Abstract
Buddhist literature follows in the Vedic tradition of avowing belief in life after death. What is not so clear is the sense in which this belief is to be understood. Even contemporary Buddhist authors give widely differing views. For example, on the one hand immortality is likened to the vital energy which, flowing from time immemorial, is passed on from one organism to the next—from the fruit tree to its seed, on to another tree.1 On the other hand, all kinds of evidences from parapsychology are adduced to justify the belief that the person survives as a discarnate, non-substantial spirit and returns to human existence.2 Between these two views there lies an enormous difference; whereas the first substitutes a non-individual, continuing vitality for any persistence of the person, the second presupposes such persistence.
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Notes
D.T. Suzuki, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), pp. 204–5.
Cassius Pereira [‘An Elucidation of Kamma’, The Buddhist Review 9 (1917), p. 61]
K.N. Jayatillake, ‘The Case for the Buddhist Theory of Survival and Karma’, Mahabodhi (Colombo) 77 (1969), pp. 334–40
For example, ‘The correct view in light of the highest knowledge is as follows: “This is not mine; this am I not; this is not my self.”’ Samyutta-Nikāya, xxii, 85. The exact meaning of the Buddha’s silence about or refusal to identify the self is somewhat in doubt. For example, some have attempted to show that the Buddha believed in a soul or self, but remained silent about it because it was non-empirical and discussion concerning it did not lead to edification. See T.W. Rhys Davids, The Birth of Indian Psychology and its Development in Buddhism (London: Luzac & Co., 1936), pp. 206–14.
Samyutta-Nikāya, xxii, 85. See also the Mahā-Nidāna-Sutta, in Digha-Nikāya, in Henry Clark Warren, ed., Buddhism in Translations (New York: Atheneum, 1973), p. 137
According to the Pudgalavādins, the law of karma presupposes rebirth of the person who dies, otherwise justice would not be upheld because someone other than the doer of the action would be rewarded or punished. But rebirth is impossible without a person who transmigrates. This person or pudgala, which is the agent for a person’s actions, is the connecting link between one life and the next. However, in attempting to maintain the anātman doctrine, they argued that the ineffable pudgala was neither identical with the skandhas nor different from them, but a substance which was neither conditioned nor unconditioned but exists through them. Their view was rejected by the Theravādins on the ground that the substratum introduced was nothing else than a soul or self in disguise. See Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967), pp. 121–33.
Conze, p. 97. In contrast to F. Th. Stcherbatsky and Conze, that dharmas are momentary is held by recent interpreters to be a contribution of Abhidharma thought. See David Kalupahana, Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1975), pp. 71–2.
‘In the ultimate sense the life-moment of living beings is extremely short, being only as long as the occurrence of a single conscious moment.’ Buddhaghosa, Visuddhi-Magga, viii, par. 39. For a brief account of this conflict, see Y. Karunadasa, ‘The Buddhist Doctrine of Impermanence’, Mahabodhi 77 (1969), pp. 217–8.
Paul J. Griffiths, ‘Notes Towards a Critique of Buddhist Karmic Theory’, Religious Studies 18 (Sept. 1982), pp. 283–4.
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© 1990 Bruce R. Reichenbach
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Reichenbach, B.R. (1990). Buddhism, Rebirth and the Human Person. In: The Law of Karma. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11899-1_8
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