found.

Alright.

>>It is in the overlap between religions that truth is found. Not in a particular one.
no. religious people and secular humanists are stuck a the ''oneness'' like here
>which literally is "The All".

it is already better to be stuck here than some secular humanist who spends his day with speculations, but it is not enough.

That was actually really fucking interesting, thanks for that.

>if I was unchanging I wouldn't be able to learn anything.

If you didn't have a permanence in you then there couldn't be anything that was learning things and relating them to itself.

Zen Buddhist monks are allowed to get married.

Believe me that I do believe in maya and in Oneness and etc

But do you really think your exact version of the entire reality, of the All is the exact correct version? Do you really think humans are capable of producing a work (such as a religious text) that is perfect and encompasses the All?

Japanese Zen is to original Buddhism what modern Lutheranism is to the Desert Fathers.

It's designed to comfortably fit into a secular society rather than making society confirm to itself. Lukewarm shit.

Found the Buddha!

It's a moot point

>tfw

it's the same self (or nonself) being eternally transmigrated.

The thing about this though is that as Nietzsche points out (although I do think this guy clearly has read Nietzsche) is that the desire to erase life after seeing it as worthless is itself subjective and arbitrary. You could very well praise life.

Seeing life as not having an intrinsic purpose is cognitive, of the mind. If you look at it objectively and rationally, you can come to the conclusion that meaning is arbitrary, because if there was a meaning, it would have to itself be meaningful for some reason, and so on etc.

Deciding that we therefore should hate life is an emotional decision which has no relation to the cognitive dismissal of any purpose to life.

yeah, all ethics come down to muh feels. some feels are more compelling than others though.

>How do Buddhists reconcile samsara and transmigration with no self?

By rejecting any ultimate continuum.

Conventionally there is a 'continuum' and from death to new birth is like making an imprint in clay. A pattern is imprinted even if the karmic 'printing-die' is then destroyed.

The salistambha sutra explicitly states "there is nothing whatsoever that transmigrates from this world to another world."

>Hesse describes it all very well in Siddhartha.

Hesse didn't understand Buddhism and that book doesn't represent Buddhism, it represents some kind of advaita.

>hat said, however, certain viewpoints regarding Buddha Nature do seem to imply that there is a "true self" so take that as you will.

Not really in Indian or Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
This ideas are sensationalized by contemporary people that only read poor English translations of the tathagatagarbha sutras.

Bump for reading Siddartha then re-visiting the whole Buddhist cycle thing.
Some entry level Buddhist history and theology books or lectures would help too.

A Veeky Forums thread is a clumsy way to approach the topic when more streamlined and focused avenues are available. I'm not sure if it's a super pleb thing to recommend but the Great Courses lecture series on Buddhism is a good start. The professor is a bit quirkier than necessary but it was a good comprehensive intro.

>Selfhood is illusory

Holy shit. Mind blown. Any other basic Buddhist knowledge you feel the need to bestow on a fellow Buddhist?

Not him but that's not true. You can refine your learning process therefor whatever mechanics are used for learning can constantly shift.

>Believe me that I do believe in Oneness

For a Veeky Forums forum, so many people have dumbass ideas about what Buddhism is about. It isn't about "oneness" or "all is one". These are explicitly identified as delusory deviations.

>I'm not sure if it's a super pleb thing to recommend but the Great Courses lecture series on Buddhism is a good start.

Definitely a pleb thing. Eckel is a nice guy and has an interest in trying to understand parts of madhyamaka, but he is far from a buddhological expert, and like so many in comparative religion, gets a lot about Buddhism wrong.

Nobody has answered my fucking question yet. Is OP just retarded?

Ur retarded. Not all vedantics are advaita.

ITT: the unenlightened play ego games with words

this is dead on accurate. I remember alan watts explaining among the lines with the hindu thought by saying the hindu connected illusion to the word "that" because it implied a separation. The whole point of eastern religion, along lines of this guy, according to watts, is that you are IT.

In Theravada, a karmic stream exists that allows for transmigration of one's karmic progress.
In Mahayana, the spirit continues on, but the spirit is also empty. It exists in the system.

Is there vedanta Buddhism, though?

Thinks clarifying buddhadharma is an unenlightened activity.

Nirodha when?

The vaisnavas say buddhists are atheists. At most, they believe in fusing with the brahmajyoti

>The whole point of eastern religion, along lines of this guy, according to watts, is that you are IT.

Watts was never a serious voice or authority on Eastern religion, let alone Buddhism. In Buddhism there is no IT to be a part of, no existing homogenious "oneness"-substance. Buddhism rejects "all is one" as delusion.

Rather, in Buddhism the dharmata of each mind is heterogeneous, like the heat and light of an individual fire.

A lot of this confusion actually comes down to the words advaya and advaita and unfounded Western fascination with the latter to the extent of projecting it onto Buddhism.

Buddhist texts virtually never use the noun advaita (non-duality), Vedantic texts do. Buddhism does however use the adjective advaya (non-dual), and means something very, very different than advaita.

This isn't true.

see >salistambha sutra: "there is nothing whatsoever that transmigrates from this world to another world."

The salistambha sutra is a definitive mahayana sutra.

You mustn't mistake upaya for the definitive position of common Mahayana.

No, there isn't.

OP raised the issue as a point counterpoint.

>At most, they believe in fusing with the brahmajyoti

What sect of Indian or Indo-Tibetan Buddhism asserts this? This is a deviation in every Buddhist system I know of.

This is a caricature of Buddhism.

Sorry i got some things mixed up.I was reading on māyāvādī, and it said buddhists didn't believe in the individual soul or the sac-cid ānanda vigraha form.

So, where do they go after breaking out the samsara cycle?

>they havent realized buddhism is the medicine and vedanta the actual food

keep feeding on ur medicine and remaining attached to your unattachment. we cant change how the human mind works, only get to know how it does it and then live by it

Conventionally, Sravakas abide in a samadhi of extinction until they are roused from their slumber to take pure birth in a buddhafield located in the highest form realms and begin (bracketing Tsongkhapian deviations) the bodhisattvayana.

This is still coarse upaya though, buddhas, and so-called sentient beings, are non-arising from beginningless time.

J. Robert Oppenheimer lucidly pointed out:
"If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say 'no;' if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say 'no;' if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say 'no;' if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say 'no.'

The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of man's self after his death; but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth-century science."

>actually buying into anti-Buddhist Brahmanical propaganda
>believes Vishnu reincarnated as Gautama the monk to tame the 'evil atheists'

Pushyamitra would be proud.

Hindu tantra streams are legitimately dead and broken. The only truly living streams of tantra remaining reside in Buddhadharma.

>Blood Elves will rule Azeroth one day, you'll see!

>actually pretending Azeroth isn't just a washed up wasteland, a shadow of its former self.

Nobody needs that shit, I also don't know a thing about "Azeroth".

>(non-dual), and means something very, very different than advaita.
such as?

Advaya literally means "not two", it is an adjective and never referring to a thing in itself. Advaita is grammatically and semantically very different. It refers to a 'non-duality', and in nearly all usages is an abstract noun referring to a kind of thing, and further that very thing in itself.

In short, advaita means non-duality in the manner of being one single thing, it refers to a kind of monism. While with advaya there is no such implication, here "not two" or non-dual doesn't necessarily mean "one". Rather, Buddhism asserts ontological undecidability, some texts express this by talking about being beyond both dual and non-dual.

Therefore in context we see this play out for example where advaita vedanta believes in a real, truly existing state of 'non-duality', and constantly use the word advaita to indicate this.

Buddhism proper completely rejects this monism and non-duality, it recognizes that there is no state or condition that is ever truly devoid of all duality as such.

So what does advaya mean to Buddhism in context? Beyond "one", beyond "two", just the mere fact that all phenomena arise in dependence and are free from all ontological extremes.

Perhaps surprising to many Westerners, to Buddhism this is just a view and in itself has surprisingly small soteriological use: merely that by understanding that lack of awakening stems from not apprehending the non-dual nature of things, we can strive to overcome it. While emptiness and non-arising on the other hand aren't views but serve as cures for views.

Merely knowing about the view doesn't do much for one's practice and this hype about non-duality in the Western contemplative community is really an overused and overrated fad that early Western scholars largely perpetuated.

In fact, experiences of oneness and "all is one" are not considered very remarkable in Buddhism, since Buddhism isn't that interested experiences per se, but is concerned with specific non-conceptual direct perceptions and ascertaining the limits of conceptual proliferation.

The difference is significant:

In the incorrect view one pursues a false, conceptually tainted nature that is an ontological, transpersonal, homogeneous, unconditioned existent. It reduces all to a non-differentiated, single substance that is self-existing. This often manifests in practice by treating the clarity of mind as an abiding substratum that serves as an independent foundation for a witness or "higher self".

While the pursuit of Buddhadharma is epistemic, and regarding a personal, heterogeneous dharmata free from the extremes of existence and non-existence etc. It is insubstantial and a non-reductive recognition that there is nothing established in which or of which to be a part.

Since so called 'conditioned' phenomena and their non-arising natures are ultimately same nor different, these phenomena have never truly come into existence in the first place, and thus have been pure and empty from the very beginning.

>It is very likely that we've misunderstood their idea of self, or lack of it.

Pretty much.

Jay Garfield, one of the leading Buddhologists states clearly:

"Buddhists are eliminativist about the self, but not about the person. That is an important distinction."

The reason why this basic element of Buddhism is lost on so many Westerners is kind of complex, but it has to do with poor scholarship starting decades ago, sloppy translations, teachers with poor English, and a Western fascination with conflating Buddhism with Neo-Advaita and other "non-dualisms".

>propaganda
>implying any doctrine isnt propaganda

yes, even emptiness is propaganda by the sole fact that it is a discourse.

So what do the Buddha-anons in this thread think of the eternal recurrence?

Conventional Buddhism is a caricature of Buddhism. It has been watered down for the masses and incorporated by mainstream society as religions always are. But the roots of most religions are very extreme.

Buddhists want to escape from eternal recurrance, they are Anti-Nietzsceans in this sense.

Of course Nietzsche was merely memeing about his vitalism in his books and was actually miserable and suicidal.

He always remained a Schopenhauerian at heart even if all of his later work was a adolescent tier reactionary pro-life stance while all the sages of old have always said that life is either not worth living or not worth clinging to. His whole idea was to oppose Schopenhauer, Christ, the Buddha, Socrates et cetera.

there's a lot in that paragraph that's accurate but the guy is pushing it towards the "wisdom of Silenus"

Buddhism is anti-death just as much as it is anti-birth. It is warped to call it "anti-natalist" given the connotations that this has in western thought.

Being born in a human incarnation, though it is bound up in suffering, is a precious opportunity to practice Dharma and achieve awakening.

We are just the universe doing its thing, and when you look at how rare life is compared to duller states of matter, never mind living beings capable of speech, thought and meditation practice, you see that every human birth is an extremely unlikely opportunity for liberation. Concatenations of phenomena that result in the opportunities we have are RARE, so use the time wisely.

who the hell are you and what are you doing on Veeky Forums

since when did the same thing ever happen twice?

I agree there is a certain provocative charge and edginess to that post but that's what makes it compelling.

If awakening leads to stopping rebirth Buddhism is exactly antinatalism though, just with a different cosmology. It's antinatalism on hard mode.

I like the positive idea of seeing your humanity as an opportunity, but from a Buddhist perspective this is because in your human life you have the greatest chance to work towards the true, final death.

>I like the positive idea of seeing your humanity as an opportunity, but from a Buddhist perspective this is because in your human life you have the greatest chance to work towards the true, final death.

how do you know that's what Nibbana is though? its notoriously slippery as a concept. The Buddha refused to clarify whether an arhat/tathagata a) exists after death, b) does not exist after death, c) both exists and does not exist after death, or d) neither exists nor does not exist after death

point being that whatever it is that happens at the full fruition of the path, is totally incommunicable in terms of our concepts of birth and death. it is often said in the suttas that with awakening we transcend birth and death, or that upon Nibbana we are never reborn in this world, but if you never are reborn in this world, does that mean there is not some place or other that some morsel of your being abides? The answer, if full awakening is a true, final death, is clearly "no", but the Buddha refused to give that question a straight answer (and most credible claimants of enlightenment since then as well), so be careful.

I'll say this - there definitely is an aspect of meditation practice that is experienced as a process of 'psychological suicide'. Your attachments to the skandas are like living beings, there is a strange feeling of grief that can arise as you watch them disintegrate. We are conditioned to the delusion that "I am" my favourite memories, my favourite music, my relationships with my friends, my opinions about this or that, and when you being to see that that you are not any of those things, it feels as though a part of you is dying. But is anything really dying? It could just be a painful attitudinal shift. We have to be careful about how much stock we put in the words we come up with to describe such things.

The problem with thinking you have an answer locked in a phrase like "true, final death" is that you come up with some kind of view of what the thing is, but you don't know what it is until you've done it. This is why there is a kind of inherent prejudice against discursive philosophical reasoning in Buddhism - we aren't going to find any answers by sitting back and thinking things through, as though we will arrive at some magic packet of words that can unlock the mystery. We have to do the contemplative practices which take us beyond thought. 10 days of solid practice on retreat with a good teacher will advance our understanding more than 10 years of philosophical reasoning and speculation about what Buddhism is about, what awakening is like and what its significance is.

Excellent critisism of my post desu.

Have you taken retreats? If so, which sect/school and what was it like?

>since when did the same thing ever happen twice?
This.

The Eternal Return, if we're supposed to take it seriously as metaphysics and as logos, and not as mythos, is essentialism masquerading as process philosophy, where in order to remain the same things move in circles.

>from a Buddhist perspective this is because in your human life you have the greatest chance to work towards the true, final death
Buddhism as a cult of annihilation sounds like an atheistic, secular, naturalist reading.

As a human your best choice is not to be a Buddhist, it is to become a Buddhist monk, the monks themselves know perfectly well that not all monks are gonna make it in this life.

If you can't be a monk you could return as one in the next life. As long as you're stuck in the mess that is samsara, your past and future matter, as kamma.

To reject rebirth is to reject kamma is to reject the foundation of Buddhism's ethics and practical aspects.