There’s definitely some tension between the ideas of anatta and rebirth. From the suttas, it seems that the definition of an atta is as permanent, blissful and able to control the five aggregates in the body it is inhabiting as it wishes (well, that seems to be the kind of atta that the Buddhist anatta is denying anyway). The principle of anatta presumably is incompatible with something like this existing. However, does anatta allow something that might fall short of this (a kind of impermanent or suffering self/soul buffeted by the whims of fate)? There’s certainly a degree of wriggle room. The pudgala of the personalists sounds something like atman lite! They, at least, felt it was consistent with the suttas (though other schools did not agree).
I guess what is needed is some mechanism that, at minimum, allows the kamma/sankharas associated with a life that has just finished to end up being associated with a later new life. The word “soul”, for me, is tied up with consciousness (what is being transferred being also conscious). I’m not sure that this is necessary for continuity and DO to work. If am running some program on a computer and save it and its state to a usb key, turn off the first computer, stick the usb key into a second computer and starting running the program from there, then there’s certainly a type of continuity but the the program/data is in a fairly inert state on the usb key when it is being transferred!
I think DO logically requires a mechanism for transference of kamma and maintaining some kind of chain of continuity (though not necessarily something as soul-like as the pudgala; that school is right at the edge of sutta wriggle room I think).
The Abdhidhamma introduced the concept of “bhavanga”, though this isn’t found in the suttas. It seems like an attempt to introduce an element of continuity to consciousness, though this seems to contradict the suttas, where consciousness is a transient phenomenon which only arises in dependence on sense base and object.
As for rebirth, I think the basic difficulty is explaining how a transfer of “information” actually takes place, or how a mental state is transferred. To use the computer analogy, it would need to be more like a Wi-Fi connection, instantaneously transferring information from the deceased person to a foetus. Sort of!
Sure, you could say rebirth is reincarnation without a “soul”. So with rebirth we have to identify something else to be reborn… And therein lies the problem.
It’s early Saturday morning and I am only into my first cup of coffee, so I am just spitballing here. But with reincarnation, to me there is the sense of a rebirth of a defined “self,” or personage that is reborn and identified in the next life. I saw in the recent Netflix documentary of reincarnation of a village elder reborn into a young man in a First Nations community, and the young man is regarded as the specific reincarnation of his Village Elder.
With rebirth, I think in terms of there being a metaphysical external body of consciousness, like a vast sea of code, or DNA, and that from this vast sea there are aspects of this DNA or lines of code that migrate into and out of human bodies in the womb. Some of the code is pronounced, and for the early years of the new birth’s life, he/she can recall these lines of code ( memories of a past life) in a more or less vague or pronounced way. But in that child are vast lines of additional code that define that human life as being more complex than the lines of code that defined the prior life. That child is an entirely distinct body of code, possessing many, or few, lines of code from prior lives. Again, much the same way we understand DNA (my consciousness and body is a cocktail of DNA/consciousness going back centuries ( so says 23 & me), but my body’s DNA is uniquely mine (my mundane, everchanging process of humanity I regard as a “self”) When I die, my physical body returns to organic matter, and my small drops of consciousness migrate out of my dead body and return (or are reestablished, having never actually “left” the vast ocean at any time) to the vast ocean of eternal consciousness…with some lines of that code perhaps later being redistributed in new lives, or not.
Not sure how much of the suttas you’ve read, but there are a lot of references to what gets reborn in the suttas. It goes by different names, sometimes it’s called gandabba, sometimes it is said that consciousness descends into the womb, sometimes it is called the “being to be born”.
Sujato wrote an essay about it called
Rebirth and the In-between State in Early Buddhism.
Google it and you’ll find the pdf
Of course, you’re not going to find some fully fleshed out metaphysical theory about what the rebirth being is, since that’s not what the Buddha’s teaching is about. As such, such a theory would be considered among the “leaves in the trees” which are not directly helpful on the path.
Oh, that’s certainly true. However, the basic way they were viewing life and the world and what the object of the spiritual life was (escape and liberation) sound very Indian to me. It may be there were already precedents for it in the Greek world; I’m not an expert in that area of religious history.
Did the “I” have the idea? Or, is the idea itself a product of, a manifestation of, a process of dependent origination? Is the idea to drink coffee at night an aspect of kamma, from this life and from prior lives? Were you Juan Valdez, or perhaps 9 Famous Geniuses Who Were Also Huge Coffee Addicts | HuffPost Life in a prior life?
Thank you Bhante Sujato for this thread and your very well reasoned article. This sutta warning of the Buddha comes to mind.
“There is no disappearance of the true Dhamma as long as a counterfeit of the true Dhamma has not arisen in the world, but there is the disappearance of the true Dhamma when a counterfeit of the true Dhamma has arisen in the world. Just as there is no disappearance of gold as long as a counterfeit of gold has not arisen in the world, but there is the disappearance of gold when a counterfeit of gold has arisen in the world, in the same way there is no disappearance of the true Dhamma as long as a counterfeit of the true Dhamma has not arisen in the world, but there is the disappearance of the true Dhamma when a counterfeit of the true Dhamma has arisen in the world. It’s not the earth property that makes the true Dhamma disappear. It’s not the water property… the fire property… the wind property that makes the true Dhamma disappear. It’s worthless people who arise right here [within the Sangha] who make the true Dhamma disappear. The true Dhamma doesn’t disappear the way a boat sinks all at once.” Saddhamapatirupaka Sutta, SN 16.13
“Those who consider the inessential to be essential
And see the essential as inessential
Don’t reach the essential
Living in the field of wrong intention”
Dhammapada ch1,12
Is there Life after Death
Recently watched this video with testimony from young children who remembered
their past lives (the memory fades after 7 years); 50 years of research at UVA
Many adults remember past lives in lucid dreams or hypnotic regression. Read his book
but haven’t tried it.
There definitely seemed to be a later desire to try to figure out the mechanics, e.g. the theories of the Personalist pudgala, the Yogacara/Mahayana storehouse consciousness or the aforementioned Abhidhammic “bhavanga”.
I suppose dependent origination is the given reason why anatta and rebirth can coexist. The Buddha mostly seemed to shy away from ontology and metaphysics, but not entirely though. Some basic ontological/metaphysical assumptions are made. These are fairly bare bones though (I guess enough to provide the “handful of leaves”) and are far from being any complete system (even whether this “transfer of information” is instantaneous is unclear). Also, in the environment in which the Buddha was teaching, the assumption of rebirth was largely a given. I don’t think he had to work that hard to get people to buy into rebirth as such (just into the Buddhist version of rebirth). If the Buddha was teaching his system in an environment where rebirth was not a common idea, I do wonder whether he would have needed to flesh out the metaphysics/ontology of rebirth just a bit more (even to increase chances of more people buying into his approach).
I suppose in many ways the West is such an environment. Rebirth is a harder sell here. Many potential converts would be either former Christians or secular agnostics (or ideas of rebirth people might have already encountered would be more New Agey or Hindu in nature). The just mentioned Analayo rebirth book does attempt to tackle some of this, e.g., looking at NDE/regression/childhood memories evidence and the Dhammaruwan case.
I guess Buddhism heads somewhat in the direction of idealism (I think consciousness must have a non-physical aspect for rebirth to work) but I’m not sure it is really idealistic either. The possible mechanics of all this? No idea (won’t be found in the suttas; these put some minimal constraints on what it might be but not a lot). I guess an atman/soul would also equally depend on some kind of hypothetical non-physical mechanism/reality.
I suggested in another thread that DO had to be introduced because of the omission of Atman.
DO was introduced to avoid the dichotomy of existence v. non-existence. But if you include Atman there is no need to avoid the dichotomy, since Atman does exist in these terms.
Well, as long as the soul/atman is non-permanent, does suffer, and does not have control over its aggregates or fate, then IMO the concept can probably still be made fit with the suttas. It would exist in a sense until it doesn’t. I can’t think of a reason why it would strictly contradict anything. It does seem reasonable that those three attributes would come as a single package: permanency, non-suffering, and control. If one is missing, it’s hard to see how the others could be maintained.
I guess DO is not just about rebirth but also embodies the Buddhist soteriological scheme. If one cuts one of the links in the chain, e.g. craving, then the whole chain ultimately collapses. But if those attributes hold, the notion of salvation then does change. In those circumstances, while it might be good to not attach to impermanent things, if there are also permanent things, well, that may not be a good principle for those. And if not all of existence is suffering, then maybe the goal is heading for or realizing the non-suffering part. But at that point we’re entirely out of the Buddhist park and it’s a whole other ball game!
I wasn’t suggesting an Atman in the EBT, I was suggesting that it was necessary to introduce DO because of the absence or rejection of an Atman. If there is no independent entity, then everything has to be explained as dependent and conditional - that’s essentially what the 12 nidanas of DO do.
Unfortately there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on the interpretation of DO, but that’s another discussion.
Exactly. And the fact the Buddha is quoted in EBTs to having said he himself, a tathagata, could not discern a beginning to this dependent and conditional arising of birth and death suggests that he did not have much to say about an eternal thing like an atman as part of the puzzle (and much less to the solution to the problem of) suffering.
In case you wonder where that’s is found, check out occurrences of expressions like:
They, at least, felt it was consistent with the suttas (though other schools did not agree).
but it’s a useful label to use, so I suppose I could say yes.
