score:2
The version you linked is truncated, as is common for repetitions of previous sections. Each section ends:
Why is that? Transmigration has no known beginning. No first point is found of sentient beings roaming and transmigrating, shrouded by ignorance and fettered by craving. For such a long time you have undergone suffering, agony, and disaster, swelling the cemeteries. This is quite enough for you to become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed regarding all conditions.
The point is not that making balls of mud to represent one's ancestors, or that removing mustard seeds from a three-mile-square blob once per century, is enough to achieve enlightenment; all of these discourses on causation, and these (in the Duggatasutta) concerning misery, conclude with a statement of the misery of timeless transmigration (using Bhikkhu Sujato's term for "saαΉsΔro"); the point is that mindfulness of all of this may be enough for attainment of NibbΔna.
Upvote:0
From experience, whether I sometimes view or viewed my own wife as my "sister" isn't really your business, and youngsters sometimes think a lot of foolish things -- but certainly no-one, neither our two different families nor the laws, ever called it incest.
And I think the sutta is relevant, to the answer to your previous question. If nothing else it's a reminder that this kind of idea is in the suttas -- not only in the Jataka which you referenced. As a sutta it also helpfully includes the exhortation or conclusion (where the intent or "direction" of the Jataka may not be obvious):
This is quite enough for you to become disillusioned, dispassionate, and freed regarding all conditions
As for your question -- "how does believing?"
It's said elsewhere that there are many "dhamma gates" as I suppose this is one.
FYI I see the sutta as having several meanings or implications.
One is to see all sentient beings as not unlike your mother -- to be treated kindly, or at least not hurt -- and to the extent that you're an adult, to avoid being a burden on them. I don't know about your own relationship with your mother (I'm pretty sure my wife's relationship with hers was not the same as mine with mine), but that i.e. "kindly" is how I see it. This manifests in Buddhist societies with people being kind or harmless even towards animals.
Another might be, are you hoping to find an object of lust out there somewhere? Someone who might be your lover or your wife? This sutta might imply there is no-one like that, instead everyone is your mother under different guises.
Another -- and I guess the main sense, a previous sutta is the "Assu Sutta: Tears [SN 15.3]" -- I suppose a lot of the audience knew very well that their birth mother was already dead, or mortal. So this is a proxy way to say, "Not just your own mother, everybody is like this."
Consequently perhaps you understand, that as a description of the "gate" itself. I'm not sure I can explain the process, of passing through the gate, e.g. how does that lead to being "released" (vimuccati)? I think it says elsewhere, that the way forward begins with sila even if not all the perfections, but perhaps that's another gate.
If I may I would draw a parallel with a verse of the Dhammapada:
6.: People, other than the wise, do not realize, "We in this world must all die," (and, not realizing it, continue their quarrels). The wise realize it and thereby their quarrels cease.