WHAT IS REBORN?

(Extracts from a Letter to a Friend)

FRANCIS STORY

Director in Chief, Burma Buddhist World Mission

Vol. III, No. 2, 1956

          In your letter you asked about rebirth, and I'd better admit straight away that I can't "explain" it in so many words. Words, which are just symbols, can only deal precisely with matters of common experience, for which we have a common stock of corresponding ideas ; and even then they sometimes go astray badly, because each of us draws his interpretation of their meaning from his own individual sum of knowledge and own personal way of interpreting the facts of experience. For the rest, they're just approximations to the reality they express, and that "reality" in itself is subject to various modes of cognition ; it is only relative and can therefore only be "known" in the context of other assumed realities. Each of us is apt to see, or understand, things, events and situations in an entirely different way both from other people and even from ourselves at different stages of our ever-changing mental and psychic progression. For this, it's only necessary to cite the difference between the child's world and that of the adult; between that of the sane "normal" person and the psychopathic, without taking extreme cases. There is a world that is normal for the child and one that is normal for the adult, yet at the same time this normalcy is purely theoretical it can only be known by deviations—some degree of the infinite range of which is to be found in everybody.

         "Cogito, ergo sum" sounds very convincing, but we must define just what we mean by "I am". Right at the start, it's not a static entity. The child who says "I exist" becomes a man and continues to say "I exist" with the same confidence, but he is not talking about the same thing when he says "I ". Everything that constitutes it has changed, no doubt imperceptibly and in some cases to a much lesser extent, psychically, than in others (here I make no quarrel with your observation of yourself, because in some people the character of the mind does change comparatively little—"nevertheless, it changes") and the "I" of the man of forty is by no means the "I" of the child of, say, twelve. Or of any of the innumerable stages in between. Yet it is the result of that former I", without the pre-existence of which it could not have come into being; there is a causal-continuum that links them, just as there is a continuum of the bodily process that, through all the cellular changes and physical developments or deteriorations, makes the body of the grown man the result of the body of the infant. Here, the only "reality" we can trace is the reality of a causal process, and it cannot well be anything but that process we mean when we say "I am ". Now, we may call this a "life-process ", and for certain purposes that is a satisfactory definition. But not for all, because the process applies equally to inanimate things, and to give it its true significance we must raise it to a cosmic level, where the words "alive" and " lifeless " cease to mean what they meant on the plane of relative reality, or on the subjective level of the individual's own self-awareness. A process of de-personalisation—something more than mere objectivity—must come into play to enable us to realise the nature of the " self" as merely a part, or a succession of momentary manifestations, of a universal principle. The impression we receive of a persisting identity throughout the unbroken succession of experiences, together with the conviction of selfhood comes about through the individuality of the current of awareness and its insulation from all other currents, whether they be parallel or transverse, not through the actual persistence or any unit of personal identity such as we commonly mean when we use the word myself ''. When we say, " yesterday I did so-and-so" we are speaking in conventional terms; to be more nearly precise we should say, "yesterday the aggregate of physical and mental elements that constituted what was then called 'I', and which was the causal forerunner of what is called 'I' today, did so-and-so". And this introduces another important factor in the persistence of the identity-concept—that of memory. To a certain extent, varying greatly in different people, we do have the ability to retrace our steps, as it were, through the line of the causal-continuum, marking various points at which the time-flow cuts across it; but this is also characterised by gaps, periods of which we can recall nothing because the points of intersection did not mark any significant interruption of the real current, which is subconscious. (In Pali it is called "Bhavanga"). When conscious attention is turned towards any external object or event there is an interruption of this unconscious causal current, and it is these points which, to a greater or lesser extent, according to their strength and the consequent impression they make, we remember.

          Now, if we accept this view of the "personality" as we study it in ourselves or any other living being, it becomes much less important to know what it is that is reborn. The whole question takes on a different aspect, and we even begin to suspect that it is wrongly put—there ceases, in fact, to be any justification for such a question. "Not he, yet not another", the Buddha tersely said, and the reply fits equally the case of the adult man and his casual predecessor the child, and the being that comes into existence (or rather, the re-emergence of the same causal current) after what we call "death". All we are justified in assuming is a causal cosmic principle which connects the child with the adult, and the "self" of this existence with the "self" of the next and all subsequent ones.

          The actual determinant of the nature of this current is the willed activity we generate—if you like, the life-urge (which is tanha—craving) and the actions to which it gives rise, which form the kamma. At any given point we are subject to the results of past kamma, but our present kamma with its future results is subject to us; we cannot unmake the past, but we are continually creating the future.

          Here, two further difficulties present themselves, of which I'll deal with the simplest first. Since memory does not usually bridge the gulf between two existences (although it in fact does so much more often than is commonly supposed, and can certainly be cultivated to do so) how can it be said that there is any kind of identity between the past, present and future personalities, and even if an identity of a sort be admitted, can it be truly said that the new being is suffering or enjoying the results of his own actions ? Is he not justified in saying, "since the person who suffers the results of my bad actions will not be myself, in the sense in which I understand it, why should I trouble about possible consequences?"

          For the answer to this we have to return to the concept of personal identity that we constructed from our comparison of the child and the (consequent) adult ; and where concrete examples can be used it's always best to use them. Supposing, then: the child loses an arm or leg through an accident. The man that he becomes, despite all physical and mental changes and what may be quite justly called a completely reconstructed personality, will still continue to be a person minus an arm or leg, as a direct result of what happened to the child that he once was. He will be suffering, in fact, for something that happened to A BEING THAT WAS, YET AT THE SAME TIME AND IN ANOTHER SENSE WAS NOT, himself— and that despite the fact that he may not be able to recollect any of the circumstances of the accident. Yet would one say that a child need not take any special care in crossing the road because if he loses a limb it will not be he who will suffer in the future, but another person whose existence he cannot even foresee ? To carry the analogy forward in another direction, and incidentally bring in the moral considerations that are inseparable from any view of kamma, it is possible for an elderly man to be suffering the physical and mental consequences of follies committed in his youth ; yet would one say to any youth about to commit such follies that he should go right ahead, since their results would be endured not by him but by another person who would be merely the result of his present existence ? Obviously one wouldn't ; yet the relationship between the old man and the youth is precisely the same as that existing between the "personality" of the present life and that of the future—simply that the one is the result, in a causally-connected sequence, of the other.

          There is yet another aspect to this question, with its ethical implications. With the gradual liberation from the concept of personal identity and all it implies of selfhood, and consequently of exclusive self-interest, the ego inevitably becomes merged in the wider cosmic operation, and it becomes of the first importance to avoid the propagation of suffering in any form, whether it is oneself that suffers, or any other sentient being. Long before self-identification—the real objective and purpose of compassion—is achieved, the question of whether it is oneself or another that suffers in the future recedes into insignificance, until it is finally found to have no meaning whatever. The "self" as we understand it may not be real, but suffering is real. In the widest philosophical interpretation all Vedana (sensation) is Dukkha (suffering), whether it appears in the form of pain or pleasure. This is so because it is a stimulation, an agitation, a disturbance of the mind's tranquillity ; and also because it is transitory and yields only temporary satisfaction. Pleasure, particularly physical pleasure, is only the release of a tension, the momentary gratification of a craving that is incessantly renewing itself, and which grows in intensity with what it feeds upon. What we call pleasure and pain are so intimately associated that in certain experiences it is impossible to say at what point the one becomes the other to what extent the two are commingled and identified.

          What it all comes down to is that we have to discard the old terms of reference and adopt new ones, substituting the idea of a dynamic process of causality for the conventional and grammatically-necessary "I" which means that the problem of rebirth is largely one of semantics. In any case, we have to begin, like Confucius, by examining and "rectifying" terms, finding out just how closely they can be made to correspond to the ideas they represent, before we can establish whether the ideas themselves are true.

          The chief thing in the quest for understanding is to allow the ideas to sink in—neither striving to accept nor to oppose—until by a gradual readjustment the mind comes to a decision. There are some things one can understand, yet cannot express in words. It's just this point I've tried to make in my articles in the Light of the Dhamma and elsewhere. Naturally people want to know about rebirth, and how the Buddhist idea differs from " reincarnation", " transmigration" and so on. One can only say that these ideas are simplifications of it—reductions of the highly abstract truth to popular and animistic terms.