Many thanks for your admirably detailed letter. The attitude you speak of, that of cursing the world and oneself, is, in a sense, the beginning of wisdom. Revolt is the first reaction of an intelligent man when he begins to understand the desperate nature of his situation in the world; and it is probably true to say that nothing great has ever been achieved except by a man in revolt against his situation. But revolt alone is not enough—it eventually contradicts itself. A man in blind revolt is like someone in a railway compartment trying to stop the train by pushing against the opposite seat with his feet: he may be strong enough to damage the compartment, but the damaged compartment will nevertheless continue to move with the train. Except for the arahat, we are all in this train of samsāra, and the problem is to stop the train whilst still travelling in it. Direct action, direct revolt, won't do; but something, certainly, must be done. That it is, in fact, possible to stop the train from within we know from the Buddha, who has himself done it:

I, monks, being myself subject to birth, decay, and death, having seen the misery of subjection to birth, decay, and death, went in search of the unborn, undecaying, undying, uttermost quietus of extinction (nibbāna), and I reached the unborn, undecaying, undying, uttermost quietus of extinction.
Revolt by all means, but let the weapons be intelligence and patience, not disorder and violence; and the first thing to do is to find out exactly what it is that you are revolting against. Perhaps you will come to see that what you are revolting against is avijjā.

Nanavira Thera on rebirth



People who find life worth living are usually confining their attention to this particular life; they forget (or do not know) that there has been no beginning to this business of living. This particular life may perhaps be not too bad, but how about when they were a dog, or a hen, or a frog, or a tapeworm? Alam—Enough!

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It is always advisable, when taking up a new author, to find out whether he accepts or rejects survival of death. If one knows this, one can make the necessary allowances, and one may perhaps make sense of what would otherwise seem to be rubbish. Camus is a case in point—to find him sympathetic it is necessary to know that he passionately loathes the idea of survival.

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I see what you mean about the Balfour/Willett book, and in fact I did not want to press it on you because I rather thought you might feel that way about it. Our temperaments are too different—which, of course, you very well understand when you disapprove my preference for ideas over images. It is not easy for me to think mythically—in terms, that is to say, of myths (in the good sense)—and I always tend to ask myself 'Is it true as a matter of fact? Is such a thing actually possible?' whereas for you, as I understand you, the question is 'Is it a valid myth?' And so by a commodious vicus of recirculation, we come back to Balfour and Willett.[2] For me the question that this book raises (whether or not it provides the answer) is obviously 'Are these communications actually what they purport to be? Is rebirth (or personal survival of death) true as a matter of fact?' And, of course, this question is perfectly intelligible to me.
But to you, I rather imagine, this question is not intelligible: it is not the sort of question that can be raised at all—or at least, it ought not to be raised. Re-birth, survival, yes, by all means, but as a metaphor for something else, perhaps for everything else (the continuation of the human race, of one's seed in one's progeny, of one's fame in the successive editions of one's books, of the traditions and culture of a people; the re-birth of the year at the winter solstice, of the foliage of a tree each spring, and of the tree itself in the germinating of its seeds—your list will be far better than mine can ever hope to be).
Perhaps you will say (or am I misrepresenting you?) that the truths of religion are mythical truths, that they are not matters of fact; and if you do say this, I shall not contradict you. But then I shall have to say, with infinite regret, that if it is a religion you are after (in the sense of a 'valid myth'), then I have nothing to offer you, because the Dhamma is not a religion.[a]
In other words, before we can even begin to discuss the Dhamma we have to agree whether or not the question 'Is there re-birth?' can be raised at all, and if so in what sense. It is simply a matter of first securing our lines of communication. But I am not suggesting that you will want to do this. (What makes the situation all the more difficult is the popular and mistaken idea that the Buddha's Teaching 'explains re-birth'.)

Footnotes:
[a] I don't mean to say that the truths of Buddhism are necessarily matter-of-fact truths in an objective scientific sense: the Four Noble Truths are not even, properly speaking, propositions at all. (Cf. Heidegger's idea of 'truth' as the self-disclosure of a thing for what it really is.)

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You told me that you had read Francis Story's 'The Case for Rebirth' (BPS Wheel 12/13) and found that it helped you to accept rebirth as a fact. I have now just read this booklet myself, and perhaps a few observations might not be out of place.
To begin with, the examples of (what appear to be) rebirth are good, and there is no reason at all not to take them at their face value. Such cases, while not amounting to logical demonstration of the necessity of rebirth (which is not possible anyway, since, let alone re-birth, logic cannot even demonstrate the necessity of birth—is there any logical reason why you, Dr. de Silva, should have been born?), cannot easily be dismissed on some other hypothesis.[a]
The remainder of Mr. Story's booklet, however, sets out to explain rebirth, either in terms taken from the Suttas ('Dependent Origination,' paticcasamuppāda) or the exegetical literature ('Cognitive Series,' cittavīthi), or else in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. This part of the booklet is worthless (or worse), and any acceptance of rebirth based on it is built on quicksand; for not only are the explanations bogus,[b] but they should never have been attempted in the first place. The Buddha does not explain how rebirth takes place; he states simply that, unless craving has ceased, rebirth does take place. It may be that a more detailed description of the phenomenon of rebirth than is found in the Suttas could be made, but (a) it would be irrelevant and unnecessary (because it is quite enough just to accept rebirth), and (b) it would not be in terms of 'cause and effect' (i.e. it would be strictly a description and not an explanation).
This distinction between description and explanation is of vital importance, and is really what I was talking about when I said that the Buddha's Teaching cannot be understood by one who (however unwittingly) adopts the scientific attitude (which is also the scholar's attitude). I suggested that a more fruitful approach to the Dhamma, at least for one accustomed to Western ideas, might be made by way of the existential or phenomenological philosophers, who have developed a more direct and fundamental approach to things than that of empirical science with its inductive and statistical methods. These methods give, at best, only probable results; whereas the phenomenologist, not going beyond description of present phenomena, enjoys certainty.

Footnotes:
[9.a] I would strongly recommend G. N. M. Tyrrell's The Personality of Man (Pelican Books A165, published by Penguin Books). It gives an intelligent summary of various supernormal phenomena, and includes some solid evidence for rebirth. 

[9.b] (i) 'Dependent Origination' has—in spite of a venerable tradition—nothing whatsoever to do with 'Kamma and Re-birth', (ii) the 'Cognitive Series' is rubbish anyway, and (iii) Science, since it excludes the scientist, has nothing to say about the scientist's—or anyone else's—rebirth

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