Dharma doesn’t lend itself well to elevator speeches.
I used to work at a place that helped startup businesses. As part of the startup help, we would help develop the startup’s marketing, including something called the “elevator speech.” This meant that if someone asked what the business was about, the entrepreneur could explain the business briefly yet sufficiently in the time it would take for a short elevator ride.
When describing spirituality, like Yoga and Buddhism, we sometimes have the same concern. We want a quick and solid summary of tenets, beliefs and practices.
Oh sure, in regard to Buddhism, your elevator speech might step through the Fourfold Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path easy enough, but there are some conceptual thorns out there that can make an elevator speech spring leaks as quickly as a discount store air mattress.
One of these thorns is rebirth–also referred to as reincarnation. Buddhism seems like a pretty rational system until you hit the notion of dying and being reborn in some other form due to somehow transmitting your samskaras–volitional tendencies or karmic imprints–to a newborn life which could either be an animal, a buddha, a god or a hell being depending on the merits of your actions in the preceding life. I won’t even go into descriptions of Tibetan bardo states or the Tulku system of reincarnated spiritual masters.
In our world of scientific materialism all this is crazy talk. You might as well say you believe in some guy who turned water into wine or rose from the dead or something. For someone hearing about Buddhism for the first time, this is a stumbling block, an irrational deal breaker. Your elevator speech has tanked.
I’ve been known to avoid difficulty in my own elevator speech, ignoring some of what the Buddha actually said in the Pali Canon, and going with an explanation of rebirth offered by Stephen Batchelor in his book, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening:
Regardless of what we believe, our actions will reverberate beyond our deaths. Irrespective of our personal survival, the legacy of our thoughts, words and deeds will continue through the impressions we leave behind in the lives of those we have we have influenced and touched in any way. (Batchelor, 38)
Whew! I’m back to rational causality. My elevator speech is back on track.
What I leave out of the elevator speech is that I believe that Batchelor’s description doesn’t go far enough (and in fairness to Batchelor, he also has a little more to say about the subject). It almost seems to have simplified rebirth to something like the impact that your favorite high school teacher had in your life. I believe Bhikkhu Bodhi captures the concept of rebirth better here:
To understand how kamma [karma] can produce its effects across the succession of rebirths we must invert our normal, everyday conception of the relationship between consciousness and matter. Under the influence of materialistic biases we assume that material existence is determinative of consciousness. Because we witness bodies being born into this world and observe how the mind matures in tandem with the body, we tacitly take the body to be the foundation of our existence and mind or consciousness an evolutionary offshoot of blind material processes. Matter wins the honored status of “objective reality,” and mind becomes an accidental intruder upon an inherently senseless universe.
From the Buddhist perspective, however, consciousness and the world coexist in a relationship of mutual creation which equally require both terms. Just as there can be no consciousness without a body to serve as its physical support and a world as its sphere of cognition, so there can be no physical organism and no world without some type of consciousness to constitute them as an organism and world. Though temporally neither mind nor matter can be regarded as prior to the other, in terms of practical importance the Buddha says that mind is the forerunner. Mind is the forerunner, not in the sense that it arises before the body or can exist independently of a physical substratum, but in the sense that the body and the world in which we find ourselves reflect our mental activity.
It is mental activity, in the form of volition, that constitutes kamma, and it is our stock of kamma that steers the stream of consciousness from the past life into a new body. (Bodhi, accesstoinsight.org)
Naturally, Bodhi, a great monk, makes a lousy entrepreneur. This small snippet of his elevator speech won’t do–elevator speeches prove insufficient for discussing Dharma. This is further complicated by the fact that the business of Dharma, after all, is one of impermanence. Honestly, you can’t sell this stuff. Not really.
© 2010 Yoga Buddhist.