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The Truth of Rebirth — And Why it Matters for Buddhist Practice

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Rebirth has always been a central teaching in the Buddhist tradition. The earliest records in the Pali Canon (MN 26; MN 36) 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.

When teaching the path to awakening to others, he defined the four stages of awakening achieved by the path in terms of how many rebirths remained for those who reached them: up to seven for those reaching the first stage; one return to the human world for those reaching the second; rebirth followed by total liberation in the Pure Abodes for those reaching the third; and no rebirth for those reaching the fourth (AN 3.86). On occasion, when one of his disciples who had not reached full awakening passed away, he would comment on the disciple's rebirth — as when Anathapindika the householder, after his passing, appeared to the Buddha as a heavenly being (MN 143). When any of the Buddha's fully awakened disciples passed away, he would state that one of the amazing features of their passing was that their consciousness could no longer be found in the cosmos. Rebirth, he said, happened to those who still had clinging, but not to those who didn't (SN 44.9). And one of his own amazing attainments as Buddha, he said, was that after the end of this life, the world would see him no more (DN 1).

When discussing more mundane topics, such as the rewards of generosity and virtue, he would cite the rewards they brought not only in this life but also in future ones. Even in cases where he was asked specifically to confine his discussion to the present life, he would end the discussion by referring to the rewards of these skillful actions after death (AN 5.34; AN 7.54).

So the theme of rebirth is woven inextricably throughout the Buddha's teachings. And freedom from rebirth has been a central feature of the Buddhist goal from the very beginning of the tradition. All of the various Buddhist religions that later developed in Asia, despite their other differences, were unanimous in teaching rebirth. Even those that didn't aim at putting an end to rebirth still taught rebirth as a fact.

Yet as these Buddhist religions have come to the West, they have run into a barrier from modern Western culture: Of all the Buddha's teachings, rebirth has been one of the hardest for modern Westerners to accept. Part of this resistance comes from the fact that none of the dominant world-views of Western culture, religious or materialistic, contain anything corresponding to the idea of repeated rebirth. Plato taught it, but — aside from an esoteric fringe — few in the modern West have treated this side of his teaching as anything more than a myth.

For people who have felt burned or repelled by the faith demands of Western religion, there is the added barrier that the teaching on rebirth is something that — for the unawakened — has to be taken on faith. They would prefer a Buddhism that makes no faith demands, focusing its attention solely on the benefits it can bring in this life.

So for many Westerners who have profited from the Buddha's psychological insights and meditational tools, the question arises: Can we strip the Buddha's teachings of any mention of rebirth and still get the full benefits of what he had to teach? In other words, can we drop the Buddha's worldview while keeping his psychology and still realize everything it has to offer?

We in the West have done this sort of thing before. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many European Romantics and American Transcendentalists found that they couldn't accept the worldview of the Bible because they were born in an era of new scientific discoveries — of geological deep time and astronomical deep space — that called the biblical worldview into question. Nevertheless, they valued many of the psychological teachings the Bible contained. So they developed an historical approach to the Bible, stating that its worldview may have fit in with the cultural presuppositions of the time when it was written, but that that worldview had to be discarded as science advanced. Only then could the Bible's psychological insights survive in the modern world. And not only survive: actually develop to a higher level. By dropping its out-of-date worldview and leaving cosmology to the scientists, the Judeo-Christian tradition could focus more precisely and effectively on the proper sphere of all religions: the development of the human psyche. This approach formed the basis of liberal Christianity and Reform Judaism.

Inspired by this approach, many modern Buddhist teachers have argued that the teaching on rebirth should be treated in the same way. In their eyes, rebirth was simply a cultural presupposition of the Buddha's time and — because it no longer fits in with our cultural presuppositions and scientific beliefs — the time has come to discard it so as to help the Buddhist tradition advance.

To support their argument, these teachers cite the works of historical scholars who state that everyone in India in the Buddha's time believed in the idea of rebirth and in the metaphysical assumptions about karma and personal identity on which the idea is based: that there's something within each of us that survives the death of the body, and that our actions shape where that "something" will be reborn. Thus, they argue, the Buddha, in teaching karma and rebirth, was simply going along with the crowd.

A stronger version of this argument holds that the teaching on rebirth was not merely irrelevant to the Buddha's essential message; it was actually antithetical. Just as all great thinkers have their lapses, he — or whoever, in compiling the Pali Canon, put the teaching on rebirth into his mouth — didn't realize that his culture's assumptions about karma, rebirth, and personal identity were at odds with his central teachings on not-self and the four noble truths. Now that we no longer hold to those assumptions — and have replaced them with more reliable, scientific notions of human action and the metaphysics of personal identity — we're in a better position to drop the idea of rebirth and reshape the Buddhist tradition so that it focuses more clearly on the Buddha's central insight and the main purpose of his teaching: the ending of suffering in the here-and-now.

The irony of this argument is that, when we check it against the actual historical evidence, we find that it has everything backwards. The actual facts are these:

1) The idea of rebirth was far from universally accepted in India during the Buddha's time. Some schools of thought actively rejected it; others affirmed it. And thinkers on both sides offered widely differing metaphysical ideas about personal identity in support of their positions. In other words, even those who agreed that rebirth did or didn't happen disagreed as to what was or wasn't reborn. At the same time, those who did agree in teaching rebirth disagreed on the role played by karma, or action, in the process of rebirth. Some maintained that action influenced the course of one's lives after death; others, that it played no role at all.

2) Thus the Buddha, in teaching rebirth and its relation to karma, was actually addressing one of the hot topics of the time. Because he didn't always take up controversial topics, he must have seen that the issue passed the criterion he set for which topics he would address: that it be conducive to putting an end to suffering. And, in fact, he made rebirth an integral part of his explanation of mundane right view — the level of right view that provides an understanding of the powers and consequences of human action that allows for the possibility that human action can put an end to suffering.

3) He also made rebirth an integral part of his explanation of the four noble truths and the understanding of causality — dependent co-arising — on which those truths are based. Because dependent co-arising contains many feedback loops — in which one factor reproduces the factors that feed it — it's a self-sustaining process with the potential to maintain itself indefinitely. This is why birth has the potential to keep repeating as rebirth until something is actively done to cut the feedback loops that keep the process going. At the same time, because dependent co-arising operates on many scales — from the micro level of events in the mind, to the macro level of lifetimes across time in the cosmos — it shows how micro events can lead to rebirth on the macro scale, and, conversely, how the practice of training the mind can put an end to all forms of suffering — including rebirth — on every level.

What this means in practice is that no matter how much you observe the events of dependent co-arising in the present moment, if you don't appreciate their potential to sustain one another indefinitely, you don't fully comprehend them. And if you don't fully comprehend them, you can't gain full release from them.

4) In discussing rebirth, the Buddha differed from the other schools of the time in that he didn't base his position on a metaphysical view of personal identity — that is, on defining what it is that gets reborn. By placing rebirth in the context of dependent co-arising, he was presenting it in a phenomenological context — i.e., one that focused on phenomena as they can be directly experienced and that refused to take a stand on whether there is a reality of "things" underlying them. His purpose in taking this sort of position was pragmatic and strategic: By focusing on events and processes as they're directly experienced, you can redirect them — through the power of attention and intention — away from the suffering they normally cause and toward a deathless happiness. In this way, the Buddha's approach, instead of being metaphysical, bears similarities to modern schools of philosophy — phenomenology and pragmatism — that avoid getting involved in metaphysical assumptions about a reality behind direct experience.

5) The fact that the Buddha suggested that his contemporaries drop their metaphysical assumptions about personal identity if they wanted to practice the path suggests that he would make the same suggestion to people in the modern world. To get the most out of his teachings, it's necessary to recognize that we have metaphysical assumptions about personal identity and the world; and that — unless we put them aside — those assumptions will prevent us from looking deeply enough at immediate experience in the terms described in dependent co-arising.

To see experience in terms of dependent co-arising means identifying the mental events and choices that lead to rebirth and other forms of suffering, and developing the knowledge that can put them to an end. In other words, part of the practice even today lies in confirming that the Buddha was right about the connection between karma and rebirth, and that his rightness was timeless: These teachings are integral to the four noble truths, and in particular to the path of practice leading to the end of suffering. To discard these teachings won't help Buddhism to advance. It will prevent the teachings from fulfilling their purpose.

Although it's possible to gain some benefit from the Buddha's teachings without accepting what he said about rebirth, if we want to get the most out of his teachings, we owe it to ourselves to give his statements on rebirth a fair hearing. Because rebirth is such an important working hypothesis in following the path all the way to the end of suffering, and because misinformation on these points is so widespread, it's necessary to discuss the Buddha's actual teachings, and their context, in some detail. In addition, because Buddhist thinkers in the centuries after the Buddha's passing often abandoned the Buddha's position on point number four — they let themselves get drawn into metaphysical discussions about what does or doesn't take birth — we have to focus on the early Pali discourses to gain an accurate picture of the Buddha's own position on these issues.