In this essay I will expound the Buddhist belief in rebirth, non-self, and karma for a Threads audience, as inspired by this comment on one of my posts:

To me it’s not really deep until religion gets into the soul and God and the relationship between. Hinduism got there, but Buddhism never did. So it’s like a religious path without any faith, without any eternal relationship with a supreme being. It seems intellectually lazy to me to deny the soul exists, and yet say reincarnation exists. The explanation when asked what incarnates if not for the soul, they say “karma” but that answer doesn’t satisfy. I need REAL religion, not philosophy. —jeffersonnance on Threads

This confusion is understandable when viewing Buddhism through a Western worldview influenced primarily by Abrahamic religions, and a superficial understanding of what is meant by reincarnation, karma, and the denial of a soul.

I will address the following misconceptions from this quote:

• if the soul does not exist, how is reincarnation possible?
• the idea that ‘karma’ is the thing that reincarnates
• that Buddhism has no faith

First, a note on terminology. Buddhists use the term rebirth, rather than reincarnation, because the latter implies an “essence” moving form body to body, whereas rebirth is a process of continuity conditioned by causal forces, absent an essence or agent.

Also, some of the terms I’m using are not the most commonly used in Buddhism for these concepts, but I’m choosing words specifically for a non-Buddhist audience.

If the soul does not exist, then what is reborn?

The concept of soul implies some eternal essence – that there’s a “you” that will continue after death, and “you” will live eternally in another realm.

In the Buddhist worldview, everything is impermanent, including you.

“You” are an assembly of parts, resulting from the causes and conditions that shaped you, and when you die those parts disassemble or change and what was “you” in this life ceases to exist.

The parts that comprise “you” are your body, sensations, emotions, mental activity, and consciousness. When you die, your body returns to the earth, the sensations you experience through your body’s sense faculties cease functioning, your perceptions change when your consciousness is no longer embodied. You cease to be “you” but the cessation of your identity does not equal the cessation of a causal continuity.

Then what is it that is reborn in the next life? The cycle of rebirth is endless, but it’s no longer the “you” that exists as your current self that continues in the cycle.

The cycle of rebirth is neither eternalism (the belief in an unchanging soul) nor nihilism (the belief that nothing continues at all). It’s more like there is constant activity in the universe and for a period of time you call “life,” the causes and conditions are right and elements coalesce to create something you perceive as a self, and upon death they don’t vanish, but rather disperse.

Birth, death, and in-between are a never-ending cycle of assembly and disassembly of parts that resemble something like a “self” during life, and this “self” is affected by all the causes and conditions in which it arises. Next, let’s examine those causes and conditions.

The skepticism around rebirth also assumes that continuation requires an identity – one self that continues. But let’s look a physical matter. There is an endless cycle of physical elements in the world that is ever-changing, for example, water moves from rain to lakes to rivers to the ocean to clouds and back to rain again.

The argument that rebirth requires a soul to be reborn is like looking at one raindrop and saying that raindrop was reborn as a morning dew drop. Maybe they are even the same molecules that rained and evaporated and cooled on a blade of grass, but there is no essential “raindrop-ness” that was reborn. In the same way, the continuation of spiritual substance through the cycle of life and death is an endless re-configuring of elements.

But water molecules do persist materially, so let’s find another analogy, because we can make the same argument for all of physical reality. A tree gets chopped down and it ceases being a tree, it then becomes a table for some time, then it becomes kindling, then the carbon is released into the atmosphere and the ash goes on the garden. The carbon is absorbed by the leaves of mayflowers, and the ash provides minerals to the roots of an elderberry shrub. Nothing is destroyed, only transforming, re-arranging. There is no “essence” of tree and Buddhists view the “self” in the same way.

There is confusion about this because in the West, we hear about famous cases of rebirth where one remembers their past life, such as the child Dalai Lama who recognizes his belongings from his past life. Through the Western worldview, this looks like there is a soul that remembered its past life and was reincarnated into a new body.

According to Buddhism, that is not what is happening. Buddhism has a very lengthy explanation of the phases of spiritual attainment that one progresses through with diligent practice of meditation, visualizations, mantra, and living according to the eightfold path.

At a specific stage in this development, one becomes able to purify the effects of their karma and control their own rebirth. This is still seen as a part of a cycle, and not a ‘soul’ that continues, but the mind-stream is one of the components of the ‘self’ which is able to strengthened with practice.

Here is my own analogy for this process. You know when you become aware of a tiny muscle when it is suddenly overworked? You didn’t even know you had that muscle, and suddenly it’s in pain when you start a new activity. As you continue that new activity, that muscle strengthens, and eventually you’re more aware of it, better able to control it, and eventually it becomes more defined and maybe even visible. But like consciousness, it is still a part of the whole that allows you to move. It cannot act independently; it relies on your bones, fascia, and ligaments, blood providing oxygen, etc.

I’m likening that tiny muscle to your mind-stream. Most of us are not aware of how it works and that there is even the possibility of strengthening it. Meditation and other spiritual practices make us more aware of our mind. Progressing through stages of spiritual development, we can strengthen our awareness like a muscle, and then are better able to control our mind.

Even though Tibetan culture widely supports belief in rebirth, most people don’t trace their lives from one to the next. These cases of remembering past lives are rare because it is a result of dedicated effort over many years and lifetimes. In Tibetan Buddhism, a “tulku” is one who has strengthened this ‘mind-muscle’ to such a degree that they have some control over their rebirth.

How does karma affect rebirth?

Karma is not the thing that is reborn, it is the causes and conditions that affect the cycle. Karma literally means “action” and every action has effects.

Everyone is subject to the effects of karma, but it is much more complex than ‘do something good and good things will happen to you’ or ‘do bad things and bad things will happen to you.’

Every thought or action you take creates some effect in the world, and you have to live in that world, so these effects also affect you.

Thoughts also create karma. Have you ever had a grudge against someone you just couldn’t let go? It leaves a trace in your consciousness. Maybe in the future you meet someone resembling your nemesis and act differently toward them. In Buddhist philosophy, every thought you have, good or bad leaves a trace like this, which affects your karma, and these traces persist in the mind-stream (which is not a thing but a process) beyond death and into the next life.

So karmic conditioning affects the arising of the next confluence of parts that make up the next “self.” Back to the tree analogy, the tree became carbon in the atmosphere and ashes, but the forest is a continuing process. Karma is the fertility of the soil, the depth of the seeds, the amount of sunlight – all the conditions shaping which tree grows next, how strong it is, and which direction it grows, etc.

Do Buddhists have faith?

And finally, the idea of faith. Belief in an external, omnipotent being is not a prerequisite to having faith. Buddhists have plenty of faith, just not in God.

Instead, they have faith in the teachings, and that doing the practice will help improve your karma and improve your situation in this life or the next.

But this faith is also not blind. Buddhism is different than Abrahamic religions in that it is meant to be based on experience. There is no “word of God” to believe in uncritically, and debate is encouraged, but even more so, practice is encouraged – the practice of working with your own mind and consciousness until there is no need to believe because you will be able to experience these truths for yourself.

So faith in Buddhism is not about believing in anything other than your own ability to work wth your mind, faith that awakening is possible, and faith in the people who are teaching you the methods. And it does take a tremendous amount of faith to dedicate hours, years, or even decades to something without immediate material benefits.

As for whether or not it is a “REAL religion” as put by the original comment, it most certainly is a real religion, but there is a spectrum of Buddhist practice around the world. On one end of the spectrum, Tibetan Buddhism looks rather similar to Catholicism, with its intricate rituals, cultural practice by laypeople, supplication to deities, and candle offerings, and on the other end of the spectrum there is secularized Buddhism that focuses on the psychological aspects of Buddhism and has no ritual whatsoever.

Whether or not you believe any of this is not the point. Buddhism doesn’t require you to believe anything, rather, it insists that you examine your own mind and deepen your perception so you can draw your own conclusions. It calls you to action, not to belief, but when Western religious ideas of soul, God, and faith are superimposed on a religion with a completely different worldview, misunderstanding is inevitable.

And as for the accusation of “intellectual laziness,” Abrahamic religions are known as the religions of the Book, whereas Buddhism is known as the religion of the library. It’s easy to dismiss other religions when an unfamiliar worldview is judged using familiar but incompatible concepts, leaving your questions unanswered.

It takes much more intellectual rigour to examine how your own pre-conceptions, and even how your own sense perceptions and cognitive process, might be colouring your view. This is the essence of Buddhist practices of meditation, contemplation, and experiential investigation, about which there are countless volumes of commentary explaining how perception, our senses, and feelings affect our understanding of reality, and how we can reduce obscurations to seeing reality as it is.

The sustained examination of perception itself is many things, but intellectually lazy is not one of them.