Buddhism, Rebirth and DNA…

img_1773The year 1953 should have been a big one for Buddhism. Something to do with Tibet, you’re probably thinking? No, something to do with the discovery of DNA, I’m thinking, because that meant that we Buddhists would no longer have to twist ourselves into human pretzels and insert our heads halfway up our… meditation postures…

…just to Ptolemy-like add another feedback loop of ellipses and eclipses to somehow justify and make sense of rebirth, reincarnation in sheep’s clothing, rather than just toss the whole thing out as an outdated vestige of a previous era, in which learning was nascent and science non-existent…

But it didn’t exactly work out that way, unfortunately, with the denizens of dharma doubling down on flimsy foundations to prove by disproving, that the world is indeed not flat, but circular, as had long been suspected, though not in space but time, revolving around us like a Hollywood B-movie, of flashing screens and self-winding clocks, perpetual motion in a closed time-box…

For the uninitiated rebirth is something somehow analogous to Christian purgatory, halfway between Heaven and Hell, so giving us multiple options for deliverance from those forty-nine dead days before our soul, or karma, or maybe just our neuroses, depending on who’s opining, is sent straight to the doorstep, FedEx priority, of some unsuspecting, but quite pregnantly expecting couple, just in time for its final delivery through the birth canal to the bedroom, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead…

Now just exactly where this Big Idea originated is not clear, but it certainly wasn’t the Buddha’s, though he was certainly seduced by the idea enough to give it his imprimatur and all the power and respect of his position that it could carry, but it came a while before him, somewhere in the 700-800 BCE time-range it seems, though any estimate closer than that in preliterate India would be only the wildest speculation…

And there is a good chance that the earliest instigators were the Jains, competition of the Buddhists and Brahmanists, and the most austere of the lot, they more concerned with ritual purity than commercial popularity, often naked but seldom afraid, but it’s still not clear from what comes the original impetus for this flash of brilliance…

…that our actions on this earth would somehow congeal into gooey sticky transmittable karma that would go with us not only through this life but another and another, hopefully as human, and if lucky even masculine, unless otherwise ‘liberated’ from this ‘wheel of cyclic existence’ somehow some way…

Rebirth was the Molecular Biology of its time, cutting edge thought…

And if the guy with the Big Idea had ulterior motives, then it’s still not clear what, whether simple child psychology to keep you in line while you’re doing your time, or to ensure that high-caste Brahmins would forever be in charge of the whole shebang, but I prefer a middle path in which it was noticed that something ‘carried over’ through the lines of genesis, plain as the nose on yer face, and that of your young ones, and this would somehow explain it all…

So rebirth was certainly never ‘proven’, true, but perhaps supported by this astute observation that something gets carried over, or carried on, from one generation to the next. Is it too much to think that the original(s) might survive in some form, in one place or another? Thus we have ancestor worship of the past, and rebirth worship of the future, through the intermediate notions of self and soul and personality, slathered with karma and left in the oven to bake…

There’s only one problem: the holy triumvirate of karma, rebirth and past lives is not the best answer, though finding that answer would take the best minds of many generations, both theoretical and experimental, and countless hours of testing. But they were right. Something does indeed continue from one generation to the next and we now call it DNA, a lowly acid in the shape of a spiral—a double spiral—that had long been written off as a write-off, while scientists looked for the perfect protein, proteins generally viewed with more potential than acids…

So that got some blokes the Nobel Prize, but didn’t even make a dent in the noble Aryan eyes of Buddhism. Because this is a religion for which the current Dalai Lama once had to ensure his fellow Tibetans that he’d been up in many planes many times and that the earth was indeed round…

But even he is not jumping on the DNA science wagon, saying something like, “I don’t think science will ever disprove rebirth.” It doesn’t work that way. Science doesn’t have to take the time to disprove every half-baked idea from every religion that made the cut to the present. For anyone who thinks like that will never accept the evidence anyway, even when it’s staring them in the face, as it already is…

But hopefully the next generation will, as the logic and the evidence sink in, for religion can never go forward if it’s stuck in the past, head planted in the sand in the hope of sprouting wings. Just like Christianity needs no creator nor heaven or even Hell to justify its mandate to love your neighbor as yourself, Buddhism needs no past lives nor karmic retribution in order to justify its mandate for compassion and non-grasping in the face of suffering–and that is gospel…