daverupa wrote:If agnostic approaches to post-death states are undertaken, all that is left is this world here and now, and one is left with Buddha's Wager as given to Pāṭaliya in the Sutta in my signature. This is a perfectly reasonable alternative to your insistence that a certain belief is necessary.
I'm not talking about the necessity of a certain belief. I'm talking about the meaningfulness and purpose of living the path of ascetic renunciation. If the view of continued birth and death in saṃsāra is denied then the monastic path as prescribed in the vinaya and suttas becomes an unreasonable and entirely unnecessary way to live one's life. A far more reasonable choice would be to live a life engaged in moderate pleasures.
daverupa wrote:I don't want to argue the presence or absence, the literal or metaphorical readings here - at least one hundred years of doctrinal development are reflected in the Nikayas, and all sorts of things are in there (don't worry, I'm not going to get all "pristine Ur-Canon" on you); I just don't want there to be those exploring the Dhamma who see this sort of reasoning and lump the Dhamma in with the Bible and the Norse Eddas, and move on.
It sells the Dhamma short, in my opinion.
Not taking the texts seriously on their own terms sells the dhammavinaya short. Even in the context of textual analysis alone, sans lineage, Buddhist scholar Lambert Schmithausen sums it up well:
- I presuppose that the texts I make use of are to be taken seriously, in the sense that one has to accept that they mean what they say, and that what they mean is reasonable within its own terms.
And at this purely analytical level, without lineage there is no need to
believe in the assertions made in the texts nor
live by the vinaya precepts.
But if one is going to actually live by the vinaya precepts and various related prescriptions given in the suttas it is far more reasonable and purposeful to accept the possibility that the assertions made in the texts are true.
Said another way, if a person is intent on maintaining some version of scientific materialism then there are other systems of theory and practice that are more compatible with that sort of agenda than the dhammavinaya.