(Buddhist Values for Today? -- continued)
One stumbling block is that the “big bang” theory to explain the origins of the universe tends to undermine the Buddhist view that the universe had no beginning and will have no end.
A second stumbling block is the traditional view that one goes through a succession of lives to reach Nirvana---a perfected state free from suffering. Some folks have been brought up to believe that there is indeed an afterlife, but just one afterlife, in a better place. Others do not believe in an afterlife or doubt its existence.
For these individuals, the Buddhist belief that escape from the sufferings of the world can be achieved only through continuing self-improvement in countless successive lives is hard to accept. It is difficult to understand how, in Tibetan Buddhist belief, the elements that form one individual being will somehow find each other and come together once again in a successor being during “bardo,” the period after death.
A third stumbling block is the oft-heard Buddhist view that there is no “Self.” This view runs contrary to the American ideal of a healthy, whole, integrated, fully-developed Self. It is important to understand here that the Buddhist teaching that there is no “Self” actually refers to an external Self that can exist independently of one’s mind and body.
The closest counterpart to that concept in Western thinking is that of the soul. Buddhists would say that an individual is mind and body together, but no more. There is, however, a “self” of mind and body together during life that is the respository of the life force, sensations, memory, thought, and so on.
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