Question

In the very early days of Christianity, reincarnation was not rejected. Could it be that the reincarnation of a soul is in fact the same as reincarnation of Kamma?

Answer

Maybe. I can't really answer this question because I simply don't know, which leads me to another little thing. The Buddha was once being asked about Kamma, about the beginning of time, the end of time, where the Buddhas go when they die, all sorts of far-reaching, big, big questions. He basically said before you can get the answers to those questions you will go insane. To a certain extent, asking a lot of questions that don't have an answer is actually Dukkha in itself. And the Buddha never explained the beginning of time, as he stated he couldn't even see his own first birth. He did not like going into those questions because they weren't really that important for the actual practice.

He likened a lot of these questions to the following little analogy. He said it is rather like a person who is walking along a path and somebody shoots them in the back with a poisoned arrow. The person falls over on the ground and they are bleeding to death. It happens that a doctor is walking by. The doctor sees this person bleeding to death and runs up and goes, "Oh, let me help you, I am a doctor, I can pull out this arrow, I can save you!" The person lying on the ground says, "No, wait a minute, wait a minute, I want to know who shot the arrow, I want to know was it a man or woman, were they tall, were they short, do they have a family, blah, blah, blah." Before the person gets those answers, they die. The important job is to get the arrow out. We have to be careful not to put more arrows in. We've got to be careful with how much we get involved in these sort of questions, get the arrow out instead!

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