Whose teaching it is

The teaching

As each tradition of rebirth in its own scriptures teaches it.

The self that does not die

In the Hindu teaching the true self, the atman, is never born and never dies. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna tells Arjuna, on the field of battle, that weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it and wind does not dry it. As the embodied self passes, in this one body, through childhood, youth and old age, so it passes on to another body, and the wise are not troubled by it. What dies is the body. What passes on is the self, carrying with it what it has made of itself.

How one life leads to the next

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad gives the oldest account of the passage. As a caterpillar that reaches the tip of a blade of grass draws itself together and reaches out to the next, so the self, letting go of one body, reaches toward another. As a goldsmith takes a piece of gold and works it into a newer and fairer shape, so the self, casting off this body, makes for itself another form. What shapes the new form is the old life. A person is made of desire: as their desire is, so is their resolve; as their resolve is, so is their deed; and whatever they do, that they become.

The Vedanta teachers explain what carries the past across. Besides the gross body of flesh there is a subtle body, made, in their count, of seventeen parts: the five powers of sense, the five powers of action, the five vital breaths, the mind and the intellect. It holds the impressions, samskaras, left by every act and thought, and the leanings, vasanas, that grow from them. At death the subtle body leaves the gross one, and these impressions draw it toward its next birth.

The two paths

The Upanishads and the Gita speak of two roads for the dead. Those who in the forest worship with faith and austerity, knowing the truth, go by the path of the gods: into the flame, the day, the bright half of the month and the northern course of the Sun, and on to brahman, from which there is no return. Those who live in the village doing works of sacrifice and charity go by the path of the fathers: into the smoke, the night, the dark half of the month and the southern course, to the Moon; and when what they earned is spent they come back down as rain, become plants and food, and are born again. The Gita adds that the yogi who knows both paths is deluded by neither.

Release

The round of births is samsara, and the Hindu schools agree that it is to be ended, not enjoyed. Release, moksha, comes by knowledge of the self, by devotion to God, or by action done without clinging to its fruit, and the schools weigh these differently. Two teachings of the Gita bear on rebirth directly. Whatever a person thinks of at the moment of leaving the body, to that they go, because it is what they have always dwelt on. And no effort on the path is ever lost: one who falls short is born again in a pure and prosperous home, or among the wise, and takes up the work where it was left.

Rebirth without a self

The Buddha teaches rebirth and denies that any lasting self passes from life to life. Asked how both can be true, the monk Nagasena answers King Milinda with a lamp that burns all night. Is the flame of the last watch the same as the flame of the first? Not the same, says the king, and yet not another, for it burns from the same lamp. So too with birth: the one reborn is neither the same as the one who died nor another.

Milk becomes curds, curds butter, butter ghee; no one would call the ghee milk, and yet it came from nothing else. And a man who steals mangoes from another's tree cannot plead that he took different mangoes from the one that was planted. What grows from an act belongs to its line, though no unchanging person runs through it.

The twelve links

The Buddha set out how the round turns as a chain of twelve links, each the condition of the next. Ignorance conditions the formations of will; formations condition consciousness; consciousness conditions name and form, the mind and body; name and form condition the six senses; the senses condition contact; contact conditions feeling; feeling conditions craving; craving conditions clinging; clinging conditions becoming; becoming conditions birth; and birth conditions ageing and death, with sorrow, grief and despair.

With the ending of ignorance the formations end, and so on down the chain, until birth and death end too. Teachers point to the place between feeling and craving as the one where practice can act most plainly: a feeling can be known for what it is without being clutched.

The realms and the rare human birth

Birth may be among the gods, among humans, among animals, among hungry ghosts or in the hells: five destinations in the oldest discourses, and six in later teaching, which adds the jealous gods, the asuras. None lasts, not even the heavens. Human birth is the precious one, because there pleasure and pain are mixed enough to move a being to practise. The Buddha gave an image of its rarity: a blind turtle that rises from the depths of the ocean once in a hundred years has a better chance of putting its neck through a single yoke floating on the waters than a being fallen to the lower realms has of regaining a human birth.

Remembering and ending

On the night of his awakening, the discourses say, the Buddha first recalled his own former lives, many thousands of them, with their names, their food and their joys and pains. Then he saw beings everywhere passing away and reappearing according to their deeds. Then he ended the taints of sensual desire, of becoming and of ignorance, and only this third knowledge freed him. Memory of past lives is a fruit of deep concentration in this teaching, and never its aim. The aim is that becoming should cease, and the discourses give the words of one who reaches it: birth is ended, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done is done, and there is nothing further beyond this.

The soul and its dust

The Jains teach that the universe is full of souls, jivas, without number, each eternal and each by its own nature possessed of infinite knowledge, perception, bliss and energy. Not only people and animals have them: so do plants, and even beings with a single sense that live in earth, water, fire and air. What hides a soul's nature is karma, which here is a fine matter that streams in through the activity of body, speech and mind and sticks to the soul wherever the passions, anger, pride, deceit and greed, make it sticky. Weighed down by it, the soul is born again and again as a god, a human, an animal or plant, or a being of the hells, and only from a human birth can it be freed.

The way out and the place of the freed

The way out is to stop the inflow and wear away what has gathered. The inflow is stopped by vows, care and restraint; the old karma is shed by austerity, as a great tank dries up once the water flowing into it has been stopped. The path is the three jewels together: right faith, right knowledge and right conduct. Its vows are five: not to harm, not to lie, not to steal, to be chaste, and not to possess. A soul freed of all karma rises, light as it truly is, to the summit of the universe, the abode of the siddhas, where it rests for ever in knowledge and bliss and is never born again.

Plato: the soul that remembers

Among the Greeks, Plato teaches that the soul is immortal, has been born many times and has seen all things here and in the other world, so that learning is really remembering: in the Meno a slave boy who has never studied geometry is led by questions alone to a truth he already held. In the Phaedrus the soul is a charioteer with two winged horses, one noble and one unruly, who once followed the gods around the heavens and glimpsed true being. Losing its wings, it falls into a body. It takes ten thousand years to grow them again, except for the soul that three times in a row chooses the life of one who loves wisdom, which is freed in three thousand.

The West's school of souls

Allan Kardec's Spiritism teaches that spirits are created simple and ignorant, all alike, and perfect themselves through many incarnations, on this earth and on other worlds. Before each birth a spirit chooses the trials of the coming life, for its own progress or to make amends. It may stand still but never goes backward, and never returns in an animal's body. Between lives it lives in the world of spirits, and forgetting the past lives is a mercy that lets each life be lived freshly.

Theosophy gives a longer map. At death the lower parts of the person are shed in kama-loka, the place of desire. The reincarnating ego then rests in devachan, a long dream of bliss in which its highest hopes are fulfilled, until the tendencies it left behind draw it back to birth. Karma is the law that fits every effect to its cause, and the ego climbs through many lives toward perfection.