Rebirth has always been a central teaching in the Buddhist tradition. The earliest records in the Pali Canon indicate that the Buddha, prior to his awakening, searched for a happiness not subject to the vagaries of repeated birth, aging, illness, and death. One of the reasons he left his early teachers was because he recognized that their teachings led, not to the goal he sought, but to rebirth on a refined level.On the night of his awakening, two of the three knowledges leading to his release from suffering focused on the topic of rebirth. The first showed his own many previous lives; the second, depicting the general pattern of beings dying and being reborn throughout the cosmos, showed the connection between rebirth and karma, or action.When he did finally attain release from suffering, he recognized that he had achieved his goal because he had touched a dimension that not only was free from birth, but also had freed him from ever being reborn again. After he had attained release, his new-found freedom from rebirth was the first realization that occurred spontaneously to his mind.(Thanissaro Bhikkhu.The Truth of Rebirth.)
Buddhists understand life as samsara, meaning perpetual wandering, and describe the transition like a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball. While nothing physical transfers, the speed and direction of the second ball relate directly to the first. So the term most often used is rebirth, rather than reincarnation. Reincarnation implies the transfer of an essence, or a soul, while rebirth follows the law of causality, or dependent origination, where this arises because of circumstances which happened before.
Death for [the Buddhist] is the shadow on the face of life, for the opposite of death is birth, not life; that which is born must die. Life has no opposite, for life goes on; only its forms must change unceasingly. It is life which creates, uses and then destroys each form of life, whether yours or mine or that of the mountain, the empire or the fly.” Christmas Humphreys, The Buddhist Way Of Life
Critics of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth say that if there is no soul, only a changing stream of mental energy, then there could be no identity and thus to talk of a person being reborn or experiencing the results of good or bad actions done in the past, is meaningless. However this criticism fails to understand the phenomenon of identity in change. Even within a single life we can notice a person change, sometimes quite dramatically, and yet still be able to recognise them as the same person. This is possible because different aspects of the person changes at different velocities. For example, the complexion and amount of wrinkles on a person's face may change with age while the general shape of the face changes little. Again, a person may change their beliefs while holding them with the same intensity as they held their former ones or perhaps retain the same beliefs but in a more moderate way than before. To use a simile - the Ganges River is changing every moment and over the centuries its width, its course, the quantity and quality of the water it contains have all changed and yet it can still be recognized as the same river. Thus the idea of a dynamic personality does not contradict the idea of identity.
Further Reading
- V.F. Gunaratna, Rebirth Explained. Kandy, 1980;
- The Tibetan Buddhist View of Death and Rebirth, a teaching by Tibetan Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman
- The Case for Rebirth, a review of Bhikkhu Analayo’s book on the subject
- Do You Only Live Once? The Evidence for Rebirth, a profile of reincarnation researcher Jim Tucker
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