The Logic of Rebirth and Karma

“Offered to us as the irreplaceable means of deliverance, the Dhamma does not seek mere intellectual assent, but commands a response that is bound to be fully religious.” – Bhikkhu Bodhi, Two Faces of the Dhamma

“Why, if experience continues anyway, is it so terribly important that it continue within this set of personal characteristics, memories, and body?” – Tom Clark, Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity

Strange Relics

When I started meditating, ten-odd years ago, I didn’t think much of Buddhism. Whenever neuroscientists wrote about the absence of a solid self, I was intrigued. When Alan Watts waxed lyrical about the ideological assumptions underpinning materialism, I was enthralled. But when Buddhists spoke of the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, or the Three Characteristics, I glazed over. Even though Buddhism was the primary source of my newfound interest in spirituality, it often read like a painfully detailed way of stating the obvious in dry, arcane terminology.

Plus, it seemed unnecessary. People like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Sam Harris had already gone forth, extracted the gem of meditation from its religious matrix, brushed off the superstitious residue, and delivered it to the West. Why would I learn to meditate from an outdated religion when a modern approach was available? Learning about meditation through Buddhism seemed like learning about physics through Aristotle. Nowadays, I thought, we know better.

But as my practice has developed, I’ve changed my mind. Ignoring Buddhist wisdom now seems less like ignoring Aristotle and more like ignoring Einstein or Newton. Buddhism contains a body of introspective genius unparalleled in Western thought. Its teachings can free the mind from the shackles of evolutionary, cultural, and personal conditioning, revealing an oft-overlooked freedom intrinsic to awareness. This freedom can then become both a refuge and a lodestar, fundamentally reorienting how one pays attention (and, by extension, how one experiences life).

Within Buddhism’s brilliant teachings, however, lie some strange relics. The Canon is filled with stories of devas, deities, and psychic powers, which are hard to take literally. Fortunately, Buddhism does not demand belief in these elements; they can be interpreted as mythological metaphors which illustrate the teachings and inspire practice. For instance, when the Buddha takes his half-brother to a heaven realm inhabited by nymphs whose beauty far surpasses that of any human, the point is not to arouse belief in such a realm. Rather, it is to show the painful futility of desire, and the peace available once it is overcome.

One supernatural element is not so conveniently understood, though: reincarnation. Western meditation teachers often ignore the role of reincarnation in the teachings, or explain it purely as a metaphor for successive mind moments within this very life. This approach makes sense, because many students would bolt at the mention of streams of consciousness transmigrating across lifetimes. But to understand Buddhism, a different approach is required. The earliest teachings were clear that reincarnation (which I’ll also refer to as “rebirth”) is not a mere metaphor; it should be interpreted literally, and disbelieved at one’s own peril.

Modern monks, who need not cater to rationalist perspectives, are more direct. Bhikkhu Bodhi writes, “The teaching of rebirth crops up almost everywhere in the Canon, and is so closely bound to a host of other doctrines that to remove it would virtually reduce the Dhamma to tatters. … [The suttas] even say that rebirth occurs ‘with the breakup of the body, after death,’ which clearly implies they intend the idea of rebirth to be taken quite literally.” Ajahn Sona says that to have right view—one facet of the Noble Eightfold Path—“one must have a conviction of continuation beyond death,” and that without right view “much of your meditation will be in vain.” Similarly, Bhikkhu Analayo notes, “The standard definition of wrong view in the early discourses explicitly covers the denial of rebirth…” According to Buddhism, rebirth is a fact.

I initially thought that reincarnation’s significance was solely a matter of religious confusion. After all, every religion has its share of odd dogma. But over the years, I’ve experienced, in a way that leaves no room for doubt, the value of the core tenets of Buddhism (including the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and, especially, the Three Characteristics). As my mind has gradually (and sometimes suddenly) opened to the liberating power of the Dharma, I’ve softened my stance on reincarnation. While I still don’t believe in it, I do believe it has something to teach us.

Whether or not it’s true, the idea of reincarnation is useful. Understood as an aid to meditation practice and a view that promotes the good, its central role in Buddhism makes more sense. To fully grasp its utility, though, we must first understand what Buddhists mean by rebirth.

What Reincarnates?

Upon learning of the importance placed on rebirth, I had one big question: What reincarnates? Because Buddhism denies the existence of a concrete personal identity, I could not understand what, in theory, migrates between lifetimes. If not some sort of soul or personality, then what?

However, this question is misguided, for a fundamental reason: even within this lifetime, experience migrates across moments unmoored to personal identity. Truly pay attention, and you’ll see that your subjectivity is not yours at all. It is an impersonal process playing out of its own accord, so fleeting that it can never be grasped, let alone pinned down and “owned”. There is no you behind the scenes; there are only the scenes, unfolding with a nature as selfless as a stream.

And if this selfless stream of experience can continue across moments, asks Buddhism, why not across lifetimes?[1] Viewed this way, the question of what persists across lifetimes is actually the same as the question of what persists within this very life. Consciousness—the lifeblood of experience—contains all things, personal identity included. Just as consciousness can hold various identities in this life—friend, sibling, child, lover, and so forth—Buddhists claim it can also hold different identities in subsequent lives.

A famous metaphor likens consciousness to a flame. Flames are forever in flux, but it makes sense to talk of this flame rather than that one. A candle flame of one moment is not identical to that in the next, but neither is it separate. Likewise, consciousness ceaselessly changes, yet it also persists. The consciousness that starts this sentence is not the same as the consciousness that finishes it, but they flow in the same stream. And, the metaphor goes, just as the flame from one wick can be used to light the flame of another, so can the consciousness from this life flow into the next. Different moments, different lives, same stream of consciousness.

Mind, Matter, and Causality

This raises an obvious question: If consciousness depends on the brain, and the brain decomposes with death, how can a stream of consciousness re-emerge from a different brain? To understand the answer, we must reframe our understanding of the relationship between mind, matter, and causality.

In Western thought, physical reality—comprising matter, energy, and forces—is considered fundamental. Experience is seen as a subjective epiphenomenon that emerges from this objective, physical substrate. As such, experience is not a causal player; it simply rides the waves of causation that exist at the physical level. Consciousness may exist, but it is causally impotent. It is the effect of neurological events, but never the cause of anything. In this paradigm, the workings of the brain are objective facts, whereas the experiences of mind are mere subjectivity.

In contrast, Buddhism grants consciousness a more causal role. Experience does not only emerge from the physical world; the physical world also emerges from experience. In this paradigm, the causal influence that the brain exerts on experience is counterbalanced by the non-physical influence of experience on the brain. In other words, experience has a causal power comparable to that of material reality.

As Bhikkhu Bodhi explains, “consciousness and the world coexist in a relationship of mutual creation which equally require both terms [emphasis added]. Just as there can be no consciousness without a body to serve as its physical support and a world as its sphere of cognition, so there can be no physical organism and no world without some type of consciousness to constitute them as an organism and world.” Thus, mind is as real as anything physical, with an equivalent causal force.

And if consciousness is part of the causal fabric of reality, the thinking goes, then its causes must have effects. When we strike a pool ball, we expect it to move. This is because we live in a world where causes don’t simply end; they always induce effects. If the pool ball were unaffected, this would make no sense. Likewise, the causal momentum of consciousness cannot simply cease; in the Buddhist view, where mind is as much a causal player as matter, this would make no sense.[2] Consciousness continues beyond death because the decomposition of the brain is not sufficient to impede its causal flow.

Whether or not you agree with the rebirth bit, this framing—in which experience has real causal effects—is worth pondering.

We tend to think that reality is made of two parts: the objective physical world and a subjective psychological one. We then assume that the physical is somehow more real than the psychological, which causes us to discount the importance of cultivating healthy minds. But how could consciousness be any less real than the brain states upon which it interdepends? Both occur within reality, and neither occurs without the other. To believe that consciousness is somehow less real than its corresponding brain states is like thinking that when a coin lands heads-up, the tails-down side is irrelevant to the outcome.

Experience is reality, just as much as the sun or the moon.[3] By appreciating this fact, we are better oriented to give it the care it deserves.

Buddhism grants a significance to experience often missing from Western thought. But where Western traditions downplay the reality of experience, Buddhism over-emphasizes its role in the cosmos. To understand why, let’s turn to the mechanisms which drive rebirth.

Reincarnation How?

Contrary to what some might think, taking rebirth is not a good thing. This is because the cause of rebirth—craving—is painful and permeates existence. Craving coats the intrinsic freedom of consciousness with a veneer of dissatisfaction—and for the untrained mind, it does so with few reprieves. Whenever we crave, we prioritize the pursuit of a thought over the felt understanding of what is happening now. For this reason, craving is not just a source of suffering, but also of delusion. It makes us dissatisfied because it obscures the experiential truth of moment-to-moment existence.

The ultimate goal of the Buddhist path is to step off the wheel of samsara, ending all future rebirths. To do this, we must completely and permanently eradicate craving. Only when the possibility of craving no longer exists can our stream of consciousness rest and cease being propelled from life to life.[4] To fully extinguish craving is to fully dispel the cause of suffering—a realization also known as enlightenment.

The suttas call craving “the seamstress”, because it stitches beings into the cycle of unsatisfying, samsaric existence. Whenever we crave, Buddhists claim, we bind moments of experience together, causing consciousness—and suffering—to cascade across lifetimes. If consciousness is a flame, craving is like the wind that carries it far and wide. As Bhikkhu Analayo elaborates:

[A flame supported by wind] “can cross over a distance even without any fuel and is able to set fire to fuel that is not immediately contiguous to it. Similar to the wind acting as a support for the flame, craving is considered to function as the support for the mind at the time of transition from one life to the next. Unlike the wind, which will abate on its own at some point, as long as craving continues in unawakened beings, immersed in ignorance, it is the bond that according to the early Buddhist analysis binds consciousness to present and future bodies. To be free from this bond requires that ignorance and craving be eradicated.”

Craving impels the mind to grasp at the world with such force that even after our physical death, this grasping remains. When the body dies, craving causes the mind to, as Bhikkhu Bodhi says, “spring up again, grasping on to a fertilized egg… bringing the whole storage of accumulated impressions over with it into the new psychophysical organism.”

I suspect that, at this stage, some readers are doubtful. How could craving possibly direct a disembodied mind stream to a freshly fertilized egg? I share this skepticism, but I’d like to remind readers that I’m not arguing that reincarnation is true. Rather, I’m laying out the Buddhist viewpoint, insofar as one exists, because I believe it has value.

Rebirth is a religious belief, not a scientific hypothesis. Bhikkhu Bodhi makes this clear when he writes, “There is no logical way to prove the validity of rebirth and kamma.” Bhikkhu Analayo shares this sentiment. When asked whether we can reason our way to rebirth, he replied that he is not interested, nor does he see the point in such an effort.

Rebirth serves a functional purpose rather than a factual one. To fully appreciate its practical value, though, requires an understanding of karma.

What is Karma?

As we’ve seen, Buddhism takes experience seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it weaves a map of the cosmos where psychology has the power of physical law. In Buddhist metaphysics, craving does not just cause suffering—it perpetuates our very existence. Just as the force of gravity makes apples fall, so the force of craving steers disembodied streams of consciousness towards zygotes.

Buddhism also grants cosmic significance to moral intuitions, folding them into the fabric of reality by way of karma. Karma holds that morality has implications far beyond the psychological. The moral character of our thoughts, words, and deeds exerts a lawful force on the world, affecting an ethical equilibrium maintained by the cosmos. Whenever we think, speak, or act with intent, we plant seeds in this moral equilibrium. When these seeds ripen, they can affect this life, future lives, and even the diversity of life on Earth.

Bhikkhu Bodhi acknowledges the psychological basis of our moral intuitions, but unapologetically extends their purview to the world at large. As he writes, “…the very fact that we can conceive a demand for moral justice has a significance that is more than merely psychological. However vaguely, our subjective sense of moral justice reflects an objective reality, a principle of moral equilibrium that is not mere projection but is built into the very bedrock of actuality.”

This moral equilibrium is like a scientific conservation law, but instead of balancing physical quantities such as mass or energy, it balances ethical qualities across conduct and consequences. And this happens naturally. There is no Buddhist commissar in the sky, keeping moral balance sheets. The intent with which we think, speak, or act contains a moral momentum that merges with the wider web of causation and produces consequences according to natural, impersonal processes. This moral momentum, known as karma, is just one cause among many.

Intent is key to karma. Sneezing, being involuntary, is not a source of karma. If an angry thought spontaneously comes to mind and we quickly drop it, this generates little unwholesome karma because no hostile impulse was indulged. Karma only takes root when we purposefully curate our mind-body process. The Buddha made this clear when he (allegedly) said, “Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.” (Kamma is the Pali word; the more widely used karma is Sanskrit.)

Strictly speaking, karma is not the result of wholesome or unwholesome deeds. Karma is like a seed, planted by the quality of our motivation. Under the right conditions, the seeds of karma ripen into fruit—and these fruits, known as vipaka, are what is meant when speaking of karmic results. In other words, we sow karma and reap vipaka.

But just as a farmer cannot guarantee a good harvest, no matter how meticulously they plant their seeds, so too we cannot guarantee favourable vipaka, no matter how wholesome our karma. Seeds need water, light, soil, and other conditions to grow; simply planting them is not enough. Likewise, karma only matures into vipaka when conditions allow. While we can influence these conditions (by contributing wholesome karma to the system), we cannot control them (because many non-karmic forces are also at play). Karma comes from us, but its fruits come from the universe.

And these fruits need not mature in this life. Karma from one lifetime can ripen in a subsequent one, and may even determine the biological form of successive lives. Thus, according to Buddhism, we are linked to our ancestors and descendants not just by culture and evolution, but by ethical heritage as well.

Karma and Evolution

The idea that karma influences biology might strike readers as absurd, but I think a gem of wisdom is hidden here. Yes, the Buddha and his contemporaries were unaware of genetics and modern evolutionary theory. Yes, Buddhism strains belief in claiming that “the particular body with which we are endowed, with all its distinguishing features and faculties of sense, is rooted in our volitional activities in earlier lives.”[5] But a view in which consciousness shapes the diversity of life actually makes sense, whether or not the specifics of karma are true.

Reflect on the evolution of the eye. We typically think that eyes evolved because they allow organisms to see, and seeing brings obvious survival benefits. But it is equally true to say that because of seeing, eyes evolved. For without the experience of seeing, what use is an eye? If seeing did not coincide with eyes, they would not have persisted in the evolutionary tree. In this sense, certain forms of consciousness (such as seeing) “lock in” certain forms of life (and vice versa).

If the above example seems too panpsychist—perhaps you object that vision need not be experienced to be useful—instead consider feelings and the brain. When animals (including humans) fear something, they generally avoid it. As a result, the tree of life has produced myriad nervous systems capable of feeling fear as a protective measure. But once again, the influence flows both ways. For without the experience of fear, such nervous systems would never have taken root. Evolution might have briefly stumbled upon them, but lacking any experiential oomph, it would have passed them by.

The same is true of feelings of love, lust, happiness, sadness, and disgust. Academic discussions of philosophical zombies aside, we all know that conscious experiences influence behaviour (and many neuroscientists are starting to agree). And because behaviour affects evolutionary prospects, consciousness is a key player in the diversity of life.

This has potential implications for how we treat other lifeforms. If eyes could independently evolve upwards of forty times across insects, cephalopods, and vertebrates, why not also fear and pain?

Reasons to Believe

We like to flatter ourselves with the idea that we hold beliefs because they seem true. But this is, at best, a half-truth. In reality, we tend to think something is true because we already believe it. There are many reasons to hold beliefs, such as confirmation bias, social validation, or psychological comfort. For instance, when people “learn” through podcasts and TikTok that the pandemic was a hoax, their belief forms through a toxic mixture of epistemic arrogance (“Experts always get it wrong”), strong emotions (“You should be angry about this”), distrust in institutions (“Leaders always lie”), and charismatic influencers (“I heard this guy on Rogan…”). Of course, COVID-19 skeptics think their pandemic beliefs are true—but their conviction coalesces from causes having little to do with truth.

Our beliefs, right or wrong, are the products of happenstance: we believe (or disbelieve) certain things because of our trajectories through life. This does not mean that we believe things only for bad reasons. It does mean that we should be humble, and view beliefs through a broad lens. Even if a belief is not true, there may be good reasons to hold it. When I practise metta meditation, for example, I let myself believe that my well wishes can psychically touch others. I doubt this is true (though I can’t be sure), but I choose to believe it (if only periodically) because it helps my practice.

If a belief has abundant benefits and few downsides—personally and societally—it may make sense to believe it, even if it might not be true. This is not to say that we can convince ourselves of things we know to be false. But where uncertainty exists, we can believe strategically, choosing beliefs that serve us (and our neighbours) best.

If, as a scientific-minded reader, this line of reasoning makes you squirm, then I have some bad news: most of your day-to-day thoughts are not just false, but, because they rest on assumptions programmed by evolution to serve survival and reproduction rather than truth, they are fundamentally deluded.

Whenever we believe that we are self-contained, autonomous agents, we are not seeing experience—which is all we ever see—clearly. To identify with a thought of self is to mistake a transient thought for our genuine nature (which is actually a boundless, borderless, ceaselessly changing expanse of experience). When I believe that I am Tristan, a telecommunications engineer, this belief has value because it helps me organize my affairs and relate to others. But where does the engineer exist? Sure, I have an expensive piece of paper with my name on it, and I sit at a desk sending emails and drafting CAD files forty hours a week. When I examine experience, though, there is no engineer in sight.

So, if you don’t object to this ubiquitous belief in self—which forms the conceptual framework for how billions of us relate to the world—you have already assented to a core belief which is useful but not true.

Meditation makes the contingent nature of belief more salient, granting us greater flexibility in how we relate to our beliefs. Bhikkhu Analayo touches upon this in his book on nibbana: “For one who has seen the escape from constructing, anything constructed [i.e., anything contingent], including any view, can no longer appear as real or solid as it may have seemed earlier. Hence … the acceptance of a view has been reduced just to the instrumental purpose of serving as an orientational reference point for progress on the path.”[6]

Put another way, beliefs can be used as tools. With this in mind, we are now ready to consider benefits (and drawbacks) of believing in rebirth.

Reason I: The Quest for Cosmic Justice

The human moral sense is a source of much misery. We crave fairness and justice but live in a world filled with wars, refugees, homelessness, corruption, inequality, violent crime, climate change, natural disasters, factory farming, nuclear weapons, human trafficking, declining democracies, aging, illness and death (to list just a few). Cast your moral gaze outwards, and you quickly find ample reason for despair.

We can—and should—work to improve the world, but it will always be grievously flawed. Rather than dwell on this fact, cultures invent myths that imbue reality with a sense of fairness. In some of these myths, our imperfect lives are just a preamble, and the moral balance is paid after death. In others, smart, hardworking people are rewarded while stupid, slovenly people are punished—in direct proportion to their virtue and vice. By believing in God, meritocracy, or some other moral myth, we can dispel the distress that arises when our moral ideals meet the amoral bedrock of reality.   

Karma is one such way of satisfying our desire for cosmic justice. Bhikkhu Bodhi elaborates on this with characteristic candour:

Our moral intuition, our innate sense of moral justice, tells us that there must be some principle of compensation at work in the world whereby goodness meets with happiness and evil meets with suffering. But everyday experience shows us exactly the opposite. We all know of highly virtuous people beset with every kind of hardship and thoroughly bad people who succeed in everything they do. … However, in his teachings the Buddha reveals that there is a force at work which can satisfy our demand for moral justice. … This force is called kamma.

But to be a convincing moral myth, karma must extend beyond this lifetime. Otherwise, people might see good individuals burdened by difficult lives (or the opposite) and conclude that karma does not add up. Bhikkhu Bodhi again:

It is only too obvious that such moral equilibrium cannot be found within the limits of a single life. We can observe, often poignantly, that morally unscrupulous people might enjoy happiness, esteem and success, while people who lead lives of the highest integrity are bowed down beneath pain and misery. For the principle of moral equilibrium to work, some type of survival beyond the present life is required, for kamma can bring its due retribution only if our individual stream of consciousness does not terminate with death.

Buddhist teachings are a method to reduce, and possibly even extinguish, suffering. But as we learn, through meditation, to pierce our biases, we’re often met with hard truths. As ego-defences diminish, we might find that we’re not the moral exemplars we thought we were. And as we open beyond self-reference, we might notice external suffering that previously passed us by. The logic of karma holds that the moral ugliness of the world exists within a larger, natural balance. Suffering may not be good, but at least it is lawful. By remembering this, teachings on karma help us face the world without giving in to despair.

What About the Animals?

Even if rebirth were true, the modern treatment of animals casts doubt on a literal reading of karma. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens, “Over the last two centuries tens of billions of [animals] have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.”

How was so much unwholesome karma planted that tens (or more likely hundreds) of billions of animals lead lives of unimaginable misery? Unless streams of consciousness are migrating to Earth from some deviant off-world, or insect colonies tend to behave very badly (wasps, I’m looking at you), the wanton enormity of modern agricultural practices seems irreconcilable with the idea of a moral equilibrium.[7]

(That said, this is not proof that karma is false, because karma is not the only cause of suffering.)

Reason II: Be Good

Sure, you might think, karma can make a person feel better about our broken world. But isn’t this a cop-out? If nature keeps a moral balance, of its own accord, why care about anything? And if we have countless lives ahead of us, what does the current one matter?

This misunderstands the implications of the twin teachings of karma and rebirth.

To believe in karma is to believe that the quality of one’s motivations holds existential importance. And the purest motivations flow from a place of compassion, non-greed, and understanding.

To believe in rebirth is to believe that one cannot escape the consequences of misbehaviour, even by dying. And if one doesn’t see the rewards of their wholesome intent, they know to remain patient.

Imagine if, every time you engaged in unskillful behaviour—such as expressing anger, spreading rumours, or watching pornography—you knew it would come back to you, just as a ball thrown up must come down.[8] Likewise with skillful action. Wouldn’t you be kinder to yourself and others?

Crucially, karma encourages moral behaviour without forcing Buddhists to feel scrutinized by an ever-watchful God. In the Abrahamic religions, fear and guilt play a central role in morality—and many Jews, Christians, and Muslims feel intense dukkha as a result. In Buddhism, where morality is a matter of cause and effect, fear and guilt have fewer footholds.

Belief in karma can even defuse self-judgment, which is a red herring in our quest to be good. When we judge ourselves, what is actually happening is that we are getting lost in negative thoughts of how we imagine others perceive us. It is a nasty ego trip, but in truth, there is no self being judged—just a storm of thoughts and intensely unpleasant sensations. This generally triggers a frantic desire to make cloying amends. Only once self-judgment recedes can we see the situation clearly and behave appropriately.

Granted, some people could benefit from a bit more self-judgment. But for most of us, we’re laden with it. By framing morality in terms of cause and effect, karma cuts out the self while refocusing attention on what matters: our motivation, or attitude. If you want to improve your life, watch your attitude—with loving attention. Whenever I’m struck by feelings of shame or guilt, I always feel better after narrowing my focus to the defiled attitude behind my cringeworthy words or actions. In spotting this link—between unhealthy motivation and the suffering currently gripping me—I learn, firsthand, to improve my attitude. In this way, thoughts of karma prime the mind to supplant self-judgment with understanding.

Reason III: Be Compassionate

Samsara—the cycle of rebirth—has no beginning. As the Buddha (reportedly) said, “A first point is not discerned of beings roaming and wandering on hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving. For such a long time … you have experienced suffering, anguish, and disaster, and swelled the cemetery.”

This sounds dour (which is the point, as we’ll see below) but, surprisingly, it can serve to expand our circle of moral concern. If we’ve all been transmigrating through countless past lives, then, as the suttas say, we have, at one time or another, been a son, daughter, mother, father, brother, or sister to nearly everyone. Families can be frustrating, but our sense of kinship keeps us caring. The concept of samsara helps extend this forgiving care outwards—making us less self-centred, and thus less deluded.

The Ugly Side of Karma

In the suttas, a student asks the Buddha why there are “short-lived and long-lived people, sick and healthy people, ugly and beautiful people, … poor and rich people, … stupid and wise people.” The Buddha’s answer: karma.

Now, the Buddha clarifies that by “beautiful” and “ugly”, he is referring to temperament. Regardless, his answer illustrates a danger of the idea of karma. By curtailing the role of moral luck, karma makes space for the harmful view that, somehow, everyone gets their just deserts. Instead of searching for the childhood trauma, mental illness, environmental toxins, or host of other blameless conditions behind people’s misery, karma tempts us to cut our inquiry short and pin people’s problems on their mental quality and merit.

Bhikkhu Analayo explains that, because karma is not the only cause of suffering, it should not be seen as a comprehensive explanation of present-world conditions. Someone might suffer through no fault of their own. Unfortunately, this does not change the fact that some Buddhists, lacking in wisdom, will enlist karma to justify their callousness.

Reason IV: Life is Dukkha, but Don’t Despair

Buddhism is refreshingly honest about the human predicament. By default, we are knots of dissatisfaction—meaning that we should endeavour, teachings in hand, to untie our suffering. Facing the human condition head-on, however, carries psychological risks.

If Buddhism emphasized the pain of existence without also teaching rebirth, this would lead some Buddhists—who have not yet realized the liberating aspects of the teachings—to contemplate suicide. If life is dukkha, with decades more to come, why go on?

Belief in rebirth makes suicide less appealing, because death is not the end of suffering. The only way to end suffering is to master one’s mind by cultivating morality, mental discipline, and understanding. In this context, suicide is not a viable option, as it simply continues the cycle of suffering.

On a similar note, rebirth makes it more justifiable to have children—and no religion can prosper if its followers are reluctant to multiply. If life’s persistent struggles ended with death, some might argue that every birth is a tragedy that inflicts avoidable suffering on its recipient. But if rebirth is true, every newborn is a continuation of a pre-existing mind stream, meaning that birth does not add new loci of suffering to samsara. In fact, far from perpetuating suffering, each human birth is an opportunity—realizable through Buddhist teachings—to end it.[9]

Reason V: Whose Body?

Few people are satisfied with their bodies. We want them to be beautiful, but they grow old. We want them to be healthy, but they fall ill. We want them to be comfortable, but they fill with aches and anxiety.

Westerners do not handle this well—as evidenced by widespread body dysmorphia, eating disorders, cosmetic surgeries, crippling self-consciousness, and obsessions with supplements, working out, and makeup. We expect our bodies to satisfy our desires, and suffer when they don’t.

When we identify with our bodies, we are especially susceptible to suffering. When we believe in rebirth, though, we can only identify with the body so much. If consciousness migrates from body to body, in perpetuity, then this body is just a temporary home. It is less like something we personally own, and more like something we temporarily lease. And, as anyone who has ever driven a rental car knows, we obsess less when something is not truly ours.

Reason VI: Spiritual Urgency

It is all too easy to know how to lead a good life, yet lack the motivation to do so. Patience might be a virtue, but we happily pursue short-term, transient pleasures over longer-lasting, durable benefits. Consequently, our society is filled to the brim with compulsive, irritable people.

In granting cosmological importance to the project of overcoming suffering, the Buddhist worldview places supreme importance on the cultivation of healthy minds. If intent has karmic consequences, best be mindful of it. If craving locks us into samsara, best hold things lightly. To a Westerner, an evening spent watching fluff on Netflix might seem like a good use of time (or, at worst, a guilty pleasure). To a devout Buddhist, it is a distraction from the paramount goal of transcending samsara by growing in wisdom.

The twin belief in karma and rebirth reminds Buddhists to pay attention skillfully. Essentially, it weaves mindfulness queues into a worldview—such that thoughts of birth, death, evolution, and causality all serve as reminders to be mindful. As someone who has logged countless hours lost in thought on his meditation cushion, who routinely watches horror movies instead of meditating, and who sometimes pins his faults on a non-existent self rather than the intent that drives him, the value of such reminders is obvious.

Reason VII: Letting Go of the Goal

If someone’s highest aspiration is to escape samsara, they are probably dedicated to their spiritual practice. But the desire for liberation can be a cause for frustration if approached unwisely.

The “goal” of meditation is to develop a mind that is unperturbed, come what may. This requires a radical absence of expectations, so that experience can unfold without human preferences obscuring the view. If we constantly feel that we must achieve liberation, we might not even glimpse it.

Like existential mulligans, rebirth takes some of the pressure off. If we haven’t yet reached the goal of full liberation, that’s okay—we have unlimited attempts. Reducing the stakes, if only slightly, fosters equanimity, improving our meditation practice.

This also benefits Buddhist societies, because parents, teachers, caregivers, and other pillars of the community are less likely to “drop out” to focus on attaining nibbana. A small community of monastics can provide wisdom, perspective, and emotional grounding for their neighbours. However, there are only so many monks and nuns a community can support. If spiritual gains accrue across lifetimes, fewer economically productive citizens will be compelled to don the ochre robes.

Reason VIII: Direct Experience

Some meditators, while deep in practice, seemingly experience past and future lives. This has convinced many people that rebirth is true. As Bhikkhu Analayo writes, “recollection of one’s own past lives … is considered to yield direct experiential knowledge, thereby being far removed from mere theorizing.”

I have not personally experienced other lives, but people’s reports are fascinating. Such experiences are not just conceptual; they feel real, and can involve first-person and third-person perspectives.

Although this seems mystical, a naturalistic explanation exists.

Through meditation, we learn that thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are insubstantial and impersonal. Before learning to meditate, “my hand” might seem like a concrete thing. With practice, though, it becomes obvious that a hand as experienced is really an amalgam of changing psycho-physical processes—including thoughts, sights, and sensations—and the idea of ownership is, at best, a useful fiction. With sufficient attention, concepts loosen and experience becomes diaphanous.

Eventually, we can learn to see that nothing is stable or personal—including perceptions of self. At this stage, when mindfulness is all-encompassing, it becomes obvious that self-referential thoughts are just thoughts, not personal truths. As such, they don’t stick to the mind.

As self-reference subsides, experience grows less self-centred. From this impartial vantage point, thoughts of self and thoughts of other no longer seem so different. Visually, both take a third-person, “from the outside,” perspective. Verbally, both often use the second-person (as in the self-critical thought, “You are such an idiot”). And overall, both are fleeting, insubstantial, and clearly not true in an absolute sense.

Here, we can touch the wisdom of the 13^th century monk, Dōgen, who wrote, “To study the Way is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be awakened by all things. To be awakened by all things is to let body and mind of self and others fall away.”

To see experience this way takes a great deal of awareness, typically only accessible on silent retreats. The sustained awareness cultivated during retreats makes vivid dreams more common. And, as I know too well, dreaming doesn’t just occur in bed—it also happens on the meditation cushion.

I think that people who supposedly experience past lives during deep meditation are having hyper-realistic dreams in wakeful states, but with very little activity in their default mode network. Generally, our default mode network remains active during dreaming, keeping our autobiography online (to some extent). But on retreat, we subdue it—and this carries over into dreams.

Take a perspective no longer anchored to self, combine it with the malleability of a dreamscape, toss in a cosmology that takes rebirth as a given, and it is perhaps not surprising that some meditators “experience” other lives. This is not to belittle the phenomenon, though. Film, literature, and travel help us inhabit the viewpoints of others. Dreams of past or future lives offer another, powerful, way to cast our gaze beyond the horizon of self.

Futile Speculation

Years ago, while on retreat in Burma, a fellow student asked Sayadaw Tejaniya for help discerning their past lives. He advised them to give the matter no thought, and just meditate.

Although Buddhism teaches rebirth and karma as truths, it advises followers to avoid speculating about them. Until one attains full enlightenment, Buddhism holds, they cannot know the intricacies of karma or the full spread of their lifetimes. So don’t waste time trying.

This is wise, because Buddhism’s strength lies in cutting through unnecessary, futile, or painful thinking, to tap into a wellbeing beyond concepts. Rebirth and karma are not proffered as absolute truths; like most everything in the Buddhist Canon, they are tools for finding freedom here and now.

Ajahn Maha Bua—rumoured to have attained full enlightenment—brought Buddhist cosmology down to earth when he said, “The cycle of birth doesn’t refer to anything else. It refers to this single heart that spins in circles. It’s the only thing that leads us to birth and death.” How fortunate that we can train it.

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[1]Different Buddhist traditions offer different interpretations of rebirth, but in this essay I’ve aimed to capture common themes based on my reading of popular sources.  

[2]The causal momentum of consciousness can cease, but it requires a specific set of causes and conditions to do so, culminating in the experience of cessation, or nibbana. But, according to the Theravadan framework, simply experiencing nibbana once is generally insufficient to attain full enlightenment.

[3]This is not to say that all of our thoughts are true. It’s just to say that the existence of felt experience is as much an objective fact as the existence of gravity.

[4]To many people, ending craving sounds morose. But craving is not the same as enjoyment. We actually enjoy life more with minds free from craving.

[5]Bhikkhu Bodhi (somewhat humorously, at least to my mind) continues, “Precisely how past volition can influence the development of the zygote lies beyond the range of scientific explanation, but if the Buddha’s words are to be trusted such an influence must be real.”

[6]By “one who has seen the escape from constructing,” Analayo is referring to someone who has had a specific meditative experience, sometimes referred to as stream entry—but his point holds regardless of one’s stage of insight.

[7]A devout Buddhist might argue that rebirth takes place across numerous realms, not all of which are visible. This means that you cannot just look Earth’s population when gauging the numbers.

[8]If you think that my criticism of pornography is oddly conservative, then I invite you to stop indulging in it (long enough to get past the withdrawal stage) and notice whether you feel better or worse.

[9]Buddhism claims that humans are uniquely situated to realize liberation. The higher realms are so pleasant that the gods and devas who live there are rarely incentivized to pursue liberation. And the lower realms are so unpleasant and saturated with desire that wisdom cannot grow. Therefore, every human birth gives a stream of consciousness a precious opportunity.