Re-Birth

With palms together


Good Morning Everyone,



Recently, we decided to begin an educational exchange series on our Zen Living email list. My morning post is my position on our Order’s understanding of “Re-incarnation.”



The Soto School of Zen typically does not use the term, “re-incarnation,” but rather, chooses the word, “re-birth” to refer to continuation of life in the eternal flow of living and dying. To re-incarnate would mean a transmigration of a unique individual’s ego or ‘essence’ into another form after death. We hold to the Buddha’s teaching that there is no such thing, that there is no “soul” that survives after death as a manifestation of a unique individual. I quote Kennett-roshi, Founding Abbess of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives,



“A new being is neither absolutely the same as its predecessor (since the composition is not identical) nor entirely different, being the same stream of life-force which, like electric current, can be tapped when a new bulb is plugged in…so with re-birth there is a continuity of a life force which manifests itself in birth and seems invisible in death; just that and nothing more.”



So, Re-birth, on the other hand, means life as life itself continues as a river continues along its path. The matter and energy that once was a person re-enters the whole and becomes part of the whole re-manifesting in whatever ways it might. There is no conscious choice in this process, only process itself, or ‘flow’ if you will.



Our unique sentience is ours in this moment and, at death, ends forever as “our” unique awareness. That which we were composed of comes apart, the aggregates fall away, and “we” as a “I” are no more. But then again, we as an I never really were, were we? The “I” of us is an illusion created by a physical brain which perceives itself and needs a name.



As a river of life flows past a sentient viewer is the river the same or different at any given moment in time? It is both. It is river flowing. Living and dying are the same. We are river.



So, where does karma fit in?



Let’s suppose the river we are thinking of has the conscious capacity to engage its banks. It might chose at some point to change this or that aspect of a bank. The river flowing before it and the river flowing after it will be the same, yet will have changed as well. Perhaps it will be cleaner; perhaps more polluted. Any change in a system creates changes in all of its sub-systems: this is karma, impersonal cause and effect, but in your face. A wider view reveals the whole: it is still river flowing.

Again, Kennett-roshi:



"re-birth must be distinguished from re-incarnation or transmigration since an unchanging or eternal soul is non-existent; since there is no "I" to think, there is nothing to be reborn."



Awakening, then, is our complete and total realization of this and our total acceptance of it.



Be well.