Learning to see beyond Christian dogma to recognize that Heaven is simply a present existence while engaged in good deeds. Hell is the opposite, while engaged in bad. Simple mathematics really: good begets good; evil begets evil.
The Chinese have instead looked at this in terms of heaven and earth, where earth is the physical existence we enjoy here on this planet, and Heaven is the elements moving around us, like weather patterns, natural phenomena, etc. The landscape paintings therefore most often depicted a sage in the mountains, but it's not really him in the mountains as much as him engaging the phenomenally of existence, where the human force and the natural world come the closest to terms. I suppose had the ancient Chinese been more of a seafaring people, more of their paintings would have depicted the open water, as there too we are the most vulnerable to the whims of nature.
A decade of zen study in Japan had brought the idea of reincarnation to the fore, that souls eventually transmigrate into something else, as conditioned by the laws of karma. Yet when my son died, I was puzzled by all my Japanese relatives talking about how he was now in Heaven, or the Pure Land in the Japanese Buddhist idea. I made temporary sense of this in thinking that the subjective corporeal stamp that was Ken's "soul" was now in Heaven, while the more objective animating "spirit" would reincarnate.
It was just after university that I started to read more about Buddhism and found myself more and more swayed by it's ideals. The Buddhist concept of the world made more sense to me, and I was able to eventually reconcile in it the Catholic ideals that I had been raised with. But I was simply unable to make the leap from the Christian concept of Heaven to Buddhist reincarnation. It proved to be a near impenetrable chasm.
Yet Robert Linssen's Living Zen eventually helped me chose one over the other. The book deftly explains zen usuing the language of a number of disciplines, such as religion, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics, among others. But I found clarity in its description of zen in terms of energy, particularly in how energy is always in balance, how atoms (and electricity) are in a constant flow of plus and minus. I began to see Heaven, at least how Christianity defines it, as a sort of energy bank, where souls go after they die. It made no sense to me, as it seemed contradictory to what I understood about the world.
Bizarrely enough, as my understanding of Buddhism evolved, I found that I could no longer believe in reincarnation either. A zen teacher I studied under claimed that reincarnation has no place in traditional Buddhism, and it found its way in later due to the Vedanta-inflected Buddhism that developed later in Tibet. And this began to make sense.
Now I feel that reincarnation is simply a metaphor for the body decomposing and its remains going on to feed already existing life forms like worms and vegetation, then working its way from there up the food chain to create life in new bodies.
In a metaphorical sense, perhaps the word 'reincarnation' should be replaced instead by 'reanimation.' Which brings us back to the Christians again. After all, wasn't Jesus reborn three day after death, like a hermit meditating in cave, this new person born after some sort of enlightened experience?
Or as others would have it, Christmas's proximity to the Winter Solstice speaks volumes, for on December 21st the sun stops moving southward, pauses, and then starts moving northward. The very word "solstice," derived from the Latin "sol" for "sun" and "sisto" for "stop."
Thus the confusion continues. Doubt, I suppose, is a wonderful catalyst for resurrection, of ideas both old and new.
On the turntable: Bach, "Cantatas"
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