334 – Six Useful Lessons from the Buddhist Teachings on Rebirth (1 of 2)

The common worldview of the Buddha’s time was that beings are reborn after death. A central question in religious practices, including Buddhism, was what you could do in this lifetime to ensure a favorable rebirth – or liberation from the whole cycle of rebirth.

Zen practice is not dependent on rebirth being true or untrue, and I suspect most Dharma teachers would say the same of their lineage traditions. As long as you practice, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in rebirth, disbelieve, or maintain an agnostic attitude. Nevertheless, the traditional narratives and imagery of rebirth teachings contain many valuable lessons for us.

Quicklinks to Article Content:
Context and Background: Past Episodes about Rebirth
Believer, Nonbeliever, Agnostic: Attitudes Toward Rebirth
Six Useful Lessons from the Buddhist Teachings on Rebirth:
1. The Basic Laws of Karma
Next episode (2 of 2 – stay tuned!):
2. Personal Responsibility and Your Inner Wisdom
3. Respect for the Power and Momentum of Karma
4. Accepting the Karma You Ended Up With
5. Concern for Your Effect on Other Beings, Present and Future
6. The Ideal of Liberation from Rebirth

Context and Background: Past Episodes about Rebirth

To give you context for appreciating the value of Buddhist teachings on rebirth, you might want to read or listen to one or more of these episodes first:

Episodes 5 and 6 – Arising of Buddhism: Historical and Religious Context

In these episodes I described the arising of the doctrine of transmigration (rebirth) during a time of social, economic, and political upheaval in India between the 700s and 500s BCE. This teaching first appeared in the early Upanishads and subsequently had a profound influence on almost all native Indian religious traditions. The doctrine of transmigration held that beings are reborn in the world after they die. Some soul or essence of individuality passes from a dying body into a new embryo – of a human or other animal – and is born into another life. This process of birth, death, and rebirth was believed to extend into the past and future for incalculably long periods of time. Every time you are reborn, the doctrine goes, you forget everything about your previous life.

I discussed reasons the doctrine of transmigration may have arisen and how new religious traditions – including Buddhism – became preoccupied with the process of causation affecting your fortune in this life and the next. This process was called karma, which literally means “action” or “deed.” Negative karma contributed to an unfortunate rebirth, while positive karma helped ensure you would be reborn in circumstances conducive to happiness.

In those episodes I also presented how, according to Buddhist texts, Shakyamuni Buddha’s pivotal awakening involved insight into the workings of karma in his past lives. He subsequently developed a path of practice based on the premise that the course of our karma is most profoundly impacted by our intentions and views when committing an action. Therefore, we can influence our karma by working on our minds.

Episode 28 – Listener’s Questions about the Teaching of Rebirth

In this episode, I addressed some listener questions about rebirth, including, “It is possible to be Buddhist and not believe in the concept of rebirth?” and, “You say belief in rebirth isn’t really necessary to practice Buddhism, so why do some people take it very literally and make a big deal about it?” I offered three reasons I think it’s unnecessary to believe in rebirth to practice Buddhism and discussed some pitfalls that can be associated with taking the rebirth teachings extremely literally. I also discussed the Zen approach to using rebirth and the related teachings of the Six Realms of Existence as potent metaphors for the action of karma within this lifetime (over the course of days, months, or years).

Episode 196 – Death and the Emptiness of Self: What’s the Meaning of Life If You’ve Got No Soul?

In this episode, I explained why the whole question of what happens after our death is not the focus of most kinds of Buddhist practice. Essentially, the Buddha said such preoccupation was part of a self-centered “thicket of views” that keeps us bound to suffering, and that it’s a waste of our precious time – time we could be spending on useful practice – to speculate about metaphysical matters we’re unlikely to be able to understand through our own direct experience. (I then went on to discuss the Zen attitude toward the question of what happens after we die.)

Believer, Nonbeliever, Agnostic: Attitudes Toward Rebirth

Before I speak to the value of rebirth teachings regardless of your beliefs about them, I want to address the range of attitudes you might have. I think there is room in all forms of Buddhism for any attitude toward rebirth – anything from believing in it literally to believing it’s a completely human invention with no basis in reality.

Depending on what type of Buddhist community you’re part of, you’re unlikely to feel completely out of sync if you believe in rebirth. In fact, some Buddhist sects, like certain lineages of Vajrayana Buddhism, have developed extensive teachings and practices around preparations before death so you can navigate the bardo – the realm between the end of one life and the moment you inhabit the embryonic form of a new one. Many Vajrayana Buddhists believe that a sufficiently accomplished practitioner can retain some memory and freedom of choice in the bardo and can choose a beneficial rebirth or opt out of rebirth entirely. Certain revered teachers, such as the Dalai Lama, are believed to be reincarnations of past wise teachers who choose rebirth to benefit others.

At the other end of the spectrum, you will be in good company in most communities if you find teachings about rebirth weird, irrelevant, or even disturbing. It’s certainly not surprising if you wonder how on earth teachings of rebirth can be compatible with a religion whose fundamental premise is that we have no enduring, independent self-nature. What gets reborn? Buddhists throughout the ages have debated this question and proposed many answers, although it’s easy to see all of them as attempts to justify the inclusion of apparently contradictory teachings in the tradition. This episode is especially for you if rebirth teachings make you uneasy and their inclusion in modern practice communities seems anachronistic and unnecessary.

I personally prefer an agnostic attitude toward rebirth. If I had the opportunity to place a bet on whether there is any reality to rebirth, I wouldn’t do it. If I had to speculate, I’d guess that if anything happens after death, it doesn’t unfold like a neat narrative. I refrain from such speculation not because I can’t be bothered to contemplate deep and potentially disturbing things, however. Instead, I think an agnostic attitude can be the best one for deep practice. Stephen Batchelor is famous for insisting that Buddhism can be practiced without beliefs, but in his book (Buddhism Without Beliefs) he says:

It may seem that there are two options: either to believe in rebirth or not. But there is a third alternative: to acknowledge, in all honesty, I do not know. We neither have to adopt the literal versions of rebirth presented by religious tradition nor fall into the extreme of regarding death as annihilation. Regardless of what we believe, our actions will reverberate beyond our deaths. Irrespective of our personal survival, the legacy of our thoughts, words, and deeds will continue through the impressions we leave behind in the lives of those we have influenced or touched in any way.

Dharma practice requires the courage to confront what it means to be human. All the pictures we entertain of heaven and hell or cycles of rebirth serve to replace the unknown with an image of what is already known. To cling to the idea of rebirth can deaden questioning.

Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can also blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.[i]

What I hope to do in this episode is give you some appreciation for why so many Dharma teachers continue to mention rebirth and related teachings like the Six Realms. In essence, the imagery and teachings around transmigration contain many truths even if there is no such thing as rebirth in the way the Buddhist traditions have envisioned it. There is a way in which vivid stories, cosmology, and supernatural characters can convey something important about the human condition in a way that prosaic explanations fail to do. I like to relate to rebirth – and other supernatural stories and teachings in the Buddhist tradition – as if they were true. I don’t have to believe them literally to appreciate what they are pointing to.

That brings me to six important lessons that can be found in the Buddhist teachings on rebirth.

1. The Basic Laws of Karma

Buddhist teachings about rebirth and transmigration contain a great deal of insight into the workings of karma, or – as I like to the link of it – the natural laws of behavioral cause-and-effect. Regardless of your views on the supernatural, you have to admit that the relationship between actions and their results are not random. Certain kinds of actions tend to lead to positive results, such as greater happiness for self and others, peace of mind, or a good reputation. Other kinds of actions tend to lead to negative results, such as suffering, fear, or conflict with others.

From the Buddhist point of view, there is no deity keeping track of your actions and meting out punishment or reward according to his or her expectations of you. Instead, the so-called “laws” of karma are like natural laws, such the law of gravity or the kinetic theory of gases, which states that the molecules of a gas will eventually expand to fill whatever volume is available. Throughout the millennia, human beings have observed behaviors and their usual outcomes and subsequently created sets of ethical guidelines, social laws and expectations, and cosmologies like transmigration to explain how it all works.

Before I get into some of what the Buddhist teachings on rebirth say about karma, I should be clear that few Buddhists see the laws of karma as deterministic. As I mentioned earlier, the karmic outcomes of your actions are profoundly influenced by your views and intentions as you act. In addition, in any given situation there are infinitely many chains of karmic causation coming together, plus infinitely many causes and conditions that have nothing to do with human behavior. This is why the Buddha said the trying to figure out the “precise workings” of karma – exactly what led to some particular outcome – is one of the “four inconceivables” “that are not to be conjectured about, that would bring madness & vexation to anyone who conjectured about them.”[ii] (The other three inconceivables are the range of power of a Buddha, the range of powers of someone deep in meditation, and the origin of the world.)

I go into great detail about the Buddhist teaching of karma in Episode 53: Karma, the Law of Moral Cause-and-Effect, so I won’t talk much more about it here.

Just because the laws of karma aren’t deterministic, however, doesn’t mean that there aren’t some pretty clear predictions we can make about the outcomes of particular kinds of actions, especially when they become the habits of a lifetime. The Buddhist teaching of the Six Realms illustrates the kinds of lives we can make for ourselves if we behave in certain ways. According to this teaching, after death we are reborn in one of six realms of existence based on our past actions, and within each realm there’s a way to practice that can lead to your release from that realm. For detailed descriptions of this teaching and each realm, see Episodes 29, 30, and 31: Six Realms of Existence. In those episodes I also discuss how you can use the teaching to relate to – and manage – the various mental, physical, and emotional states you may find yourself in. In summary:

♦ You are reborn/find yourself in the Heaven Realm, a pleasant and happy place, as a result of ethical behavior, basic generosity, and spiritual practice. You don’t get to stay permanently in heaven, though; unless you keep up the good work, eventually your positive karma is exhausted, and you find yourself in a different realm. This happens sooner than later if you allow the pleasures of heaven to lull you into complacency, so you neglect your spiritual practice.

♦ You are reborn/find yourself in the Hell Realm when you give yourself over to anger and hatred. It’s one thing to experience anger momentarily, when you have a sense that someone or something needs protecting, but it’s another grasp and feed your anger, nurturing it until it turns into hatred and aggression. Not only is this negative for others, it’s a hellish state for you. Deliverance from the hell realm comes through letting go of anger.

♦ You are reborn/find yourself in the Asura Realm, or the realm of the demi-gods, when you have become obsessed with comparing your fortune to that of others. In Buddhist mythology, the asuras can see into the heaven realm but can’t access it, so they are miserably dissatisfied with their relatively fortunate circumstances. They compete with one another and wage war on heaven. In this realm, you are driven by envy, jealousy, and competitiveness. The way out is self-discipline and becoming content with what you have.

♦ You are reborn/find yourself in the Beast Realm when you allow yourself to slide into a basic, self-centered existence where your only interests are comfort, food, sex, and other pleasures. Beasts lose track of their humanity and act without concern for the laws of karma, and they must constantly live in fear of each other. Deliverance from the beast realm comes through study of Dharma principles and learning to live according to them.

♦ You are reborn/find yourself in the Hungry Ghost Realm when you search everywhere outside of yourself to fill the inner void that can only be addressed through spiritual practice. Behavior that leads to this realm can involve constantly searching for some new thing that will bring happiness. This is also the realm of stinginess and addiction. Hungry ghosts wander their realm without being able to find food or water. Deliverance comes through cultivating generosity and accepting the Dharma.

♦ Finally, you are reborn/find yourself in the Human Realm when you have stored up some pretty good karma from ethical behavior and spiritual practice. The human realm is considered the best realm for spiritual practice because it contains a mix of suffering and joy – enough suffering to motivate you to practice, enough joy and ease that you aren’t preoccupied with the obsessions of other realms. When you find yourself in the human realm, with its changeable fortunes, ambiguity, and challenges, you try to recognize and take advantage of your precious opportunity to practice.

The vivid imagery and cosmology of the Six Realms give us a way to absorb the truths about karma in an intuitive way, rather than having to memorize a list of predictions about the likely outcomes of various actions. In particular, there is something very accurate about portraying us as being “born into” a “realm” at times. Each of the six realms describes a fairly coherent state of mind and body we have experienced at different times in our lives. When we find ourselves in such states, the Buddhist teachings help remind us of how we got there, and how to get ourselves back out.

That’s it for today… I will be back soon with part 2, where I’ll discuss five more valuable lessons we can find in the Buddhist teachings on rebirth.