Questions People Ask Me: Reincarnation 6 comments
The other night I found some people out on the back deck having a barbeque. OK, it was the downstairs neighbor and a few close friends. It was late and they asked me to join them for desert, which, of course, I did. Shrug. Why not? As we sat enjoying the lemon cake and some kind of crazy jamaican sorbet, the conversation meandered, as all conversations do, and somehow the path got us onto the subject of reincarnation.
One particular person said that on occasion he has contemplated the possiblity of reincarnation, but he couldn’t wrap his head around the numbers. He queried that if the human population is gowing by leaps and bounds, where are all the people coming from, where have they been, if there are over 6 billion humans on the planet now, why haven’t there always been over 6 billion people??
(I really like having conversations with this particular person, btw.)
My answers were a cross between New Age dogma and Buddhist thought.
One being that when we pass out of this life, our energy goes into a pool and from the pool, energy is taken to create a new life. Therefore, what we are now is not always what we will be.
The second being that not all people, souls, whatever, are incarnated into a body at the same time. Some are waiting for the proper moment. Some are lost in the bardo (haven’t found their way back yet). Some people come back instantly, while others may wait centuries. Time also works a little differently when we aren’t in a physical body – so what we picture as waiting a few generations to return may only be a blip in cosmic time. In any case, it’s a flow of humanity and not a concrete number.
Someone else mentioned that because some beings come back as animals, and since some animals are becoming extinct or their populations are declining, there are less possible chances to incarnate as an animal and more possible chances to incarnate as a human.
What do you think? Is the idea of reincarnation and how it hapens written in stone for you? Or do you contemplate the possibilities of how it all works and what the process is?
Or, is it not even worth thinking about?
6 Responses to 'Questions People Ask Me: Reincarnation'
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Ah, this is why you are on the teaching path and I am not ;)
I had forgotten about the grains of sand analogy, which makes total sense … I guess it makes total sense to someone who believes, or knows, that reincarnation exists.
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Could it also be that when people are thinking of reinincarnation that they forget that the Universe is a vast place, and that the the possiblity for incarnating in various different forms in various different realms are limitless? Beings/We aren’t limited to planet Earth.
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That’s certainly true as well, although I’m not sure I’d want to be reborn as a giant space squid.
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I like the grains of sand analogy. I’ve also often thought that the way most of us look at reincarnation isn’t how it works. Not that I know how it works but it does seem that the idea that we return over and over in human form is limiting. Therefore these ideas that we come back in different forms makes sense to me.
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Leave it to me to comment nine months after the original post but I was researching the idea of reincarnation and Google brought me here.
To my mind, the best answer I found was from Yew Han Hee who wrote:Q: Does Buddhism teach reincarnation?
A: Reincarnation is not a teaching of the Buddha. In Buddhism the teaching is of rebirth, not of reincarnation.Q: What is the difference between reincarnation and rebirth?
A: The reincarnation idea is to believe in a soul or a being, separate from the body. At the death of the physical body, this soul is said to move into another state and then enter a womb to be born again.Rebirth is different and can be explained in this way…
Take away the notion of a soul or a being living inside the body; take away all ideas of self existing either inside or outside the body. Also take away notions of past, present and future; in fact take away all notions of time.
Now, without reference to time and self, there can be no before or after, no beginning or ending, no birth or death, no coming or going. Yet there is life! Rebirth is the experience of life in the moment, without birth, without death; it is the experience of life which is neither eternal nor subject to annihilation.Q: Does that mean there is no such thing as birth and death?
A: That which is born, dies. Forms come and go. All that comes into existence is impermanent; it is born and it dies. But the very essence of what “I” am — the Buddha-nature — is unborn and undying.This seems to explain away more than explain, but there can be no ethics without responsibility and attempting to couch the inexpressible in conceptual terms leads to the linguistic gymnastics inherent in trying to plug the endless holes in the theoretical dike.
Since it is commonly agreed among all traditions throughout the Buddhist world, that fundamentally the teaching of the Buddha is contained in the Four Noble Truths, why paint legs on the snake?
They say that if you consider all the possible kinds of incarnation, and consider all the beings there are as equivalent to all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, the number of those who take the unbelievably fortunate birth of a human are as many as the grains of sand that adhere to your finger tip if you touch it to the sand and then look at it.
So there’s no shortage of living beings to take human rebirth. The fact that so many are doing so right now is remarkable, but still a drop in the bucket.
If this sounds illogical, consider the notion that karma grows, and that every part of your experience of the world comes from karma. If that is so, then to think that a human rebirth is the only possible outcome is kind of silly. Karma would have to be weirdly constrained to make that happen. What you’d really expect is that most rebirths would be very weird, random and unpleasant, and some few would be amazingly pleasant.
That’s why the Buddhas encourage us to refrain from harming others, and to be kind and generous in our activities.