Reflecting on Rebirth: An Understanding That Can Go Beyond Faith and Theory

[samseva]

I think Ven. @Brahmali touches on an important point:

@Brahmali

Rebirth reminds me that most things in this life are like borrowed goods, to use the Buddha’s simile at MN 54. It all has to go – at the latest when we die, but often much earlier. This includes our material possessions, our friends and family, our physical body, but also all aspects of our personality that are tied up with this world, such as our social status, our education, our sense of achievement, and any other aspect of our sense of identity that relates to this life. There is not much left! The one thing that remains as you move on to another life is the quality of mind that you have developed in this life.

I think there is a critical and prevalent issue with many peoples’ understanding of rebirth—even amongst Buddhists—which creates a number of problems. The common issue is that, in one form or another, and in varying degrees, rebirth is incorrectly equated to reincarnation. Even if not verbalized, it seems like there is some kind of underlying belief that you are reborn as yourself, or that “there is something after we die.”

This is particularly detrimental for a number of reasons. Contrary to someone who believes that there is nothing after we die, someone who misunderstands rebirth might waist the time that is available to him/her. Some with a similar understanding might actually be happy that there is rebirth—a bit as if rebirth is a way to live eternally.

However, all these are incorrect understandings of rebirth. Rebirth is merely the start of new life, with one’s kamma as the seed. We don’t keep our personalities, our knowledge, or our memories; there is only a start of a new life based on conditions that were brought forth from the previous life. If you were to view rebirth as a percentage, what goes from one life to the next probably approximates to only 1%.

Now, with a correct understanding of rebirth, it is possible to see that rebirth creates problems on two fronts. One being that since life is basically and intrinsically a potential for suffering, if one is to be reborn countless times, then you are to experience incessant and unbearable amounts of suffering. On the second front, if there were no rebirth and nothing after death, reaching Enlightenment wouldn’t be something we would need to be preoccupied with—it would be pointless, since simply waiting to die would be an escape from suffering (this being the reason why rebirth is such a central teaching in Buddhism). Due to rebirth, you can’t simply “wait it out”—and because of this, we have only two options available to us: to reach Nibbāna or to continually suffer from birth to birth in saṃsāra.

Either way, not much of who we are is reborn anyway, but who wants to learn how to walk and eat, grow old and die painful deaths countless times?