04 Rebirth

34 People often ask: "What will happen to me after I die ?

There are three ways of answering this question. Those who believe in some form of God will say that when a person dies he goes either to eternal heaven or eternal hell according to his deeds or beliefs.  This is the theistic view. 

Others say that when a person's life ends, his existence ends also. They believe in annihilation at death. This is the materialist's view. The Buddha says that when we die, we are reborn into a new life and that this process of death and rebirth will continue until the freedom of Nirvana is attained.

35 Buddhism criticises both the theistic and the materialistic views as being inadequate and incomplete. The theistic view is rejected because it seems to be unjust and cruel.

Even an evil person does not deserve eternal punishment in hell any more than a good person deserves eternal reward in heaven for a mere sixty or seventy years of doing goods on earth.

It also seems inconceivable that an all-loving God could condemn one of his creatures to countless millions of years of pain and torture. The theistic view also fails to answer many important questions.

What happens to animals when they die ?

What happens to the millions of babies who die each year in the womb or soon after birth?

Do they go to heaven or do they go to hell?

If they go to heaven this would be unfair because they have never done any good, and if they go to hell  this would be unfair because they have never done any evil.       

The materialist's view is better than the theistic one, but it still fails to answer many important questions. The materialist has difficulty explaining how a phenomenon as complex as human consciousness can arise from the meeting of two cells and develop within nine months. And now that para-psychology is a recognized branch of science, phenomena like telepathy are increasingly difficult to fit into the materialistic model of the mind.  

Buddhism offers the most satisfactory explanation of where we come from and what happens to us after we die.

36 The process of rebirth is called punabbhava which literally means ‘again becoming’. The Buddha says that for rebirth to take place, three conditions must be present: the parents fertility sexual union and the presence of the gandhabba. 

The word ‘gandhabba’ means ‘come from elsewhere’ and refers to the stream of mental energy made up of tendencies, abilities and characteristics that leave the body at death.

When the body dies he ‘mind moves upwards’ (uddhamgami) and re-establishes itself in a newly-fertilized egg. The fetus grows, is born and develops a new personality, conditioned by both the mental characteristics that have be carried over and by the new environment. The personality will change and be modified by conscious effort, education, parental influence and social conditioning.  A lot of the likes and dislikes, abilities and so-called ‘inborn traits’ of the individual are in fact carry-overs from the former life.

In other words, our present character and experience is in some degree the result (vipaka) of our actions (kamma), in the former life. Which realm we are reborn into will likewise be influenced by our actions in the present life.

37 It is fairly easy to understand how the mind goes from one body to another if we compare it to processes that we are familiar with - radio broadcasting for example. Radio waves, which are made of words or music but which consist of energy at different frequencies, are transmitted, travel through space, are attracted to and picked up by the receiver from which they are broadcast as words and music.  

In a very similar way, the mind leaves the body at death, travels through space,  is attracted to and picked up by the fertilized egg and is ‘broadcast’ as the new personality. Both radio waves and the mind are not things but dynamic processes, and so it is not correct to say that an unchanging soul passes into a new body anymore than it is correct to say that words and music pass into the radio from the transmitter. Likewise, there is no in-between state (antarabhava), as the mind passes almost instantaneously from one body to the next, just as radio waves are picked up almost as soon as they are transmitted.

38 But what evidence is there to support the doctrine of rebirth?  For centuries people have claimed that they could spontaneously remember former lives. One of the earliest recorded examples of this in Europe is the Greek philosopher and the mathematician Pythagoras (582 - 500 BC), who claimed he could remember several of his former lives.

In recent times, there have been numerous cases of people who could vividly remember events in previous lives, and some of these claims have been verified. The most impressive evidence so far presented to prove rebirth is the research of the American scientist, Ian Stevenson.

Dr Stevenson is professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and his research, commenced in 1958, has received international acclaim and recognition. Over the years, he has published details of numerous cases of people, often children, who could remember former lives - all backed up by careful scientific research.

A fellow scientist, Dr. Harold Leif,  has said of Ian Stevenson's research: " Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as the Galileo of the twentieth century.

39 We will have a look at one of the cases investigated by Dr Stevnson. A boy named Ravi Shankar was born in 1951 in the city of Kanaiy in northern India. His father's name was Ram Gupta, but from the age of two the child kept insisting that his real father was a banker named Jogeshwar. The child also claimed that in his former life  he had been murdered  by having his throat cut by two men - Chaturi and Jamahar. The boy even said that the unusual birthmark on his throat which strongly resembled a knife wound was proof of his story.

Investigation showed that only half a mile away there was a man call Jageshwar whose son Munna had been murdered just as Ravi Shankar has described. The police has strongly suspected two men of the murder, a washerman called Chaturi and a banker called Jamahar, but had dropped charges on the grounds of

insufficient evidence. The Body Munna had been murdered six months before Ravi Shankar was born. Dr Stevenson's research showed that most of the details were correct.

Numerous cases like this are very compelling evidence that when people die, they are reborn, sometimes with vivid memories of dramatic events that happened in their former lives. No such evidence exists to support the theistic or even the materialistic views.                              

40 Apart from the evidence supporting it, the doctrine of rebirth has a deep appeal because it is so just. The theistic view makes it possible for a good person to be condemned to eternal hell merely because he held wrong religious beliefs.

This seems to be profoundly unique. Kamma and rebirth mean that a good person will have a good rebirth no matter what his religious beliefs are.

Likewise, a bad person will have to take responsibility for the evil he has done, whether he repents and converts at the last minute or not. The doctrine of rebirth appeals also because one always has another chance. In the theistic view, a person is given only one chance. What one does or believes in the short period of a single life will determine how one will spend the rest of eternity. But Buddha makes it clear that if we do not purify or free ourselves in this life, we will be able to do it in the next life - or the one after that.

Rebirth makes it possible for us to continue to perfect the skills and interests we have developed in this life in the next life as well. The Buddha even says that we may even meet the people we love and cherish in the next life if we have a strong affinity for them.

The  householder Nakulapita and his wife Nakulamata came to see the Lord, and having sat down, Nakulapita said:

 "Lord, since my wife was brought home to me when I was a mere boy, she being a mere girl, I have not been conscious of  having transgressed against that even in thought, much less in body. Lord, we desire to behold each other, not just in this life, but in the next life also."   

Nakulamata then said: "Lord, since I was brought to my husband's house when I was a mere girl, he being a mere boy, I have not been conscious of having transgressed  against him even in thought, much less in body. Lord, we desire to behold each other, not just in this life, but in the next life also."

At this, the Lord said: "If both husband and wife desire to behold each other in both  this life and the next life, and both are matched in faith, matched in virtue, matched in generosity and matched in wisdom, then they will behold each other in both this life and the next life also."

41 It is fair to say, therefore, that the doctrine of rebirth is more plausible, more just and more appealing than other post-mortem theories.  Not surprisingly, rebirth, (or reincarnation, or transmigration, as it sometimes called) has always attracted many adherents. Gallup polls in England have shown that the belief in rebirth increased from 18 percent in 1968 to 28 percent in 1978, the largest percentage being in the 25 to 35 age group. 

A similar survey shows that 28 percent of Americans accept the idea. An impressive number of thinkers, philosophers and men of science have found the doctrine of rebirth acceptable. Two eminent philosophers who have argued for the belief in rebirth on logical and ethical grounds are J.M.E.M`Taggat and C.J. Duccuas.

Thomas Huxley, who was responsible for having science introduced into the 19th century British school system, and who was the first scientist to support Darwin's   theories, believed that rebirth was a very plausible idea. In his famous book, "Evolution and Ethics and other Essays ",  he says:

In the doctrine of transmigration, whatever its origin, Brahmanical and Buddhist speculation found, ready to hand, the means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the Cosmos to man... Yet this plea of justification is not less plausible than others; and none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity.

Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its root in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of supplying.

Professor Gustaf Stromberg, the famous Swedish astronomer, physicist and friend of Einstein, also found the idea of rebirth appealing.

Opinions differ whether human souls can be reincarnated on the earth or not. In 1936 a very interesting case was thoroughly investigated and reported by the government authorities in India. A girl (Shanti Devi from Delhi) could accurately describe her previous life (at Mattra, five hundred miles from Delhi) which ended about a year before her ‘second birth’.                             

She gave the name of her husband and child and described her home and life history.  The investigating commission brought her to her former relatives, who verified all her statements.  Among the people of India, reincarnations are regarded as commonplace; the astonishing thing for them in this case was the great number of facts the girl remembered. This and similar cases can be regarded as additional evidence for the theory of the indestructibility of memory.         

Professor Julian Huxley, the distinguished British scientist who was Director General of UNESCO believed that rebirth was quite in harmony with scientific thinking. 

There is nothing against a permanently surviving spirit-individually being in some was given off at death, as a definite wireless message is given off by a sending apparatus working in a particular way. But it must be remembered that the wireless  message only becomes a message again when it comes in contact with a new, material structure - the receiver. So with our possible spirit-emanation. It would  never think or feel unless again `embodied' in some way.

Our personalities are so based on body that it is really impossible to think of survival which would be in any impossible to think of survival which would be in any true sense personal without a body of sorts... I can think of something being given off which would bear the same relation to men and women as a wireless message to the transmitting apparatus; but in that case `the dead' would, so far as one can see, be nothing but disturbances of different patterns wandering through the universe until...they....came back to actuality of consciousness by making contact with something which could works a receiving apparatus for mind.                                   

Even very practical and down-to-earth people like American industrialist Henry Ford found the idea of rebirth acceptable.  Ford was attracted to the idea of rebirth because, unlike the theistic idea or the materialistic idea, rebirth gives you another chance to develop yourself. Henry Ford says:      

I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty-six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilize the experience we collect in one life in the next.      

When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan. I realized that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock...       

Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more...       

The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease...If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men's minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.          

So the Buddha teaching of rebirth does have some scientific evidence to support it. It is logically consistent and it goes a long way to answering questions that the theistic and the materialisitic theories fail to do.