The Process of Rebirth

Yesterday we said we would be approaching questions of aging, illness, and death from the perspective of what the Buddha learned about these topics during his awakening. This raises the question, “How can anyone, even the Buddha, know what happens at death before they die?”

There are two answers. The first is that the Buddha found a deathless dimension on the night of his awakening, and that fact shows that he came to a correct understanding of death in the course of his three knowledges. The second answer is that he saw that he had died many times, and he was able to understand the process of what happens when you die.

It’s an important point that he saw the process as a process that comes from the mind and that can be stopped by training the mind. He never got involved in the question of what dies or what gets reborn. He focused totally on the events of death and rebirth in and of themselves as actions that constitute steps in a process: one that we can control and can bring to an end. You’re not responsible for what you are, but you are responsible for what you do, and what you do can make a difference, even as you’re dying.

This brings up another question: “How can a human being, as a conditioned being, experience something that is deathless and unconditioned?” The response is that the question has the context backwards. It starts with a definition of what we are and then, arguing from that definition, places limits on what we can know. The Buddha saw that by defining yourself, you place limits on yourself, so he put aside the question of what he was and experimented to see what he could do with the mind and know as a result. And he found that it was possible to act in such a way as to cut the process leading to rebirth and to reach the deathless.

The realization of nibbāna comes with the knowledge that the mind is released from aging, illness, and death. There’s no more birth, and that realization is what gives you total freedom from limitations.

One of the reasons why the Buddha taught not-self is so that you don’t place limitations on your ability to find the deathless, too. The Buddha knew that he couldn’t prove his understanding of death and rebirth to you. You have to practice the path he taught so that you can learn about death and rebirth on your own, but he did recommend adopting his teachings on these topics as a working hypothesis.

And he offers two pragmatic proofs for doing so. The first is that you will tend to behave more skillfully and harmlessly if you adopt, as a working hypothesis, his teachings on the connection between kamma and rebirth: If you believe that your actions have an impact on whether you experience pleasure or pain, you’ll be more heedful and careful in what you do. If you don’t believe that your actions can have that impact, you’ll tend to be less skillful in what you do.

The second pragmatic proof is that by accepting these hypotheses, you leave open possibilities that you would close off if you didn’t accept them. If you don’t believe in the deathless, you won’t make the effort to see if it could possibly be a reality. If you are open to the possibility that there could be a deathless dimension, you’ll be more inclined to do what is necessary to prove whether or not it’s true. Now, because you don’t yet know for yourself, why close off good things that could be possible?

As we’ll see, the Buddha recommends developing strengths in the mind to compensate for the weakness of the body as you age, grow ill, and die, and conviction in his awakening is one of those strengths. This is a point we’ll explore further tomorrow.

Tonight, we’re going to talk about the process of rebirth. The Buddha calls this “further becoming,” punabbhava. As we’ve already said, “becoming” means taking on an identity in a world of experience. This happens on many levels, both micro and macro, i.e., both inside the mind and in the world outside. Examples on the micro level start with a desire and then you cling to it, purely as a mental act.

Now, clinging can take four forms: clinging to sensuality, clinging to views, clinging to habits and practices, and clinging to doctrines of self.

These four types of clinging correspond to four mental functions that are recognized by modern psychology.

The first, clinging to sensuality, corresponds to raw desire, which Freud would call id.

Clinging to views corresponds to what’s called the reality principle: what you feel is real in the world and how reality works in terms of causes and effects that you can and cannot control.

Clinging to habits and practices corresponds to what you think should be done given your view of reality. This is what Freud would call your superego.

Clinging to doctrines of self basically is your sense of who you are and whether you will benefit from following your desires or not. This corresponds to what Freud calls the ego, which negotiates among the other clingings.

Now, even though Buddhism and modern psychology both recognize these mental functions, the Buddhist interpretation of them differs from modern psychology on two points.

The first is that, from the Buddhist perspective, no desire is raw. Each desire has its reasons. In fact, the Buddha defines sensuality as your thoughts and plans for sensual pleasures. In other words, the problem is not the pleasures themselves; the problem is your fascination with thinking about them. For example, a pizza, in itself, is not a problem. If you’re sitting here thinking about how you want to eat a pizza after the talk tonight and how you plan to slip out to Moustiers, that would be a problem because you’re not going to be hearing what I’m saying. You’re going to be absorbed in your thoughts about a pizza. That’s the first point of difference.

The second point of difference is that modern psychology sees a constant conflict among your clingings, a conflict that is never resolved. The Buddha’s view, on the other hand, is that it is possible to develop skillful forms of clinging that are not always in conflict. They can actually help you hold on to the path that leads to awakening. We can think of the path as being like a raft that you take across a river. While you’re on the river, you need to hold on to the raft. When you get to the other side, then you can let the raft go.

I’ll give you some examples of how clinging then leads to becoming. For a micro-level example—i.e., the small level in the mind—we can talk about that evening snack in Moustiers. People tell me that I talk too much about pizza, so we’ll talk about ice cream instead. During this evening’s meditation session and during the talk, suppose that you’re fantasizing about ice cream. Now, the world in that desire or fantasy would be the things in the world outside that would help you get ice cream—such as the ice cream parlors in Moustiers—and the things that would get in the way. There are other aspects to the actual world outside that would be irrelevant to your desire for ice cream, so they don’t play a role in that particular becoming.

Another part of becoming is your role in that world—in other words, the things you’d be willing to do to get the ice cream. It’s like a theater piece with three characters. There’s the self as the producer, in other words, the self that has the ability to get out of here, go to Moustiers, and buy the ice cream. There’s the consumer, the self that anticipates the joy in consuming the ice cream. And then there’s the commentator that decides, “Is this really worth going for or not?”

Now, sometimes there’s a conflict among these three roles, and there can also be a conflict among different becomings because of a conflict among the desires on which they’re based. These conflicts can add extra suffering and stress on top of the suffering that’s inherent in each becoming. The inherent suffering comes from the fact that the desire underlying your becoming gets frustrated for one of three reasons: Either you can’t get what you want, or you get what you want but it’s not as good as you thought it would be, or it is good, but then it leaves you.

The same principles apply to becoming on what’s called the macro level in the world outside. For instance, imagine that you’re dying and you can’t stay in the body. Options of where you could go will start appearing to you. You focus on craving one of them, you cling to that craving, and then you enter into that world and take on an identity in that world around what you crave. The Buddha’s image is of a fire going from one house to another. In his days, they believed that fire, in order to burn, had to cling to something. In this case, the fire clings to the wind that takes it to the next house. So you’re riding the wind as you go to the next life. This may sound good—you get to go where you want to go—but it’s actually very risky.

Think of all of the different dangers facing you at the moment of death. First, you’re desperate: You can’t stay here and you’re being pushed out, so you’ll go anywhere. Sometimes, because of your past kamma, you see no good options available, so you’re forced to take whatever is available.

Second, your craving can be very deluded. Think about that example from Ice Age 2 that I talked about earlier this afternoon. The mermaids and mermen look attractive, but they’ll eat you up.

Third, the mind and its cravings can change directions so quickly that the Buddha said there’s no image to illustrate how fast that change can be. Even the image of the wind blowing a wildfire is too slow. So if you suddenly happen to be overcome by lust or anger or any of the other mental hindrances at that point, that mind state will take you to a bad destination.

And it could happen at the moment of death that you’re not very lucid or alert. You’ve had an experience like this many times: As you’re falling asleep, your mind can just grasp on to anything at all, with no sense of right or wrong, good or bad. It just goes.

So there’s a need to train the mind so that you can recognize craving and learn how not to fall for it.

As we said last night, the Buddha taught that there are three kinds of craving that lead to becoming. You may have heard that craving means to want things to be different from what they are, but that’s not the Buddha’s definition. After all, wanting to become awakened is actually part of the path. At the moment of death, you have to watch out specifically for the three types of craving that lead to becoming.

The first is craving for sensuality. As I said earlier, this is focused not so much on sensual pleasures as it is on the mind’s fascination with fantasizing and planning for sensual pleasures. Now, becoming—your sense of your identity in your imaginary world—often plays a big role in these fantasies: You might like to play the role of the seducer, or the seduced.

There’s an example of this in the Therīgāthā, the verses of the elder nuns. The story is that a nun is going alone through a forest, and a libertine comes up to her and tries to persuade her to leave the nunhood and become his wife. Instead of talking about having sex, though, he talks to her about what she will become if she goes with him. He basically says she will become a golden doll, surrounded by a beautiful house, loving servants, and all kinds of beautiful things. In other words, he’s creating a world in which she can imagine herself taking on a new identity. You’ve probably seen this in your own sensual fantasies: They tend to be about who you are and the role you play in a particular world.

Just as an aside, I’ll tell you how the story ends. It turns out that the nun is a non-returner, which means she has no interest in sensuality. So she asks the libertine, “What do you imagine to be attractive in this ugly body?” And he says, “Your eyes.” So she says, “But these eyes: They’re full of eye secretions, and they’re just ugly little balls stuck into the face.” And he says, “But they’re really beautiful. I really crave your eyes.” So she plucks out one eye and hands it to him: “Here, then, take it.” All of a sudden, it’s not beautiful anymore, and her fierce determination scares him. So he apologizes and leaves her alone. She then goes to see the Buddha, and as soon as she sees him, she gets her eye back.

The second form of craving is craving for becoming, the desire simply to have an identity in a world someplace.

Then finally there’s craving for non-becoming, which is wanting to see your current becoming demolished. In other words, you don’t like who you are, you don’t like the world in which you live, so you’d like to see the whole thing destroyed. Now, it may seem counter-intuitive that craving for non-becoming would actually lead to more becoming, but if you keep thinking in terms of a self and a world to destroy, and of how much you’ll enjoy the oblivion that comes when they’re destroyed, you’re thinking in the terms of becoming—a self in a world—and that creates the conditions for a new state of becoming. In fact the Buddha said that seeing how there is becoming in the act of craving for non-becoming was one of his special insights on the night of his awakening.

Now, these three kinds of craving can come on very strong at death. For example, if you’re suffering a lot of pain at death, the mind will immediately go to sensuality. As the Buddha said, for most people their only escape from pain is to start thinking sensual thoughts. Or if you fear annihilation at the moment of death, then you’ll go for any possible becoming that might appear to you. Or the hatred of suffering and the exhaustion that comes from the pains you feel as you’re dying could lead you to want to be obliterated, which would be craving for non-becoming.

Now, this presents a strategic challenge. If craving for non-becoming leads to more becoming, what can you do to get out of further becoming? The Buddha’s answer to that is you turn your focus away from becoming and focus instead on the processes that lead up to craving before they coalesce into becoming. If you can develop dispassion for those steps, that will abort the process. As for whatever state of becoming you already have, that will end on its own.

This is why dispassion was a central theme of the Buddha’s teachings. You see that the effort to continue fabricating becoming out of raw material that’s inconstant and undependable isn’t worth it. It’s like seeing that you’re building a house out of frozen meat, and you realize that the house is going to melt and create a huge mess when summer comes, so you feel no desire to continue building such a thing.

The Buddha says that there are five steps that lead to dispassion. First, you see the origination of the steps in the process leading to craving, in other words, what causes them—and when the Buddha uses the word “origination”—samuddaya—he’s usually referring to causes that arise in the mind. Second, you see how those steps in the process pass away. Third, you see their allure: why you’re attracted to them. But then fourth, you also see the drawbacks of clinging to them. The fifth step is when you see that the allure is outweighed by the drawbacks. That’s when you develop dispassion, which is the escape. We’ll discuss these steps in more detail later on in the retreat.

You can begin to see how meditation is ideal preparation for dying. You get to see events in the mind as processes in these terms before they turn into a becoming. Ideally you should want to put an end to the process so that there’s no wind going to the next house, and no more fire to ride the wind—i.e., the act of identifying with the being that clings to the craving.

However, most people don’t develop that much skill. So the second best skill is making sure that the house next door is a good house to go to, and this is done by creating good kamma. This is why the Buddha advises practicing virtue, generosity, goodwill, and the other perfections, as we taught at the last retreat, until they become habitual parts of your character. In this way, even though there is a wind, it’ll be likely to take you to a good house. This is why the Buddha’s instructions on how to prepare for death include qualities you develop in daily life right here and now.

As I mentioned last night, the teaching on good kamma is not a simple teaching. For a good rebirth, not only do you have to do good deeds, but you also have to continue doing good deeds throughout life and to maintain right view all the way through the moment of death. He saw that there were cases where people did good deeds but then they had a bad change of heart at the moment of death, which pulled them down. On the other hand, though, he saw that there were people who had done bad deeds during this life but had a good change of heart at the moment of death, and so they went up in the next life. Now, the results of their earlier bad actions were not destroyed. They were simply delayed.

Cases of this second type are heartening. If you know that you’ve done bad deeds in the past, you’re not doomed to a bad destination. But cases of the first type warn you that you need to be heedful. You can’t just accept things as they happen and be nothing more than a passive witness to the passing show. You play a role in shaping events, so you want to do your best to shape things in a good direction.

So, stay confident that when death comes you’ll be able to do something about it: In other words, you can do something good about what’s going to happen next, after death. As for aging and illness, in dealing with them skillfully, you learn skills that will be needed at death. As you learn how to deal skillfully with aging, you learn how not to be overcome by physical weakness. As you learn how to deal skillfully with illness, you learn how not to be confined by pain. Both of these developments—physical weakness and pain—tend to diminish the range of the becoming that you’re experiencing right now. It’s as if the world is beginning to close in on you, so there are fewer and fewer options as to what you can do. So you need to learn how to keep your mind from being restricted by pains and physical weakness as you age and grow ill. These will be the topics we’ll talk about for the next two nights.

I’ll end with a story. In Thailand, funerals often last for months, which means that before the cremation, they have time to print a book and hand it out at the cremation in honor of the person who passed away. The book can be about anything—the Dhamma, how to run a kitchen in the old-fashioned way, how the kings of the past used to punish their children, all kinds of things. There will usually be a little biography at the beginning of the book. It’ll talk about how the deceased person was born, their education, how they got married, how they had children, how they succeeded in life, and then how they began to have a little illness here or there, and then the illnesses got stronger and stronger, and the doctors always did their best to help the patient, but then they reached the point where even the best doctors couldn’t help. For me, that was always the most important part of the biography: the point where nobody can help you. What do you do? This is what meditation is for: to give you skills to use at that point, so that even when no one else can help you, you can help yourself.