Milinda Panha

This is from Bhikkhu Pesala's abridged translation of the Milinda Panha (available here). Other translations differ substantially. I like this one, though, because it treats rebirth as a matter of dependent arising, not atman.

The tension between anatman and rebirth is evident in many buddhisms, not just Tibetan, though perhaps there it becomes especially acute. I think Robert Thurman and others are right to insist upon rebirth (and Karma) as needed to make a Buddhism that works properly, that is, to make one that logically implies the necessity of compassionate behavior. Often, however, anatman is sacrificed in the process.

When an effort is made to "naturalize" Buddhism, as for example in Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs or Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain, anatman can be preserved. After all, science and philosophy have for some time taken it as their duty to get rid of the soul, so that bit of common ground is easily staked out. But this approach often finds little room for rebirth and Karma, which are treated at best as benevolent myths and at worst as silly superstitions. Such a Buddhism can perhaps inspire a generalized niceness, but it can be hard to see how it imposes the duty to work tirelessly to end all suffering for all sentient beings that is embodied in the Bodhisattva Vow.

Tom Pepper's essay Naturalizing Buddhism Without Being Reductive charts a different path. By treating mind as existing "only in the socially produced symbolic and imaginary system" so that "the mind is not in the brain but in systems of symbolic communication, which must always take place between multiple individuals," he is able to dispense with the need for a "world-transcendent entity that leaps from body to body" and yet preserve rebirth, now conceptualized as the "disposition or tendency in the symbolic/imaginary structure to reproduce a certain kind of subject by interpellating new bodily individuals." This seems to me not too far from Nagasena's "mind and matter [that] is not...released from the results of its previous deeds" in the passage cited above.

Pepper cites Roy Bhaskar, Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou in connection with this idea of mind, which is more fully developed in the book Cruel Theory | Sublime Practice, though he does not claim that any of them hold this view in quite this radical form. In fact, Pepper himself hedges a bit, saying in "Naturalizing Buddhism" that it "overstate(s) the matter somewhat." (But in Cruel Theory he backs away a bit from his hedging, saying that the formula overstates things "only slightly" while repeating it twice, once in bold face set off from the rest of the text, and calling it "perhaps the most important concept in all of Badiou's, Lacan's or Buddhist thought.")

Whatever it owes to the authors Pepper credits, the idea of mind not being in the brain is bound to sound radical and even scary to us, conditioned as we are by a rhetoric of the atomistically conceived individual agent. It raises serious questions about agency, to which Pepper turned soon after initiating his project at The Faithful Buddhist with a post titled "Anatman and Collective Agency" (September 16, 2013) -- with what success I will not consider here. But whatever complications this idea of mind poses for understanding agency, it would seem to offer an elegant solution to a puzzle that has plagued Buddhists and would-be Buddhists for a long time: if there is no atman, how is it that upon death "mind and matter is not thereby released from the results of its previous deeds." If Buddhism is to give us a reason to care about solving problems that we are unlikely to see solved in our lifetimes, which is something it needs to do if the Boddhisattva Vow is to mean anything, it is in need of such a solution.