Reincarnation: A Buddhist Perspective

So tonight, I actually changed up what I was going to talk about what I had planned on the schedule prior to this because for the last 2 weeks we’ve heard from Mark Ryan, a long-time esteemed member of our sangha, about reincarnation and the search for evidence on it. Mark went over some interesting, you know, past life regressions, evidence from childhood stories and child memories and experiences. And I wanted to continue on that theme because I, you know, there was a lot that was inspiring about it, but I wanted to pivot a little bit to a Buddhist point about how the teachings approach the concept of reincarnation, specifically taking it out of some of these conceptual what-ifs— there will be a little bit of that— and showing how if you were open to this as an idea, how would this impact your practice? How would this impact how we interact with each other day to day? Even if, you know, we don’t necessarily fully accept the evidence for it, how would we live right now if we had an open mind about that? And in many ways, we don’t really need to know everything.

We just need to know how it— how would it impact us and with the actions I’m taking right now. Because reincarnation and this idea of past lives comes up frequently in the suttas. It comes up quite a bit, really.

And, you know, one of the big aspects of it is in the Jataka Tales, which are these stories of the past lives of the Buddha. And he, you know, starts each of these off, ‘When I was but an unenlightened bodhisattva,’ and then kind of continues on with a training story. And, you know, these are all in some ways the lessons he learned to get to the life where he became enlightened.

And some of them don’t end in great ways for him. Sometimes he gets killed by an animal or killed by robbers or some, you know, sometimes he has a good life, sometimes a not so good life. And you see this kind of progression.

It’s, and they’re quite interesting. There’s some fun ones in there. But in the Samyutta Nikaya, in one of these baskets of teachings, the Buddha lays out a number of similes that he shares on this kind of endless round of rebirth, which is called samsara in Pali.

I’ll use that a few more times. So some of these similes, and these are fairly intense, but you can encounter these things as you read the suttas. You encounter these types of things over and over again.

So as an example, and you could close your eyes if you want to, to take some of these in, but the heap of bones from your past lives alone would dwarf a mountain. The tears you have shed over loss across lifetimes exceeds the four great oceans. The blood you have shed when you were an animal, criminal, a soldier, a mother would also exceed those oceans.

If you made a ball of clay the size of a peanut for every being you you had been, you would exhaust the earth before exhausting your rebirths. If you gathered a stick for each ancestor you had, you would have a pile higher than the Himalayas. These are just a few.

They go on and on and on in similar veins. And as you start to hear some of these, you can start to think of some for yourself about what the Buddha’s pointing at here. And the purpose of these similes, though they can get kind of intense in what they’re saying, isn’t despair, but this arising of— in Pali, the term samvega, or spiritual urgency.

There’s a little push here. To quote Ajahn Chah, the great Thai forest master, if you really saw samsara clearly, you wouldn’t want to stay another moment. Then there’s the flip side to the spiritual urgency, and this also comes in the Samyutta Nikaya and also in the Anguttara Nikaya, that when we look at these different similes, they not only show us the vastness of our rebirth, the vastness of in some ways the suffering that this wandering has taken us through.

But it also shows us our interconnection in really, really deep ways, that every being has at one point been our mother, been our child, been our dearest friend. Everyone has shared in this, maybe not in this lifetime, but in some other lifetime. They have been through what it’s like to lose loved ones, to lose children, to lose parents, to lose friends, but also to have joys.

To have children, to have great relationships. So the question comes up, like, what does this mean for our relationship to, say, the mosquito, the difficult relative? These are intimate family across lifetimes. And that’s why when some of these precepts come along, like the first precept, and they say abstain from killing, they don’t say abstain from killing humans.

It’s abstain from killing sentient beings, because all of these beings are interconnected in this wheel of samsara. That ant or, you know, that roach we smash with the shoe could be our child in the its next rebirth. You just don’t know.

And so this is taken as the root of loving kindness, that loving kindness isn’t brought up— and it really, this applies to all the other heart practices as well— they don’t come from necessarily just trying to say some phrases and create a sense of interconnection. But if you open to this a little bit, it comes from this deep-rooted ‘I am’ in relation with every other being on this planet, every being that’s here. And this is repeated in the, in the Metta Sutta, you know, we open our hearts to all beings, large and small, seen and unseen.

The weak, the strong, all of it. And this is why, because we’re all interconnected in this round of samsara. So this can really be fuel for the practice.

It’s fuel for how we engage with each other. If every being has been our mother, how do we hold resentment? Every being has been our child, has been our friend, It asks quite a lot. It’s a different way of looking at things.

The other thing that it points to, and this comes up in the suttas quite a bit as well, is that in this endless cycle, human birth is exceedingly rare. You know, there are these funny science stats that come out where it’s like, how many ants are there on the face of the earth? And it’s like in the hundreds of billions. And I think I’m even undercounting there.

It might be like quadrillions of ants. You think about like the supply of sentient beings that are around when you start counting all the insects, the fish, birds, snails, the little bacteria things moving around. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of krill.

How many krill are there? There are a lot of beings. There are many, many, many, many sentient beings, and those are the ones we know about. And so the suttas say that it’s like a blind turtle coming up from the ocean every 100 years and accidentally putting its head through a life preserver, and that’s having a human rebirth.

And you think about this, the conditions for practice, what it takes for us to be here in a group like this, hearing the Dharma, having the life stability to come on a Monday night, a human mind, the ability to practice. These things are not guaranteed. The only certainty is that this will come to an end at some point.

Everything else is uncertain. So, you know, again, there’s this concept of Samvega, this take the time now. Sure, all of this is about, you know, reincarnation, what happens later, what happened before, but it keeps coming back to what’s happening right now.

And so it isn’t— and Samvega definitely isn’t some sort of punishment, but it’s a wake-up. It’s a, it’s a, oh yeah. This is going on, and the practice isn’t necessarily to prepare us for the future, but it is about what’s going on at the moment, about what’s happening, how we relate to people right now.

And so in different, I’d say— I’m trying to think of the right word here— perhaps disciplines of Buddhism, different viewpoints on Buddhism, there’s, there are several different views. There’s some people that are basically like, okay, enlightenment and stuff, that’s impossible, so maybe next life will be better than this one. It’s kind of more like the later— I’ll do good things but for later.

And then there’s feels like, okay, this— none of this reincarnation stuff really matters at all. It’s all about what happens. It’s just this life right now.

And where I think, you know, at least a lot of the monastic community, and really where the Suttas is, is a kind of now. It’s like I was saying about the candy bar, now and later. It’s like, you know, there’s the now, and, you know, the later matters, but the now matters too.

And you kind of are holding both in many ways. And it’s not something that I feel personally that I can speak from a place of certainty. Again, you know, everything comes to an end.

That’s the only thing that’s certain. Other than that, it’s uncertain. But I do personally feel like something is lost from the richness of the teachings when this concept is just dropped out completely.

For me, there is a lot of richness in those similes. There’s a lot of richness in how they affect heart practices, how we connect to each other. And how these reincarnation teachings relate to the, you know, urgency, to compassion, to the preciousness of right now, the preciousness of our ability to practice, and this craving to come to the end of wandering.

It’s nibbāna. And there’s a lot of really fantastical things that go on in the suttas around reincarnation that are quite interesting. I mean, there are the psychic powers of being able to see previous lives.

There’s stories of people asking the Buddha, as a married couple, how can we be reincarnated again together? There’s people that ask about— and he gives an answer to that, which I think is interesting, too, but there are people who ask him very everyday questions, you know, okay, I’m really committed to this practice, I want to practice, I want to practice, I want to practice, but I may die before I get to the point that I want to get to. What, what’s going to happen to me? And there are, there are many— I mean, you can tell this, it’s both at the time the water that the Buddha’s swimming in, it’s the water of the culture he’s in.

But it’s something that the people there take very seriously, that they really care about and want to understand what’s going on. And this concept that, you know, what comes back in all these stories is that your actions have consequences, that, you know, both the good and the bad, that there is some meaning to what we do. Each— the actions we take, small or big, actions of generosity, of charity, and these things, they, they do matter.

And where I think there’s some difference though from, from certain viewpoints on, on this topic is that there isn’t ever really seen that there’s anything, I don’t know, guiding this. It’s just good begets good, bad begets bad, and that’s just kind of sometimes how things go. But it’s also very much stated over and over again, don’t try to look at the reasons for these things.

Just put in the causes that you’re able to put in. Let the results take care of themselves. That’s what we have control over.

So there’s, you know, there’s a lot of fields to talk about this in. It’s a really interesting topic. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about it some more more and offer some of what the suttas say on it.

And this urgency in the practice, because while there is a lot of talk on reincarnation, it’s also repeated over and over again that now, in this present life, in this very life, oh monks, this is achievable. In now and later. So as a reminder, you know, this life, this community, this moment, they’re rare, they’re precious, and it’s a chance that needs to be seized.

So, you know, the prior talks again offered evidence that reincarnation may be real, that we might want to keep an open mind And so again, I wanted to present what this kind of means for us in our practice if we did keep that open mind, include a standpoint. So I wanted to offer some time because I think each of us probably has some stuff we want to talk about on this for us to get into some little groups of somewhere between 2 and 4. Here and also on there.

And before you end the recording, Rafi, I just want to— so people can hear it in the recording— what the question— you can talk about any, anything in these last two talks, anything in this talk, but also for you personally. And I’ll repeat this, but for you personally, does the teaching land more as an intellectual question, a felt sense, or some type of call to action? For you personally, does the teaching land more as an intellectual question, a felt sense, or a call to action? Thank you everyone for your kind attention, and we’ll split everyone up.