佛法可以不提輪回嗎

　　[中譯]良稹

　　Dhamma Without Rebirth

　　Ven. Bhikkhu

　　In line with the present-day stress on the need for religious teachings to be personally relevant and directly verifiable, in certain Dhamma circles the time-honored Buddhist doctrine of rebirth has come up for severe re-examination. Although only a few contemporary Buddhist thinkers still go so far as to suggest that this doctrine be scrapped as "unscientific," another opinion has been gaining ground to the effect that whether or not rebirth itself be a fact, the doctrine of rebirth has no essential bearings on the practice of Dhamma and thence no claim to an assured place in the Buddhist teachings. The Dhamma, it is said, is concerned solely with the here and now, with helping us to resolve our personal hangups through increased self-awareness and inner honesty. All the rest of Buddhism we can now let go as the religious trappings of an ancient culture utterly inappropriate for the Dhamma of our technological age. 現代人對宗教教導強調有必要與個人相關並直接可證，相應地在某些佛教圈子裏，久經考驗的輪回教說在經受苛刻的重新審查。盡管只有少數幾位當代佛教思想家仍走得過遠，建議將此教說作爲“非科學”予以廢棄，另有一種觀點已開始流行，意謂不管輪回本身真實與否，輪回的教說對佛法修持無根本重要性，因此在佛法教導中無必要地位。有人說，佛法只關乎即刻當下，助我們藉提升自覺與內在誠實，解決個人難題。佛教的其余一切，只是一個古老文化的宗教性裝飾，作爲我們當今科技時代的佛法已徹底不合宜，如今可以放棄了。

　　If we suspend our own predilections for the moment and instead go directly to our sources, we come upon the indisputable fact that the Buddha himself taught rebirth and taught it as a basic tenet of his teaching. Viewed in their totality, the Buddha”s discourses show us that far from being a mere concession to the outlook prevalent in his time or an Asiatic cultural contrivance, the doctrine of rebirth has tremendous implications for the entire course of Dhamma practice, affecting both the aim with which the practice is taken up and the motivation with which it is followed through to completion. 假如暫時放下個人偏見，直接去我們的來源查看，便會發現一個不可否認的事實：佛陀本人講授了輪回，並且是把它作爲一個基本要旨來講授的。綜觀佛陀說法的經文，我們可以看見，輪回教說遠非僅是對他那個時代的流行觀念或者對一種亞洲文化構想的折衷接受，相反，它對于佛法修持的整個過程意義巨大，既影響著起始修持的目的，也影響著把修持堅持到底的動力。

　　The aim of the Buddhist path is liberation from suffering, and the Buddha makes it abundantly clear that the suffering from which liberation is needed is the suffering of bondage to samsara, the round of repeated birth and death. To be sure, the Dhamma does have an aspect which is directly visible and personally verifiable. By direct inspection of our own experience we can see that sorrow, tension, fear and grief always arise from our greed, aversion and ignorance, and thus can be eliminated with the removal of those defilements. The importance of this directly visible side of Dhamma practice cannot be underestimated, as it serves to confirm our confidence in the liberating efficacy of the Buddhist path. However, to downplay the doctrine of rebirth and explain the entire import of the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced self-awareness is to deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so one seriously risks reducing it in the end to little more than a sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy. 佛法之路的目的是從苦中解脫，佛陀多次闡明，需要從中解脫之苦，乃是受縛于周而複始的生死輪回之苦。確切地說，佛法有一個側面是直接可見並親身可證的。直接審視個人經曆，我們可以看出，憂愁、緊張、恐懼與悲痛，總是來源于我們的貪、瞋、癡，因此是可以藉滅除那些雜染而消解的。佛法修持中這一直接可證的側面，其重要性決不能低估，因爲它堅定了我們對佛法之路解脫效力的信心。然而，對輪回教說不予重視，把佛法全義解釋爲藉提升自我覺察以緩解精神痛苦，便使它失去了那些更寬廣的視點，佛法有賴于後者才得以保持完整的廣度與深度。那樣做的嚴重危險是，最終把佛法縮減至無異于一門複雜而古老的人道主義心理療法。

　　The Buddha himself has clearly indicated that the root problem of human existence is not simply the fact that we are vulnerable to sorrow, grief and fear, but that we tie ourselves through our egoistic clinging to a constantly self-regenerating pattern of birth, aging, sickness and death within which we undergo the more specific forms of mental affliction. He has also shown that the primary d…

《佛法可以不提輪回嗎

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