Soul with unfulfilled desires

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firewheel
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Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by firewheel »

Hi Members,

According to the Buddhist scriptures, what happens to the soul if a person passes away with unfulfilled desires?

Will the soul get to be reborn again as a human to fulfill his desires?

Thank you.
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Ayu
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by Ayu »

Soul is a very unfortunate choice of word in Buddhism.

And desire is not the only item that influences what happens next. I.e. fulfilling desires is not a positive thing in every case.
From the perspective of karma, fulfilling desires is just a form of exhausting positive karma. The sum of good and bad actions on one's account is influencing the direction of what appears to you next.
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Queequeg
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by Queequeg »

Nothing. There is no soul.

If a person dies with unfulfilled desires and those are the dominant impulse, theres a chance they are reborn as preta.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
yinyangkoi
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by yinyangkoi »

Ayu wrote: Sun Aug 08, 2021 7:04 am Soul is a very unfortunate choice of word in Buddhism.

And desire is not the only item that influences what happens next. I.e. fulfilling desires is not a positive thing in every case.
From the perspective of karma, fulfilling desires is just a form of exhausting positive karma. The sum of good and bad actions on one's account is influencing the direction of what appears to you next.
If one exhausts karma by fulfilling desires, won't that create more karma? Also, how to exhaust negative karma?
Malcolm
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by Malcolm »

firewheel wrote: Sun Aug 08, 2021 3:44 am Hi Members,

According to the Buddhist scriptures, what happens to the soul if a person passes away with unfulfilled desires?

Will the soul get to be reborn again as a human to fulfill his desires?

Thank you.
According to Buddhist scriptures, there is no soul at all.
Jesse
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by Jesse »

Malcolm wrote: Sun Sep 12, 2021 2:12 pm
firewheel wrote: Sun Aug 08, 2021 3:44 am Hi Members,

According to the Buddhist scriptures, what happens to the soul if a person passes away with unfulfilled desires?

Will the soul get to be reborn again as a human to fulfill his desires?

Thank you.
According to Buddhist scriptures, there is no soul at all.
Or rather the thing most people believe to be a soul is empty. Rebirth happens, and most people without any knowledge of Buddhism would consider those things which are reborn to be the 'soul'.
Image
Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
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Supramundane
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by Supramundane »

firewheel wrote: Sun Aug 08, 2021 3:44 am Hi Members,

According to the Buddhist scriptures, what happens to the soul if a person passes away with unfulfilled desires?

Will the soul get to be reborn again as a human to fulfill his desires?

Thank you.
I'm sure there's a term in logic for a case where the question itself is invalid. For example, what happens when you reach the edge of the Earth: can you look over the side and see the back of the tortoise holding it up? Or is there a huge wall blocking you? Or something else?

In antiquity, there may have been certain thinkers who spent much of their lives pondering such questions, but ultimately, considering such questions is intellectually a dead-end because the question itself is invalid. No matter how long you ponder it, you will not come up with a satisfactory answer.

Therefore, the key in life is not always having the right answers, but how to formulate our questions. Thus, I think you should reformulate your initial question. I think it has the potential of being very interesting, but you should reword it a bit.

But let me ask you a question that perhaps gets to the heart of your query: when thoughts stop in our mind, do you think rebirth immediately takes place?
muni
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by muni »

Like said no soul, but not "nothingness either".

We use to throw a light on other/others, followed by desires. We need to learn/try as much as we can to be vigilant, throw a light inside own mind, see how our grasping habits repeatedly arise. Buddhism has methods to be free of these.

When Buddha was sitting, all kind of Mara were trying to disturb him. He was not thinking how bad or good they were but watched inside own mind, to see eventually upcoming desires to get rid of these/ or to want those. He saw the problem was to solve in own mind.

Matthieu Ricard:
In conventional terms, we can talk about an ‟individual” consciousness, even if the individual doesn't exist as an isolated entity. The fact that there's no such discontinuous entity being transferred from one life to the next doesn't mean that there can't be a continuity of functioning and a particular history.

That the self has no true existence doesn't prevent one particular stream of consciousness from having qualities that distinguish it from another stream. The fact that there's no boat floating down the river doesn't prevent the water from being full of mud, polluted by a paper factory, or clean and clear. The state of the river at any given moment is the result of its history. In the same way, an individual stream of consciousness is loaded with all the traces left on it by positive and negative thoughts, as well as by actions and words arising from those thoughts. What we're trying to do by spiritual practice is to gradually purify the river.
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Sādhaka
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Re: Soul with unfulfilled desires

Post by Sādhaka »

“Soul” is an vague word.

In Buddhadharma there is no “soul”, however that doesn’t mean that Buddhadharma could be materialist or nihilistic or anything of the sort.

Holding onto unfulfilled desires after death would mean that you’d return to samsara; however whether or not you’ll get to do the things that you think would fulfill your desires, would depend on what kind of merits you’ve accumulated....
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