佛法可以不提轮回吗

　　[中译]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. 现代人对宗教教导强调有必要与个人相关并直接可证，相应地在某些佛教圈子里，久经考验的轮回教说在经受苛刻的重新审查。尽管只有少数几位当代佛教思想家仍走得过远，建议将此教说作为“非科学”予以废弃，另有一种观点已开始流行，意谓不管轮回本身真实与否，轮回的教说对佛法修持无根本重要性，因此在佛法教导中无必要地位。有人说，佛法只关乎即刻当下，助我们藉提升自觉与内在诚实，解决个人难题。佛教的其余一切，只是一个古老文化的宗教性装饰，作为我们当今科技时代的佛法已彻底不合宜，如今可以放弃了。

　　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. 假如暂时放下个人偏见，直接去我们的来源查看，便会发现一个不可否认的事实：佛陀本人讲授了轮回，并且是把它作为一个基本要旨来讲授的。综观佛陀说法的经文，我们可以看见，轮回教说远非仅是对他那个时代的流行观念或者对一种亚洲文化构想的折衷接受，相反，它对于佛法修持的整个过程意义巨大，既影响着起始修持的目的，也影响着把修持坚持到底的动力。

　　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. 佛法之路的目的是从苦中解脱，佛陀多次阐明，需要从中解脱之苦，乃是受缚于周而复始的生死轮回之苦。确切地说，佛法有一个侧面是直接可见并亲身可证的。直接审视个人经历，我们可以看出，忧愁、紧张、恐惧与悲痛，总是来源于我们的贪、瞋、痴，因此是可以藉灭除那些杂染而消解的。佛法修持中这一直接可证的侧面，其重要性决不能低估，因为它坚定了我们对佛法之路解脱效力的信心。然而，对轮回教说不予重视，把佛法全义解释为藉提升自我觉察以缓解精神痛苦，便使它失去了那些更宽广的视点，佛法有赖于后者才得以保持完整的广度与深度。那样做的严重危险是，最终把佛法缩减至无异于一门复杂而古老的人道主义心理疗法。

　　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…

《佛法可以不提轮回吗

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