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. 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.
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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
This is second episode of two on this topic. In the first episode (334), I identified existing episodes of the Zen Studies Podcast on – or related to – rebirth that you might want to listen to for context and background. Then I discussed the way you are free to believe in rebirth, disbelieve, or remain agnostic about it. Finally, I talked about the first useful lesson we can take from the teachings of rebirth: The basic laws of karma, or behavioral cause-and-effect, as portrayed in the cosmology of the Six Realms. In this episode I cover five more useful lessons from the Buddhist teachings on rebirth.
2. Personal Responsibility and Your Inner Wisdom
One of my favorite aspects of the Buddhist teachings on rebirth is the role of Yama, the lord of death, plays in deciding which realm a newly deceased spirit will enter for rebirth. A visual representation of the Six Realms is known as the bhavachakra, or Wheel of Life. Yama is portrayed as a scary-looking monster with long claws. He holds in front of him a large, round disc. Only his claws, face, and teeth are visible from behind the disc, which is a mirror on which you see reflected each of the six realms, like the slices of a pie. The Wheel of Life also has concentric circles, one of which, toward the center, shows figures in various stages and walks of life ascending on the left, and then corpses falling downwards on the right. The dead people fall toward an audience with Yama, who is also reflected in the mirror.
According to the teachings, after your death you face a moment of reckoning. No deity passes on judgment on you, however. Instead, Yama holds up a mirror for you to see your past actions, and you thereby judge yourself.
I think of this less as moment of letting our inner critic win the day, and more of an acknowledgment of our natural inner wisdom. You know when your actions are selfish, dishonest, cruel, disrespectful, and harmful. Your “knowing” may be conscious or only semi-conscious – you may live in denial or be blind to the repercussions of your actions – but at some level you have a sense of which realm your actions have conditioned you for. The positive aspect of this teaching is that you can learn to hear and honor your inner wisdom – the still, small voice within you that encourages beneficial action and spiritual practice.
3. Respect for the Power and Momentum of Karma
Another lesson we can take from the Buddhist teachings on rebirth is that karma – cause and effect as it applies to human behavior – is a powerful force that can carry you along certain pathways even when your “executive I” has other plans.
As you live out your life, naturally your primary concern is how to direct that life so you, and those you love, can avoid suffering and be happy. Clearly, your choices have repercussions, so it matters what you do. However, it’s not at all uncommon for you to continue behaving or reacting in certain ways no matter how hard you try to change. It turns out that your sense of having an “executive I” who is calling all the shots is way off base. At most, you have some noble aspirations you can hope will guide you in your few moments of actual choice.
The teachings of rebirth convey the power and momentum of karma. The universe as driven by karma is portrayed as a “wheel,” and beings are seen as transmigrating from realm to realm over lifetimes. The way you are – your personality, strengths and weaknesses, motivations, proclivities – are largely shaped by previous choices you made, either in this lifetime or in previous lifetimes. It may be fairly easy to accept that your previous choices in this life have shaped you, but there are many aspects of the way you are that remain inexplicable. Some things have been shaped by your genetics, the choices of people around you, and external forces over which you have no control. But still – why is it so hard to change? Why is it sometimes so hard to make a different choice even when your “executive I” can see it would lead to better outcomes?
The Buddha recommended against trying to figure the “precise workings of karma,” so it doesn’t help to spend a lot of time contemplating how you ended up the way you are. From here on out, you get to make peace with your karma and – whenever you can manage it – make wise and beneficial choices. The teachings about rebirth help give your effort context: You are trying to redirect the momentum of myriad lifetimes; it takes great effort to avoid having a self that is shaped by the past take rebirth in the present, depending on your conditions. What’s required for redirecting your karma is determination and great patience.
4. Accepting the Karma You Ended Up With
On a related note, the Buddhist teachings on rebirth offer a way to accept yourself, set aside blame, and see yourself as a work in progress. Why did you end up with a tendency toward alcoholism, overeating, or fits of anger? Why do you find it so hard to employ self-discipline, or extend goodwill toward others? Why can’t you understand the Dharma the way you’d like to, or why are you handicapped with anxiety? As I mentioned earlier, some of this stuff obviously arose because of genetics, the actions of others, or forces beyond your control. But even after pursuing all the explanations you can find, you’re likely to be left with some inexplicable challenges you either feel cursed by or responsible for.
This is where it can be helpful to relate to rebirth as if it’s true. You don’t have to literally believe it’s true or decide it’s just a fairy tale. If you can abide in the agnostic place of curiosity and not knowing that Stephen Batchelor describes, the teaching of rebirth can be comforting.
If you’ve ever spent time around small children, especially if you’re a parent, you’ll have experienced the wonder of watching a baby suddenly develop into a fully unique little human being. How and why did they end up with what seems like already-formed tendencies, personalities, proclivities, interests, and habits? It’s common to see two siblings, both raised by the same parents, and find one of them is shy while the other is boldly extroverted; one is graceful and careful while the other is a physical daredevil; one loves books while the other can’t be bothered to read because they’re too busy wading in the creek to catch tadpoles.
While I’m not inclined to believe in rebirth literally, I find myself in awe of the deeper truths of human existence that it might point to. It’s almost as if each being really does inherit some karma from a previous being, or beings. It’s almost as if, as the rebirth teachings suggest, each embryo was a blank slate that at some point became inhabited by a karmic force from a previous life – a force that was wandering around the bardo, looking for an appropriate place to be reborn.
What matters isn’t whether it’s literally true, but what it means to our practice. When you imagine each person is carrying karma from the beginningless past that they had no choice about this lifetime, it can help you be more patient with, and accepting of, people. When you imagine the same with respect to yourself, you can drop both self-blame and blaming others. After all, even those who may have hurt you were bearing their own karmic burden; it’s impossible to say where it all began.
5. Concern for Your Effect on Other Beings, Present and Future
The Buddhist teachings around rebirth encourage you to think beyond the limited scope of your personal life – that is, the time between your birth and your death, and the circumstances immediately surrounding you and your loved ones. According to the teachings, in the limitless past you have had relationships with all the beings surrounding you: In a past life, a stranger you encounter may have been your mother or your child. In a future life, the choices you make now will affect a being who inherits your karma, but who doesn’t remember you or why you lived the way you did.
Regardless of whether rebirth is literally true, your actions have profound and often unperceived effects on countless beings around you. Those close to you – partners, children, immediate family, friends, coworkers, Sangha members – make choices and affect their own karma in response to you. And you have probably observed the widely varying karmic legacy people can leave behind when they die: Some people live lives of kindness and generosity and leave the world a better place than they found it. They inspire and encourage others, making a lasting positive impact on them. Other people spend their lives dwelling in bitterness or acting out destructive habits. Even if they weren’t entirely willful in their negative actions of body, speech, and mind, they leave a residue of regret, hurt, resentment, or sadness. Those close to them may find themselves trapped in harmful habits they developed in response to the person who has passed.
Again, if you relate to rebirth as if it’s true, you’ll be inclined to be careful about the impact you have on other beings. You’ll be inclined to “clean up” your karma for the sake of other beings in the present and future, if not for you own sake. (For more on cleaning up your karma, See Episodes 311-313 – Ten Fields of Zen, Field 7 – Karma Work: Learning and Caring for the Self)
6. The Ideal of Liberation from Rebirth
Finally, the Buddhist teachings of rebirth present you with a koan, or a question you have to live the answer to, rather than answering it intellectually: What is meant by the ideal of seeking liberation from the cycle of rebirth? In modern cultures, most people like the idea of being reborn, even if they won’t remember a thing about their previous lives. It seems preferable to the alternative of death being the end of everything for you, right? Even at the Buddha’s time, most people were looking to steer their karma so they’d end up with a fortunate rebirth. Only a relatively small proportion of spiritual practitioners aspired to the goal of complete liberation from the cycle of transmigration, meaning they would never again be reborn.
It’s fine if you have a more positive worldview than the ancient Indians, who saw the endless cycle of transmigration as fairly sad state of affairs, if only because it meant you were doomed to have your heart broken over and over again. The way they saw it, with each rebirth you would start anew, in complete ignorance. You’d build a life for yourself, love, have a family, and succeed in your chosen pursuits, only to lose everything to ill fortune, old age, disease, and death – over and over and over. Most Buddhist lineages developed a more positive view of the cycle of life over time, as they encountered other cultures and religions. For example, Chan grew out of the encounter with Taoism, which suggested that you are inevitably part of the flow of Tao before, during, and after your death.
Regardless of your sense of whether rebirth would be a positive thing or not, it’s worth looking more carefully at the teachings to appreciate the lessons that can be found within them. According to the teachings, after death something of you lingers for as long as 49 days. You spend this time in the bardo plane, where you can perceive the world of the living and travel around at will. You tend to be confused and fearful. You still remember your past life, and are likely to be filled with regret and longing. Your unresolved karma – those patterns of behavior you inherited from past lives and failed to change, or the karmic patterns you created in your most recent incarnation – remains with you. If you spent your life dominated by anger, desire, bitterness, ambition, grasping, or obliviousness, you will continue to find yourself in these states.
Whatever karma you have left unresolved impels you to seek rebirth. You wander until you find a copulating couple that attracts you for some reason. You think you see an opportunity, by becoming the child of this couple, to fulfill unmet needs or achieve the safety or reward you have been seeking. At the moment of conception, your consciousness enters the new embryo, and at this point all memory of your previous existences is erased.
What Dharma lessons can we glean from this vision of the afterlife? Within the context of one life, rebirth means the beginning of something new, with a life of its own, brought into being at least in part by unresolved karma. Often, this feels much like the birth of a new self, with a certain set of tendencies, desires, and concerns. You might experience this kind of rebirth if you find yourself in another dysfunctional romantic relationship and realize some part of you was attracted once again to the circumstances of dysfunction. Or you might find yourself reborn as your petulant childhood self when you go visit your family of origin. Or maybe, despite your intention to seek a better work-life balance, you find your ambition has once again driven you into a demanding job and all it entails.
The rebirth teachings say you can practice diligently so you don’t have to be reborn. You can do this by cleaning up your karma as best you can so there is less unresolved stuff impelling your actions. You can develop meditative self-awareness so you notice when you are attracted to rebirth, and then you may have some degree of choice about whether, or when, to take rebirth into a new set of circumstances. Maybe sometimes you will choose rebirth because the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks, but over time you may prefer to let life come to you instead of trying to create it.
