What does it mean that "I" am reborn?

[ASearcher]

Hey @EddyP, thanks for responding.

It’s funny you bring this no-self position up, because this was the understanding I had settled on a few months ago: that the term “rebirth” was a teaching tool: “yes, the life 100 years in the future isn’t ‘you,’ but neither is the life an hour from now!”

But @sujato’s masterful essay contrasting Early Buddhism and Theravada caused me to reconsider this. He suggested that there is a “me”—a particular dependent system of five aggregates—it just isn’t an atman: an unchanging, divine soul:

@sujato

reductionist not-self

Theravada argues for the not-self doctrine by reducing the conventional to the ultimate. What we think of as a person is, in fact, nothing more than the five aggregates. Seeing this, we will understand not-self and let go of attachment.

For the EBTs, on the other hand, it is precisely the five aggregates that are taken as self. Indeed, it seems as if they were originally developed as a scheme for classifying self theories. If you had tried to argue, “What you take as self is nothing more than the aggregates” you would be met with, “Yes, exactly, that is my self.”

So while you’re right that I have no unchanging soul, and I am not to cling to the continuation of this particular conglomerate, it still is “me” in a way that those conditioned 100 years from now by my present actions are not.

Maybe the answer is that even the five aggregates that are me aren’t the same from moment to moment because they change constantly, so the differences among “me now,” “me +50 years,” “my grandson,” and “future person I’ll never meet” are a spectrum, rather than a definite me/not me?

Anyway, these are just thoughts. Thanks again!