This Buddhist doctrine of re-birth should be distinguished from the theory of
re-incarnation which implies the transmigration of a soul and its invariable material
rebirth. Buddhism denies the existence of an unchanging or eternal soul created by a God
or emanating from a Divine Essence (Paramatma).
If the immortal soul, which is supposed to be the essence of man, is eternal, there
cannot be either a rise or a fall. Besides one cannot understand why "different souls
are so variously constituted at the outset."
To prove the existence of endless felicity in an eternal heaven and unending torments
in an eternal hell, an immortal soul is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, what is it that
is punished in hell or rewarded in heaven?
"It should be said," writes Bertrand Russell, "that the old distinction
between soul and body has evaporated quite as much because 'matter' has lost its solidity
as mind has lost its spirituality. Psychology is just beginning to be scientific. In the
present state of psychology belief in immortality can at any rate claim no support from
science."
Buddhists do agree with Russell when he says "there is obviously some reason in
which I am the same person as I was yesterday, and, to take an even more obvious example
if I simultaneously see a man and hear him speaking, there is some sense in which the 'I'
that sees is the same as the 'I' that hears."
Till recently scientists believed in an indivisible and indestructible atom. "For
sufficient reasons physicists have reduced this atom to a series of events. For equally
good reasons psychologists find that mind has not the identity of a single continuing
thing but is a series of occurrences bound together by certain intimate relations. The
question of immortality, therefore, has become the question whether these intimate
relations exist between occurrences connected with a living body and other occurrence
which take place after that body is dead."
As C.E.M. Joad says in "The Meaning of Life," matter has since disintegrated
under our very eyes. It is no longer solid; it is no longer enduring; it is no longer
determined by compulsive causal laws; and more important than all, it is no longer known.
The so-called atoms, it seems, are both "divisible and destructible." The
electrons and protons that compose atoms "can meet and annihilate one another while
their persistence, such as it is, is rather that of a wave lacking fixed boundaries, and
in process of continual change both as regards shape and position than that of a
thing." [*]
* [C.E.M. Joad, The Meaning of Life]
Bishop Berkeley who showed that this so-called atom is a metaphysical fiction held that
there exists a spiritual substance called the soul.
Hume, for instance, looked into consciousness and perceived hat there was nothing
except fleeting mental states and concluded that the supposed "permanent ego" is
non-existent.
"There are some philosophers," he says, "who imagine we are every moment
conscious of what we call 'ourself,' that we feel its existence and its continuance in
existence and so we are certain, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. For my part,
when I enter most intimately into what I call 'myself' I always stumble on some particular
perception or other -- of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.
I never catch myself... and never can observe anything but the perception... nor do I
conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect non-entity."
Bergson says, "All consciousness is time existence; and a conscious state is not a
state that endures without changing. It is a change without ceasing, when change ceases it
ceases; it is itself nothing but change."
Dealing with this question of soul Prof. James says -- "The soul-theory is a
complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the actually verified facts of conscious
experience goes. So far no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific
reasons." In concluding his interesting chapter on the soul he says: "And in
this book the provisional solution which we have reached must be the final word: the
thoughts themselves are the thinkers."
Watson, a distinguished psychologist, states: "No one has ever touched a soul or
has seen one in a test tube or has in any way come into relationship with it as he has
with the other objects of his daily experience. Nevertheless to doubt its existence is to
become a heretic and once might possibly even had led to the loss of one's head. Even
today a man holding a public position dare not question it."
The Buddha anticipated these facts some 2500 years ago.
According to Buddhism mind is nothing but a complex compound of fleeting mental states.
One unit of consciousness consists of three phases -- arising or genesis (uppada)
static or development (thiti), and cessation or dissolution (bhanga).
Immediately after the cessation stage of a thought moment there occurs the genesis stage
of the subsequent thought-moment. Each momentary consciousness of this ever-changing
life-process, on passing away, transmits its whole energy, all the indelibly recorded
impressions to its successor. Every fresh consciousness consists of the potentialities of
its predecessors together with something more. There is therefore, a continuous flow of
consciousness like a stream without any interruption. The subsequent thought moment is
neither absolutely the same as its predecessor -- since that which goes to make it up is
not identical -- nor entirely another -- being the same continuity of Kamma energy. Here
there is no identical being but there is an identity in process.
Every moment there is birth, every moment there is death. The arising of one
thought-moment means the passing away of another thought-moment and vice versa. In the
course of one life-time there is momentary rebirth without a soul.
It must not be understood that a consciousness is chopped up in bits and joined
together like a train or a chain. But, on the contrary, "it persistently flows on
like a river receiving from the tributary streams of sense constant accretions to its
flood, and ever dispensing to the world without the thought-stuff it has gathered by the
way." [*] It has birth for its source and death for its mouth. The rapidity of the
flow is such that hardly is there any standard whereby it can be measured even
approximately. However, it pleases the commentators to say that the time duration of one
thought-moment is even less than one-billionth part of the time occupied by a flash of
lightning.
*[See Compendium of Philosophy, Tr. by Shwe Zan Aung (Pali
Text Society, London) -- Introduction p. 12.]
Here we find a juxtaposition of such fleeting mental states of consciousness opposed to
a superposition of such states as some appear to believe. No state once gone ever recurs
nor is identical with what goes before. But we worldlings, veiled by the web of illusion,
mistake this apparent continuity to be something eternal and go to the extent of
introducing an unchanging soul, an Atta, the supposed doer and receptacle of all actions
to this ever-changing consciousness.
"The so-called being is like a flash of lightning that is resolved into a
succession of sparks that follow upon one another with such rapidity that the human retina
cannot perceive them separately, nor can the uninstructed conceive of such succession of
separate sparks." [*] As the wheel of a cart rests on the ground at one point, so
does the being live only for one thought-moment. It is always in the present, and is ever
slipping into the irrevocable past. What we shall become is determined by this present
thought-moment.
* [Compare the cinematograph film where the individual photographs give rise to a
notion of movement.]
If there is no soul, what is it that is reborn, one might ask. Well, there is nothing
to be re-born. When life ceases the Kammic energy re-materializes itself in another form.
As Bhikkhu Silacara says: "Unseen it passes whithersoever the conditions appropriate
to its visible manifestation are present. Here showing itself as a tiny gnat or worm,
there making its presence known in the dazzling magnificence of a Deva or an Archangel's
existence. When one mode of its manifestation ceases it merely passes on, and where
suitable circumstances offer, reveals itself afresh in another name or form."
Birth is the arising of the psycho-physical phenomena. Death is merely the temporary
end of a temporary phenomenon.
Just as the arising of a physical state is conditioned by a preceding state as its
cause, so the appearance of psycho-physical phenomena is conditioned by cause anterior to
its birth. As the process of one life-span is possible without a permanent entity passing
from one thought-moment to another, so a series of life-processes is possible without an
immortal soul to transmigrate from one existence to another.
Buddhism does not totally deny the existence of a personality in an empirical sense. It
only attempts to show that it does not exist in an ultimate sense. The Buddhist
philosophical term for an individual is Santana, i.e., a flux or
a continuity. It includes the mental and physical elements as well. The Kammic force of
each individual binds the elements together. This uninterrupted flux or continuity of
psycho-physical phenomenon, which is conditioned by Kamma, and not limited only to the
present life, but having its source in the beginningless past and its continuation in the
future -- is the Buddhist substitute for the permanent ego or the immortal soul of other
religions.