Questions and Answers on Rebirth

Question: Where do we humans come from and where are we going?

Answer: There are three possible answers to this question. Those who believe in a god or gods usually claim before individuals are created, they do not exist, then they come into being through the will of a god. They live their lives and then, according to what they have believed or done during their lives, they either go to eternal heaven or eternal hell. There are others, humanists and scientists, who claim the individual comes into being at conception due to natural causes, lives, and then at death, ceases to exist. Buddhism does not accept either of these explanations.

The first gives rise to many ethical problems, if a good god really creates each of us, it is difficult to explain why so many people are born with the most dreadful deformities or why so many babies are miscarried just before birth or are still-born. Another problem with the theistic explanation is that it seems very unjust that a person should suffer eternal pain in hell for what they did during a short 60 or 70 years on earth. Sixty or 70 years of non-belief or wrong belief or immoral living does not seem to deserve eternal punishment. Likewise, 60 or 70 years of virtuous living seems a very small outlay for eternal bliss in heaven. The second explanation is better than the first and has more scientific evidence to support it but still it leaves important questions unanswered. How can a phenomenon so amazingly complex as human consciousness develop from the simple meeting of the sperm and the egg and in just nine months?

Buddhism offers the most satisfactory explanation of where humans come from and where we are going. When we die, the mind with all the tendencies, preferences, abilities and characteristics that have been developed and conditioned in this life, re-establishes itself in a fertilized egg. Thus the individual grows, is reborn and develops a personality conditioned both by the mental characteristics that have been carried over from the last life and by the new environment. The personality will change and be modified by conscious effort and conditioning factors like education, parental influence and society and once again at death, re-establish itself in a new fertilized egg. This process of dying and being reborn will continue until the conditions that cause it, craving and ignorance, cease. When they do, instead of being reborn, the mind attains a state called Nirvana.

Question: How does the mind go from one body to another?

Answer: Think of it like radio waves. The radio waves, which are not made up of words and music but energy at different frequencies, are transmitted, move through space, are attracted to and picked up by the receiver from where they are broadcast as words and music. It is similar with the mind. At death, mental energy moves through space, is attracted to and picked up by the fertilized egg. As the embryo grows, it centers itself in the brain from where it later 'broadcasts' itself as the new personality.

Question: Isn't it the soul or the self that passes from one body to another when someone is reborn?

Answer: Not according to the Buddha. In fact, he taught belief in an eternal soul or self is a delusion created by the ego and which further encourages the ego. When we see there is no eternal self, egoism, narcissism, conceit and self-centeredness disappear. The individual is not a solid rock but a flowing stream.

Question: That sounds like a contradiction. If there is no self there must be no identity, and if there is no identity how can you say we are reborn?

Answer: It is similar to a football team which has been going for 95 years. During that time hundreds of players have joined the team, played with it for five or ten years, left and been replaced by other players. Even though not one of the original players is still in the team or even alive, it's still valid to say 'the team' exists. Its identity is recognizable despite the continual change. The players are hard, solid entities but what is the team's identity made up of? Its name, memories of its past achievements, the feelings the players and the supporters have towards it, its esprit de corps, etc, Individuals are the same. Despite the fact that both body and mind are continually changing, it is still valid to say the person who is reborn is a continuation of the person who died - not because any unchanging self has passed from one to another but because identity persists in memories, dispositions, traits, mental habits and psychological tendencies.

---Good Question, Good Answers, by S. Dhammika---