Rebirth and Karma

One Flame Lights Another

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• Why no single cause carries it → Beyond Cause and Effect

Last updated 31 Oct 2026

Karma and rebirth without a traveler: how one life conditions the next with nothing carried and nothing cut off, read through the early discourses, Nāgārjuna, Tibet and Zen.

Companion pages: Death and the Bardo and The Six Powers. Talks: Rebirth 1 · 2 · 3.

Part I: The Question

Why Rebirth Seems to Need a Traveler, and Why It Does Not

Introduction: The Hardest Case

Every Buddhist tradition teaches that actions bear fruit and that one life conditions the next. Every Buddhist tradition also teaches that there is no self: no soul, no inner owner, nothing that stays the same beneath the changing body and mind. Put side by side, the two teachings can look like a contradiction. If there is no one who dies, who is reborn? If nothing passes from one life to the next, in what sense is the next life mine? And if it is not mine, why should I care what my actions do to it?

The question is old. It was put to the Buddha by wandering ascetics, to the monk Nāgasena by a Greek king, and to Nāgārjuna by the philosophers of his day. It is still the first question a thoughtful newcomer asks, and it is the question on which many modern readers decide that rebirth is the part of Buddhism they can leave behind.

This article argues that the contradiction is only apparent, and that it arises from a single assumption: that continuity needs a carrier. Remove that assumption, and rebirth turns out to be no harder to make sense of than waking up in the morning. Remove it, and one also sees why the tradition has always refused both of the easy answers: that a soul travels on, and that death is a full stop.

The article follows the governing view of the books it accompanies. That view is a reading of Nāgārjuna’s Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, abbreviated MMK) in which everything, the mind included, is empty of a nature of its own. On rebirth, it holds three things together:

1. Karma and rebirth are affirmed. Actions bear fruit, in this life and beyond it, and one life conditions the next, as one flame lights another.
2. Nothing is carried and nothing is cut off. What is refused is the traveler, the self that would walk unchanged from life to life, and also its shadow, the self that would be wiped out at death.
3. Emptiness does not prove rebirth. It removes the objection that rebirth would need a carrier, since nothing has ever had one. The affirmation itself comes from the tradition and is held conventionally, as everything is held.

The article has six Parts.

1. Part I, The Question, sets out the problem, the two extremes, and the method used to examine them.
2. Part II, The Early Teaching, reads what the early discourses say about karma, rebirth and the self, and how the Buddha answered those who asked who is reborn.
3. Part III, Bridging the Gap, follows the Indian schools as they tried to explain how a deed done now can bear fruit lives later, and shows how Nāgārjuna and his successors answered that no bridge is needed.
4. Part IV, The Later Traditions, turns to Tibet, with its teachings on the intermediate state, and to Chan and Zen, with Dōgen’s firewood and ash and Baizhang’s fox.
5. Part V, Questions and Objections, takes up the doubts a modern reader brings: the brain, memory, fairness, evidence, and whether Buddhism needs rebirth at all.
6. Part VI, Living With It, asks what the view changes for the living, the dying and the grieving, and what it means for rebirth to end.

Readers who know the companion bonus article Knowing From Somewhere will recognize some of the material here. It is gathered and extended so that this article can be read on its own.

1. Why Rebirth Seems to Need a Traveler

A. The Picture We Start With

Most people, when they first hear of rebirth, picture something like this. Inside each of us is a someone: a soul, a spirit, a mind or a spark. The body is its house. At death the house falls down and the someone moves out, travels for a while, and moves into a new house. The new life is mine because the same someone lives in it. The deeds of the old life follow me because I am the same one who did them.

This picture is so natural that it shapes even the objections to rebirth. The skeptic says: there is no someone inside, the mind is what the brain does, and when the brain stops there is nothing left to move out. Both the believer and the skeptic agree that rebirth would need a traveler. They disagree only about whether there is one.

B. The Same Picture in a Single Life

The picture does not begin with death. It is how we already think about an ordinary day. I fall asleep at night and wake in the morning, and I take it for granted that the same someone went to sleep and woke up. I remember last year’s promise and feel bound by it because the same one made it. I fear old age because the same one who is young now will be old then.

Looked at closely, though, nothing in experience shows a someone who stays the same. The body of ten years ago has been replaced, cell by cell, many times over. Its thoughts, moods and plans are not the ones it has now. In deep sleep or under anesthesia, nothing at all is experienced: there is no witness keeping watch through the gap. And yet the person who wakes is, by every ordinary standard, the person who fell asleep. She keeps her promises, pays her debts and recognizes her friends.

So the question of rebirth is only the sharpest form of a question that already arises every morning. If continuity within a life needs no traveler, continuity between lives does not need one either. If it does need one, then the problem is not special to rebirth: it is a problem about being anyone at all.

C. The Middle Way’s Starting Point

The Buddhist tradition takes the first option. From the earliest discourses on, it teaches that the person is a stream of dependent events, named and recognized as one person, with no owner standing behind them. Nāgārjuna’s contribution is to show why the second option fails: why nothing could be the traveler, even in principle, and why that does not leave the person, the path or the fruit of action in doubt.

2. The Two Extremes

A. Eternalism: The Self That Travels On

The Buddha’s teaching on rebirth is framed, from the start, against two opposite views. The first is eternalism (Pali sassatavāda): the view that there is a self that persists unchanged, through the changes of a life and across lives. In its rebirth form, it holds that the same one who acted in a past life now experiences the result. The doer and the experiencer are one, because a single self underlies both.

Eternalism is the view of the picture in §1A. It is attractive because it seems to secure responsibility: if I am the same one who acted, the fruit is plainly mine. But it fails, on the Buddha’s account, because no such self is found. Whatever is pointed to as the unchanging one, the body, feeling, perception, intention or consciousness, turns out to change and to depend on conditions.

B. Annihilationism: The Self That Is Wiped Out

The second view is annihilationism (Pali ucchedavāda): the view that the self is destroyed at death, or, in a subtler form, that the one who acts and the one who experiences the result are simply two different beings, with nothing connecting them. In its materialist form, it holds that the person is the body and ends with it. In its subtler form, it holds that because there is no lasting self, a later being has nothing to do with an earlier one.

Annihilationism is attractive to the modern mind because it seems sober. But the tradition sees it as the shadow of eternalism, not its opposite. To say that a self is destroyed at death presupposes that there was a self there to be destroyed. And to say that the later being has nothing to do with the earlier one ignores the dependence that is plainly there: the rice that grows from a seed has something to do with the seed.

C. The Middle Between Them

Between these two the Buddha taught dependent arising: this being, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. Life conditions life, deed conditions fruit, without a single thing that carries the one into the other, and without a cut that leaves them unconnected. Part II follows this teaching through the early discourses. The point to hold here is that the middle is not a compromise between a traveler and a full stop. It is the recognition that both views depend on the same mistake, the assumption that the person is a thing with a nature of its own, and that without that assumption neither view can be stated.

3. The Method

A. What “Substance” Means

The Sanskrit word that the Middle Way takes apart is svabhāva, usually translated “intrinsic nature” or “own-being”. Something would have svabhāva if it were what it is from its own side: not made, not dependent on anything else, not changing in its essential nature. Nāgārjuna gives the definition in MMK 15.2: an intrinsic nature would be not made, and not dependent on another.

A carrier, in this article, is anything taken to have such a nature and asked to do the work of continuity. The candidates are many:

• A soul or self: a someone who stays the same and moves from body to body.
• A subtle consciousness: a stream of awareness, thinner than ordinary thought, that flows on from life to life.
• A store: a storehouse of seeds or impressions, in which deeds are kept until they ripen.
• A ledger: an imperishable record of what one owes, which waits to be paid.
• An energy: a force conserved through death, as physics conserves energy.

These look different, but they share one structure. Each is asked to be the thing that is simply given, the thread on which the beads of the lives are strung, which does not itself need a thread.

B. The Search

The Middle Way does not argue against these candidates one at a time by appeal to some rival theory. It asks a single question of each: if this thing really had a nature of its own, where would that nature be found? It then looks, in the places where it would have to be.

A soul that does not change could not be affected by anything, so it could not learn, suffer, or be freed. A subtle consciousness that flows from life to life is either the same in each moment, in which case it does not flow, or different in each, in which case it is not one thing that carries anything. A store of seeds either holds its seeds unchanged, in which case they could never ripen, or changes with them, in which case it is one more changing process that needs explaining. Each candidate, examined, turns out to be one more dependent appearance, named and picked out like everything else, and so in need of a carrier of its own.

The result of the search is that no carrier is found. But the search finds something else too. When the carrier is not found, nothing that the carrier was supposed to secure is lost. The person still wakes in the morning, still keeps promises, still meets the fruit of what she has done.

C. The Two Truths

The tradition holds this result with its teaching of the two truths. The conventional truth is how things work: persons are born and die, actions bear fruit, lives follow lives, and there are standards for telling true accounts from false ones. The ultimate truth is what the search finds: that none of these, persons, actions, fruits or lives, is found to have a nature of its own.

The two truths are not two levels, with the conventional one a lesser reality laid over a truer one. They are two ways of describing the same appearing: how it works, and how it is when examined. So to say that rebirth is “conventional” is not to say that it is merely a story or a manner of speaking. Everything that is real is real in this way. The person who wakes is conventionally the person who fell asleep; that is as real as persons get.

D. Non-Implicative Negation

The search removes the carrier and puts nothing in its place. Indian logicians distinguished two kinds of negation. An implicative negation denies one thing and thereby asserts another: “the man is not fat, though he does not eat by day” implies that he eats by night. A non-implicative negation simply denies, and implies nothing further: “a brahmin does not drink alcohol” asserts nothing about what he drinks instead.

The emptiness of the self is a non-implicative negation. “No soul travels on” does not mean “something else travels on instead”: not a subtler soul, not a stream, not an energy, and not emptiness itself. Many failed attempts to explain rebirth, in Buddhist history and in modern popular books, deny the soul and then quietly install a replacement. The method of this article is to catch each replacement as it appears.

4. Three Kinds of Claim

It helps to keep apart three kinds of claim that are easily run together.

Three things follow.

1. The first column does not prove the second. Showing that rebirth does not need a carrier removes one objection to it. It does not show that rebirth happens. Removing a bad argument against something is not the same as supplying a good argument for it.
2. The second column is not weakened by being conventional. The tradition affirms rebirth in the same way it affirms that fire burns and that kindness tends toward happiness: as designated, as working, and as empty.
3. The third column is not settled by the first two. Neither logic nor tradition can confirm a particular report. Part V, §4, returns to this.

5. The Stance of This Article

This article follows the tradition. It affirms karma and rebirth as the Buddha and Nāgārjuna taught them, and does not treat rebirth as a metaphor for the arising of the ego-sense from moment to moment, though Part II, §6, shows that the same chain of dependence can be seen in a single afternoon. It does not claim that emptiness proves rebirth, and it does not claim that physics disproves it. Its argument is narrower: that once the carrier is seen not to be needed, the standard objection from the side of the self falls away, and what remains is the tradition’s teaching, held without a traveler and without a full stop.

The image that runs through the article is the oldest one the tradition offers. When one lamp is lit from another, no flame passes over. The second flame is not the first, and it is not unconnected with the first. It depends on it. That is all the continuity there has ever been, from one night’s watch to the next, from one day to the next, and from one life to the next.

Part II: The Early Teaching

What the Buddha Taught, and How He Answered “Who Is Reborn?”

Introduction: A Teaching Given From the Start

Rebirth is not a later addition to the Buddha’s teaching. It stands at its center from the night of the awakening on. But the early discourses are as careful about what rebirth is not as about what it is. Again and again the Buddha is asked who is reborn, who experiences the fruit, whether the one who acts is the one who experiences. Again and again he declines the question as posed, and answers with dependent arising. This Part follows those answers. Quotations from the discourses follow the translations of Bhikkhu Sujato where they are quoted; elsewhere the passages are paraphrased.

1. The Night of Awakening

A. The Three Knowledges

The Fear and Dread discourse (Bhayabherava Sutta, MN 4) tells how the Buddha, seated under the tree of awakening, gained three knowledges in the three watches of the night. In the first watch he recollected his own past lives: “one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand rebirths”, with their names, clans, appearances, pleasures and pains. In the second watch, with the “divine eye”, he saw beings passing away and being reborn, inferior and superior, fortunate and unfortunate, according to their deeds. In the third watch he knew the ending of the defilements, and was freed.

The order matters. The first two knowledges show the round of birth and death, life after life, shaped by action. The third shows its end. The awakening is not presented as an escape from a false belief in rebirth, but as seeing the round clearly and seeing what keeps it turning.

B. What He Saw and What He Did Not See

In none of the three watches does the Buddha see a self passing from life to life. He sees lives, and the dependence of lives on deeds. The past lives he remembers are remembered in the ordinary language of a self, “there I was named this, my clan was that”, which is the language the human world speaks. But the second knowledge describes beings according to their deeds, not according to an essence that moves among them. What is seen is a pattern of conditioning, not a passenger. The companion article Knowing From Somewhere (Part III, §§4–5) reads these two knowledges in detail.

2. Karma Is Intention

A. Action, Not Fate

The word karma (Pali kamma) means simply “action”. In a well-known passage of the Penetrative discourse (Nibbedhika Sutta, AN 6.63), the Buddha defines it: it is intention (cetanā) that he calls action, for having intended, one acts by body, speech and mind.

This definition changed the meaning of the word. Before the Buddha, karma named ritual action, the correct performance of sacrifice, whose fruit was guaranteed by the rite. The Buddha moved it inward. What bears fruit is not the act as a physical event, and not the correctness of a ritual, but the intention that shapes it: greed, hatred and confusion, or their absence.

Karma is therefore not fate. It does not say that everything that happens to a person is the result of past action; the discourses list several other kinds of condition, from the weather to the body’s own imbalances. It says that intentional action tends toward results that match it, kind acts toward happiness and cruel ones toward suffering, and that this tendency does not stop at death.

B. Heirs of Their Deeds

In the Shorter Discourse on the Analysis of Action (Cūḷakammavibhaṅga Sutta, MN 135), a young brahmin asks why some people are short-lived and some long-lived, some sick and some healthy, some poor and some rich. The Buddha answers that beings are the owners of their deeds and heirs of their deeds; deeds are their womb, their kin and their refuge; it is deeds that divide beings into the inferior and the superior.

The language of “owner” and “heir” is the language of the conventional world, and it should be read as such. The discourse does not say that a self owns its deeds as a man owns a field. It says that the course of a life is shaped by what has been done in the stream that is called this person, as an heir’s fortune is shaped by what was left to them. The image is of inheritance, not of a traveler carrying his luggage.

3. Sāti’s Mistake

A. “This Very Same Consciousness”

The most direct correction in the early texts comes in the Longer Discourse on the Ending of Craving (Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta, MN 38). A monk named Sāti, a fisherman’s son, has formed a view, which he claims to have learned from the Buddha himself: “it is this very same consciousness that roams and transmigrates, not another.”

Sāti’s view is not crude. He does not posit a soul. He posits consciousness, which the Buddha himself lists among the five aggregates. And he does not deny rebirth; he is trying to explain it. His mistake is to make consciousness the traveler: one and the same awareness, passing from body to body, like a guest moving between inns.

B. Consciousness Named After Its Condition

The Buddha summons Sāti and rebukes him sharply. Has he not taught, in many ways, that consciousness is dependently originated, and that without a condition there is no arising of consciousness? He then explains with a simile. A fire is reckoned by the fuel on which it burns: a fire burning on logs is a log fire, on grass a grass fire, on cow dung a dung fire. In the same way, consciousness is reckoned by the condition on which it arises: dependent on the eye and sights, it is eye-consciousness; dependent on the mind and ideas, it is mind-consciousness.

The point of the simile is not that consciousness does not exist, or that nothing continues. It is that consciousness is not a single thing that moves from fuel to fuel. Each consciousness is the consciousness of a particular meeting of conditions, as each fire is the fire of a particular fuel. To ask which fire is the “same” fire that moved from the logs to the grass is already to have imagined a fire apart from fuel.

C. Why the Rebuke Matters

MN 38 is the clearest evidence that the early tradition did not take rebirth to require a carrier, and that it treated the positing of one, even a carrier as refined as consciousness, as a serious error. A modern reader who rejects rebirth because “there is no soul to be reborn” is in the odd position of agreeing with Sāti about what rebirth would require, and disagreeing with the Buddha.

4. Neither the Same Nor Another

A. Who Experiences the Fruit?

In a discourse of the Linked Discourses (SN 12.17), the naked ascetic Kassapa asks the Buddha whether suffering is made by oneself, made by another, made by both, or arises by chance. The Buddha declines each option. When pressed, he explains: to hold that the one who acts is the one who experiences the result is to fall into eternalism; to hold that one acts and another experiences the result is to fall into annihilationism. Avoiding both extremes, he teaches by the middle: with ignorance as condition there are formations, with formations as condition consciousness, and so on through the twelve links to birth, old age and death.

The structure of this answer is the key to the whole early teaching on rebirth. The Buddha does not say that the experiencer is the same as the doer, and he does not say that the experiencer is someone else. He says that the question, framed as a question about identity, rests on a mistake. What there is, is a chain of conditions, and in that chain the fruit depends on the deed.

B. Not Silence but a Different Answer

It would be wrong to read this as evasion. The Buddha does not leave Kassapa without an answer. He gives an exact answer, but to a better question: not “is it the same one?” but “on what does this depend?” And the answer to that question does not leave the fruit unconnected with the deed. On the contrary, it shows the connection precisely, link by link, without asking any link to be a carrier.

5. The Flame Carried by the Wind

A. Vacchagotta’s Question

In another discourse (SN 44.9), the wanderer Vacchagotta raises a puzzle about the moment of death itself. When a being lays down this body and has not yet been reborn, what does it depend on? The Buddha answers with an image. A fire burns with fuel, not without it. But when the flame of a fire is tossed by the wind and carried some distance, what is it fueled by then? By the wind, Vacchagotta answers. In the same way, the Buddha says, when a being has laid down this body and has not yet been reborn in another, it is fueled by craving.

B. What the Image Shows

The passage has been read in many ways, and Part IV returns to it in connection with the Tibetan teaching on the intermediate state. For the present argument, two features of it matter.

First, even in the gap between lives, the Buddha speaks of dependence, not of a carrier. The flame is not a thing that leaps from log to log under its own power. It is a burning that depends, at each moment, on its condition: first the log, then the wind. Remove the condition and the burning ceases.

Second, what keeps the round turning is named: craving (taṇhā). Rebirth is not driven by a self that wishes to survive. It is driven by the thirst for being, for experience, for continuation, which is itself a dependent and changeable thing. This is why the ending of craving is the ending of rebirth, and why that ending is not the destruction of anyone.

6. The Twelve Links

A. Across Three Lives

The chain the Buddha teaches to Kassapa is the twelvefold formula of dependent arising: ignorance; formations; consciousness; name-and-form; the six sense bases; contact; feeling; craving; grasping; becoming; birth; old age and death. The commentarial tradition, and Nāgārjuna after it (MMK 26), usually read the chain across three lives. Ignorance and formations belong to the past life: not-knowing, and the intentional actions shaped by it. Consciousness through feeling describe the present life as it arises from them. Craving, grasping and becoming are the present life’s own actions, which condition birth, old age and death in the future.

Read this way, the formula is a full account of rebirth with no carrier in it. Each link depends on the one before, and nothing runs through all twelve. What is reborn is not a self that passes along the chain; what is “reborn” is the chain itself, renewing itself through its own links. As Nāgārjuna puts it in MMK 26, the one who does not know makes the formations that lead to further existence; the one who knows does not. The maker of saṃsāra is not-knowing, not a person.

B. In a Single Afternoon

The same chain can be read in the space of a moment. A sight is seen; contact brings a pleasant feeling; the feeling is craved; the craving grasps; around the grasping a sense of “I”, wanting and possessing, comes to be; and that “I” is born, ages and passes in the course of an afternoon, and gives way to the next. Some modern teachers, the Thai monk Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu prominent among them, have emphasized this reading, and it is a genuine part of the teaching: the chain works at every scale.

This article does not take the momentary reading to replace the reading across lives. The two are one pattern seen at two scales, as the flame of a single watch and the flame of the whole night are one burning seen over two spans. What makes the momentary reading valuable is that it lets the pattern be seen directly, now, without waiting for death. What it does not do is turn rebirth into a metaphor.

7. What the Buddha Left Unanswered

A. The Undeclared Questions

There is a set of questions the Buddha refused to answer: whether the world is eternal or not, finite or infinite, whether the soul is the same as the body or different, and whether a Tathāgata, a fully awakened one, exists after death, does not exist, both, or neither. The refusal is sometimes taken as agnosticism about rebirth. It is not. The Buddha answered questions about the rebirth of ordinary beings freely, as the discourses above show. What he declined were questions that presuppose a self, a world or a Tathāgata with a nature of its own, and then ask what becomes of it.

B. Where Did the Fire Go?

In the discourse to Vacchagotta on fire (Aggivacchagotta Sutta, MN 72), the wanderer asks about the Tathāgata after death. The Buddha turns the question on him. If a fire were burning in front of you, would you know it? Yes. If someone asked what it burns on, could you answer? On grass and sticks. If it went out, would you know it had gone out? Yes. And if someone asked in which direction it had gone, east, west, north or south, what would you say? Vacchagotta answers that the question does not apply: the fire burned on its fuel, and when the fuel was used up and no more was added, it went out.

The image is exact. The fire that has gone out has not gone anywhere, and it has not been destroyed as a thing is destroyed. It was only ever a burning dependent on fuel. The ending of rebirth, likewise, is not the annihilation of a self that might otherwise have traveled on. It is the ending of the fuel, craving and grasping, on which the burning depended. Part VI returns to this.

8. The Four Assurances

A. A Teaching Not Held Hostage to Proof

In the discourse to the Kālāmas (Kesamutti Sutta, AN 3.65), a discourse often quoted for its advice not to accept teachings merely on authority, the Buddha also offers four “assurances” to the person whose mind is free of hatred and ill will. If there is another world and actions bear fruit, they will be reborn in a good place. If there is no other world and actions bear no fruit, they live happily here and now, free of enmity. If evil comes to the one who does evil, how can it come to one who intends no evil? And if it does not, they are pure in either case.

B. What This Shows

The passage does not express doubt about rebirth; the Buddha teaches it everywhere. It shows something about how the teaching is meant to be held. The practice of the path does not wait on a proof of rebirth, and its value does not depend on winning that argument. A kind and clear life is good in this life and in any life that follows. This is why the tradition can affirm rebirth wholeheartedly while never making it a test of loyalty, and why Part V can examine the evidence for it calmly.

9. What the Early Teaching Establishes

The early discourses, read together, establish five things.

1. Rebirth is taught, as part of the night of awakening and throughout the discourses.
2. No traveler is taught. Even consciousness, the most refined candidate, is refused as a carrier (MN 38).
3. The identity question is declined. Neither “the same one” nor “another one” experiences the fruit; the fruit depends on the deed (SN 12.17).
4. What drives the round is craving, not a self that wishes to go on (SN 44.9).
5. What ends the round is not destruction. The fire that has gone out has gone in no direction (MN 72).

These five points leave a problem that the Indian schools would spend centuries trying to solve. If nothing carries the deed, how does a deed done now bear fruit many lives from now, after the intention that made it has long ceased? Part III follows their answers.

Part III: Bridging the Gap

How the Indian Schools Explained the Fruit of Action, and Why No Bridge Is Needed

Introduction: The Problem the Schools Inherited

The early teaching left a problem. An intention arises and passes in a moment. Its fruit may come years later, or lives later. If nothing carries the deed across the interval, what connects them? If the deed has simply ceased, how can a ceased thing produce anything? And if it has not ceased, where has it been waiting?

The Indian Buddhist schools gave many answers. Each was an attempt to stay faithful to the teaching of no-self while making the link between deed and fruit intelligible. This Part sets out the main answers, then reads Nāgārjuna’s treatment of the problem in the Fundamental Verses, and closes with the Madhyamaka of Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa, which holds that no bridge is needed at all. The aim is not to rank the schools, but to show a single pattern: each bridge, taken as a thing with a nature of its own, becomes a carrier, and each, taken as a designation, does no harm.

1. The Lamp and the Mango

A. Nāgasena’s Lamps

The earliest extended treatment outside the discourses is in The Questions of King Milinda (Milindapañha), a dialogue between the Greek king Menander and the monk Nāgasena. The king asks whether the one who is reborn is the same as the one who died, or another. Nāgasena answers with the formula that became classic: neither the same nor another (na ca so na ca añño).

He explains with images. Is the infant lying on its back the same as the grown man? Neither the same nor another: the man depends on the infant. Is the flame of a lamp in the last watch of the night the same as the flame in the first watch? It is not the same; but there is not one lamp in the first watch and another in the last. The light burns through the night in dependence on the one lamp. And when a lamp is lit from a lamp, does anything pass over from the first to the second? Nothing passes over; yet the second flame is not unconnected with the first.

B. Milk, Curds and Mangoes

Nāgasena adds two further images. Milk, once drawn, turns in time to curds, then to butter, then to ghee. A man who said that the milk was the same as the ghee would be wrong, and so would one who said that the ghee had nothing to do with the milk. And a man who steals mangoes cannot defend himself by saying that the mangoes he took were not the ones the owner planted, but grew from them. He is punishable, because the mangoes he took depend on the ones that were planted.

The mango thief is the image for karma. The fruit of action is not the action, and it is not something unrelated to it. Responsibility follows the dependence, not the identity. And this is what the conventional world already holds in ordinary cases: the fruit of the tree belongs to the one who planted it, though no single substance runs from seed to fruit.

C. What the Images Settle and What They Leave

Nāgasena’s images settle the identity question in the way the Buddha did: neither the same nor another, but dependent. They do not yet say how the dependence works across the gap of death, or across the long interval between a deed and its ripening. That is what the schools that followed tried to explain.

2. Five Bridges

A. The Person: Neither the Same Nor Different From the Aggregates

The Pudgalavāda schools, the “Personalists”, held that there is a person (pudgala) who is neither the same as the five aggregates nor different from them. The person is not a soul, they said, since it is not a separate thing; but it is not nothing, since it is what is reborn and what experiences the fruit. It is to the aggregates as fire is to its fuel.

Other schools accused the Personalists of reintroducing a self by the back door, and Vasubandhu devoted the ninth chapter of his Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa) to refuting them. The charge was that a person that is “neither the same nor different” and yet real is a self in all but name. The Middle Way reading is more precise: the person is indeed neither the same as the aggregates nor different from them, but this is because it is designated in dependence on them, not because it is a further reality with an ineffable relation to them. The Personalists had the right formula and gave it the wrong status.

B. The Past That Still Exists

The Sarvāstivāda school (“those who say all exists”) held that the factors of experience (dharmas) exist in all three times: past, present and future. A past deed has ceased to be active, but it still exists as a past factor, and so it can still bring about its fruit. The gap is bridged because the deed never really went away.

The difficulty is plain. A past that still exists is not past in any ordinary sense, and a factor that exists unchanged through all three times has the very fixed nature that the teaching of impermanence denies. To solve the problem of the gap, the Sarvāstivāda made the deed permanent.

C. Seeds in the Stream

The Sautrāntika school rejected this. On its account, an intention, as it ceases, plants a “seed” (bīja) in the mental stream: a subtle disposition that passes from moment to moment, changing as it goes, until conditions allow it to ripen. The seed is not a thing that lasts unchanged. It is a modification of the stream, transmitted from each moment to the next.

This is much closer to the early teaching, and it is the account Vasubandhu himself favors in the Treasury. But it raises a question in turn. What carries the seeds through deep sleep, through meditative states without thought, through death? If the answer is the stream itself, the stream is beginning to look like a carrier.

D. The Storehouse

The Yogācāra school answered that question directly. Beneath the six ordinary kinds of consciousness, it said, there is a seventh, the afflicted mind, and an eighth, the ālayavijñāna, the “storehouse consciousness”. The storehouse holds the seeds of all experience, receives the imprints of every action, and continues unbroken through sleep, meditation and death, until the seeds ripen as the experience of a new life. Asaṅga’s Compendium of the Great Vehicle (Mahāyānasaṃgraha) gives the classic account.

The Yogācāra teachers were aware of the danger. They insisted that the storehouse is not a self, that it changes at every moment, and that it flows “like a torrent”. Taking it as a self is precisely what the afflicted mind does, and that is the root of suffering. Read this way, the storehouse is a description of the stream of dependence, not a container. But the description invites reification as no other does. A storehouse that holds, receives, preserves and releases looks very like the store of Part I, §3A, and many later readers took it as one.

E. The Linking Consciousness

The Theravāda tradition, whose great commentator is Buddhaghosa, took another route. It denied any intermediate state between lives (the Points of Controversy, Kathāvatthu, argues against it). At the moment of death, the last moment of consciousness in one life is immediately followed by the first moment in the next, the “rebirth-linking consciousness” (paṭisandhi-viññāṇa). Between thought-moments within a life, a “life-continuum” (bhavaṅga) keeps the stream from breaking.

In the Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga, chapter 17), Buddhaghosa insists that the rebirth-linking consciousness does not come over from the previous life, and yet does not arise without it as its condition. He illustrates this with images that echo Nāgasena’s: an echo, the light of a lamp, the impression of a seal, a reflection in a mirror. In each case something appears in dependence on something else, and nothing passes from the one to the other. This is the lamp again, now placed at the precise moment of death.

3. The Pattern in the Bridges

The five answers can be set side by side.

The pattern is the one the method of Part I predicted. Every bridge is an attempt to say what connects deed and fruit, and every attempt names something. Whatever is named is, under examination, one more dependent appearance: it arises, changes and ceases, it is picked out by criteria, and if it is asked to carry the continuity it needs a carrier of its own. Taken that way, each bridge becomes a soul by another name. Taken as a description of how the dependence is spoken of, each is harmless, and some, such as Buddhaghosa’s echo, are very good.

The question Nāgārjuna asks is whether any bridge is needed at all.

4. Nāgārjuna on Karma

A. The Opponents’ Accounts

Chapter 17 of the Fundamental Verses is Nāgārjuna’s examination of action and its fruit. He begins by giving the opponents their say, at some length. One opponent offers the seed: as a sprout arises from a seed and a fruit from the sprout, and the fruit neither is the seed nor exists apart from it, so the fruit of action arises from the stream that the action began (17.6–11). Another offers an “imperishable” (avipraṇāśa), a factor that arises with each action and endures, like a promissory note, until the debt is paid (17.13–20). The imperishable is not destroyed by the ending of the action, nor by insight, but only by the ripening of the fruit, or by death and passing beyond it.

These are the bridges of §2 under other names. Nāgārjuna’s reply does not choose among them.

B. Empty Karma Works

Nāgārjuna’s own position, from 17.21 on, turns the problem around. If action had a nature of its own, he argues, it would be permanent. A permanent action could never have been done, since what is done is made, and what is made is not permanent. And if it were permanent, its fruit would ripen again and again without end, and one could never be freed from it. A karma that existed by itself could not do the work karma is supposed to do. It could not be made, could not change, could not end.

So agent, action and fruit are all empty, and this is exactly why they work. Only an empty karma can deliver its fruit. The link between action and result is real and reliable, as the link between rice seed and rice is. It is designated across the moments, not carried by something that travels through them. The gap that the bridges were built to span is a gap only for things with a nature of their own. Between empty, dependent events, there is nothing to span: there is only the dependence.

C. Like a Magician’s Creation

Nāgārjuna closes the chapter with an image (17.31–33). A magician, by his power, conjures a person, and that conjured person in turn conjures another. In the same way, the agent is like the first conjured person and the action like the second. Afflictions, actions, bodies, agents and fruits are like a city of the celestial musicians, like a mirage, like a dream.

The image is easily misread as saying that karma is unreal. It says the opposite of that. A conjured person really acts, and what it conjures really appears. A mirage is seen, and travelers turn toward it; a dream can make the dreamer weep. The image says that karma is fully working and nowhere found standing by itself: as vivid as a dream, and as empty of a dreamer’s solid ground.

5. Nāgārjuna on the Joint Between Lives

A. No Link Found at the Joint

In chapter 21, on arising and passing, Nāgārjuna examines the moment of rebirth itself (21.18–21). Consider the last moment of one existence and the first moment of the next. If the last moment had already ceased when the first arose, nothing would connect them, and the new existence would arise from nothing. If the last moment had not ceased, the two would exist at once, and one being would be living two lives. And if one ceased at the very instant the other arose, they would still be two, ceasing and arising, and the problem would remain.

The conclusion is not that rebirth is impossible. It is that no link is found at the joint: no thing that flows from the one into the other. The continuum is not denied as a convention. It is not found as a thing that flows. This is exactly what was found, in Part I, about the ordinary continuity of a single life: no witness keeps watch through deep sleep, and yet the one who wakes is the one who slept.

B. Views About Past and Future Lives

Chapter 27, the last of the Fundamental Verses, examines views about whether I existed in the past and will exist in the future. If the self in a past life were the same as the self now, it would be permanent, and nothing could be gained or lost; if it were different, the present self could have arisen without the past one, and the past one could have gone on while this one was born. If a god were the same as the human it was born from, the god would be permanent; if different, there would be no continuity between them. The chapter takes each view and finds that it cannot be stated without a self that has a nature of its own (27.1–20).

The chapter closes with Nāgārjuna’s homage to the Buddha, who out of compassion taught the true Dharma for the abandoning of all views (27.30). The views abandoned include both “I will go on” and “I will be cut off”. What is not abandoned is the teaching of dependent arising, which governs lives as it governs moments.

6. No Storehouse Needed

A. Candrakīrti’s Reply

The Madhyamaka of Candrakīrti, in his Entering the Middle Way (Madhyamakāvatāra, chapter 6), drew the conclusion explicitly. The storehouse consciousness, he argued, was posited to solve a problem that arises only for those who hold that actions exist by their own nature. If an action existed inherently, then once it ceased it would be inherently gone, and nothing could come of it; so something would be needed to hold it. But actions do not cease inherently, because they do not arise inherently. A deed that was never established by itself is not established as gone by itself either. Its fruit can arise from it, even after a long time, without a storehouse to keep it in.

Candrakīrti does not deny that the Buddha spoke of a storehouse. He reads such teachings as given for those who are not yet ready to hear that nothing needs to be stored, as a doctor gives a gentle medicine before a strong one.

B. Tsongkhapa: Disintegration Itself Functions

Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Geluk school of Tibet, made this point one of the distinctive features of his reading of Candrakīrti. An action that has ceased leaves behind its having-ceased, its “disintegratedness”. This disintegratedness is not nothing: it is itself a dependent, functioning event, and it can condition the arising of the fruit. No storehouse and no imperishable are needed, because the ceasing of an action is already a condition.

Here I part from him. Disintegratedness answers the same question the storehouse answered: how does the deed get across to its fruit? So it is one more bridge, only more refined. It is itself a stream of moments; if its moments can follow one another with no link, so can the deed's own sequence. I do not need it. A deed that never existed by itself never ceased by itself, and no ceasing has to be kept as a thing to carry the fruit. Candrakīrti's direction is the one I follow: the gap was a product of thinking of actions as things, and nothing has to fill it. (Causal Efficacy Without Causal Power, "The mere I".)

C. The Mere I

The same tradition gives its own account of the person who is reborn. The person is the “mere I” (nga tsam): the I designated in dependence on the changing aggregates of body and mind, which is not found when sought among them or apart from them, and which nevertheless acts, remembers, keeps its promises and meets the results of what it has done. It is this mere I that is said to be reborn. It is not a carrier, because it is not found. It is not nothing, because it functions. It is the person exactly as the conventional world already knows the person, with the extra assumption of a fixed core taken away. I keep the mere I in this sense, as the conventional person who acts and meets the result. I do not take it as the place where imprints must wait until they ripen; asked to do that job, it would be one more bridge.

7. What This Part Establishes

1. Every bridge names something, and whatever is named is a dependent appearance, which, if asked to carry continuity, would need a carrier of its own.
2. Read as designations, the bridges do no harm, and some of them, Nāgasena’s lamp and Buddhaghosa’s echo above all, describe the dependence exactly.
3. Nāgārjuna’s answer is that empty karma works: only an action without a nature of its own could be made, change, ripen and end.
4. No link is found at the joint between lives, and the continuum is not denied as a convention.
5. No storehouse is needed, because a deed that never existed by itself never ceased by itself.

Part IV follows the teaching into the later traditions, where the moment of death, and the interval after it, became objects of close attention and practice.

Part IV: The Later Traditions

The Intermediate State in Tibet, and Firewood and Ash in Zen

Introduction: The Same Teaching, New Emphases

The later Buddhist traditions kept the teaching of karma and rebirth whole, and kept the refusal of a traveler. What they added were new emphases. In Tibet, the interval between death and rebirth, the bardo, became an object of detailed description and of practice, and the moment of death came to be seen as a unique opportunity for awakening. In Chan and Zen, the emphasis moved the other way: away from what happens after death and toward the moment in which birth and death are already present. This Part reads both, and shows where each can be misread as installing a carrier, and how each is read without one.

The Tibetan sources and Dōgen could not be checked against the original texts for this article. They are paraphrased from standard accounts, not quoted.

1. The Intermediate State

A. A Being Between

The idea of an intermediate existence (antarābhava) between death and rebirth is Indian. The Sarvāstivāda accepted it, and Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Abhidharma (chapter 3) describes the intermediate being in some detail: it has the form of the being it will become, it feeds on smells (hence one of its names, gandharva, “smell-eater”), and it is drawn to its future parents by desire and aversion. The Theravāda, as Part III noted, rejected the intermediate state. Tibetan Buddhism accepted it and developed it.

The Tibetan word bardo means simply “in between”. In its widest sense, there are several bardos: the bardo of this life, of meditation, of dream, of dying, of the nature of reality (chos nyid) that dawns after death, and of becoming, in which the being seeks a new birth. The best known text on them, the work known in English as The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol, “Liberation Through Hearing in the Between”), is a treasure text attributed to Padmasambhava and revealed in the fourteenth century by Karma Lingpa. It is read aloud to the dying and the dead, to guide them through what they will meet.

B. The Stages of Dissolution

The Tibetan teachings describe dying as a sequence. The elements of the body dissolve one into another, earth into water, water into fire, fire into wind, and wind into consciousness, each with its own outer and inner signs. Then the coarser levels of mind dissolve, through a series of appearances often described as white, red and black, until there dawns what the texts call the clear light of death.

For the tradition, this moment is decisive. One who has practiced recognizing the nature of mind in life may recognize it at death, and be freed. One who does not recognize it passes into the bardo of becoming, in which appearances are shaped by habit, and from there into a new birth.

C. The Very Subtle Mind

Some Tibetan teachers, especially in the Geluk tradition following the tantric literature, explain what continues through this process as a “very subtle mind” and its “very subtle wind”: a level of mind finer than ordinary consciousness, which is said to continue from life to life and to be the basis on which the person is designated.

Here the danger of Part III returns in its most refined form. Read as a thing with a nature of its own, a subtle consciousness flowing on from life to life is exactly Sāti’s view (Part II, §3), and it is exactly the “stream of consciousness flowing on like water through a series of pipes” that Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way calls “a thing in all but name”. I do not accept such a carrier. The teachers who speak of the very subtle mind themselves hold that it is empty, that it is not found when sought, and that it changes at every moment; the person is designated on it, not identical with it. Read that way, the very subtle mind is a description of how the dependence is spoken of at the finest level the tradition distinguishes, and no more a carrier than the ordinary mind is. Read the other way, it is a soul. I follow the first reading, and even then I do not need it as the link. Neither carried nor cut: the dependence needs nothing at the finest level to hold it together. The step from the first reading to a soul is short, which is one more reason not to lean on it.

D. The Clear Light Read Without a Ground

The most important Tibetan teaching on death concerns the clear light or luminosity ('od gsal) that dawns at its moment. In Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā, this is said to be the nature of mind itself, which has been present all along but was obscured by coarser appearances, and is now laid bare.

Here too there are two readings. On one, the clear light is a luminous awareness that underlies all experience, a ground that was always there, uncovered at death as a lamp is uncovered when its shade is removed. On that reading it would be the traveler at last: the one thing that is not designated, that persists through all lives, and to which everything else is added.

The books this article accompanies follow the other reading, that of the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition taken with Nāgārjuna as its view. Luminosity is the knowing clarity of appearing itself, not a light behind appearances and not an awareness looking on. It is empty, as everything is empty. Clarity and emptiness are inseparable, and neither owns the other. “Unobstructed” means that nothing blocks the showing; it does not mean an enduring stream. What dawns at death, on this reading, is not a ground uncovered but appearing recognized as unfixed, when the habit of fixing has, for a moment, nothing coarse to fix on. That recognition is the same recognition the path cultivates in life. It is not a second thing, and it is not owned by anyone.

E. Recognition in Life

This is why the Tibetan teachers say that the best preparation for death is practice in life. The bardo teachings are, in the end, teachings on the bardo of this life. Every moment is “in between”: between the last thought and the next, between one appearance and the next. If one learns to recognize appearing as it is now, there is nothing new to learn at death. If one does not, death will not teach it. The intermediate state is not a special region of reality, but the same appearing, under conditions that make habit harder to hide.

F. Recognized Rebirths

Tibetan Buddhism is also known for its recognized reincarnations (tulku): teachers who are identified, often as children, as the rebirth of a previous master. The institution is a striking expression of the tradition’s confidence in rebirth, and it is sometimes taken as proof that Tibetans believe in a soul.

The tradition’s own account is otherwise. A tulku is not the same person as the predecessor, carried over; nor an unrelated child. The recognition designates a continuity of intention, aspiration and practice, held to have shaped the new life, in the same way that any rebirth is designated: neither the same nor another. Whether a particular recognition is correct is, like every particular claim, a matter for inquiry. The tradition itself has examined, disputed and occasionally reversed such recognitions, which shows that it does not treat them as self-evident.

2. Firewood and Ash

A. Dōgen Against the Senika View

The thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dōgen addressed rebirth directly in his early essay “Bendōwa” (“On the Endeavor of the Way”). There he criticizes a view he calls the heresy of Senika, after an outsider who appears in the Mahāyāna Nirvāṇa Sūtra: the view that the body perishes but a spiritual nature, a mind-nature or true self, is permanent, and leaves the body at death to be born elsewhere, as one leaves a burning house. Dōgen says this is not the Buddha’s teaching. To hold that the mind is permanent and the body impermanent is to divide what is not divided, and to seek freedom in an eternal self is to remain in delusion.

The passage is valuable because it comes from within a tradition that speaks often of “Buddha nature” and “original mind”, and that might easily have taken those as a soul. Dōgen draws the line exactly where the early discourses drew it with Sāti: the teaching of rebirth does not permit a traveler, however spiritual.

B. Each in Its Own Position

Dōgen’s best-known image comes from “Genjōkōan” (“Actualizing the Fundamental Point”). Firewood becomes ash, and does not become firewood again. Yet one should not take ash as after and firewood as before. Firewood abides fully in its own position as firewood, which has its before and after; though there is a before and after, they are cut off from each other. Ash, likewise, abides in its own position as ash. In the same way, life does not become death, as winter does not become spring.

The image is easily read as denying continuity. It denies something else: that a single thing passes from the firewood into the ash, so that the ash is the firewood “later”. Each moment, firewood or ash, life or death, is complete in its own position, and does not need a substance running through it to be what it is. This is the flame of the last watch, which is not the flame of the first watch, and is not unconnected with it. Continuity is not a thread on which the moments hang. It is the way the moments are designated, each in its own position, in dependence on each other.

C. Birth and Death as the Life of Buddha

In a short essay called “Shōji” (“Birth and Death”), Dōgen goes further. Birth and death, he writes in effect, are the life of buddha. To try to escape them is to lose that life; to cling to them is also to lose it. When there is birth, there is nothing but birth; when there is death, nothing but death. One should neither hate nor desire them, nor seek nirvāṇa as a place outside them.

This is not a denial of rebirth. It is the same move Nāgārjuna makes when he says that saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not two (MMK 25.19–20): nirvāṇa is not another place, but this same appearing with the fixing ended. For Dōgen, the practice of zazen is not a means of escaping the round, but the round met without the habit that makes it a prison.

3. Baizhang’s Fox

A. The Story

The second case of the Gateless Barrier (Wumenguan), a thirteenth-century collection of Chan cases, tells of Baizhang Huaihai. Whenever Baizhang taught, an old man came to listen, and left with the monks. One day he stayed. Baizhang asked who he was. The old man said that long ago, in the time of a former buddha, he had been the abbot of this mountain. A student had asked him whether a person of great practice still falls into cause and effect, and he had answered: “Does not fall into cause and effect” (bu luo yinguo, 不落因果). For that answer he had been reborn as a fox for five hundred lives. He asked Baizhang for a turning word to free him from the fox’s body, and put the same question. Baizhang answered: “Does not obscure cause and effect” (bu mei yinguo, 不昧因果). At these words the old man was awakened. The next day Baizhang led the monks to a rock behind the mountain, found the body of a dead fox, and gave it a monk’s funeral.

B. Not Falling, Not Obscuring

The story is a teaching on karma in the form of a rebirth story, and it can be read on both levels. On the level of the tradition’s affirmations, it takes for granted that a teacher’s words have consequences that reach across lives. On the level of the view, it turns on a single distinction.

“Does not fall into cause and effect” is the error of taking freedom as escape from conditions: as if awakening placed one outside the reach of action and fruit, above the conventional world, in a ground where causes do not apply. It is the error of making emptiness, or realization, into a second reality beneath the world, exempt from it. The old abbot’s answer sounds lofty. Its fruit was five hundred lives as a fox.

“Does not obscure cause and effect” is freedom as clarity about conditions. The awakened person is not lifted out of dependent arising. They see it without distortion. Action still bears fruit; the difference is that it is no longer taken as the possession of a self, and so no longer drives the round of craving. The companion bonus article Beyond Cause and Effect takes up the same distinction.

C. What the Story Shows About the View

Baizhang’s fox is a precise warning against a mistake that is easy to make once one has understood emptiness: to conclude that because nothing has a nature of its own, karma no longer matters. The Middle Way says the opposite. Karma works, and what works is found to have no nature of its own: an action with a nature of its own could never be done or bear fruit (MMK 17.22). Emptiness does not make karma work, and it gives no exemption from it. Freedom is not falling out of the world of cause and effect. It is no longer being blind to it.

4. What This Part Establishes

1. The later traditions keep rebirth and keep the refusal of a traveler. Dōgen’s rejection of the Senika view stands beside the Buddha’s rebuke of Sāti.
2. The intermediate state and the very subtle mind can be read without a carrier, as descriptions of dependence at the finest level the tradition distinguishes, or with one, as a soul. I follow the first reading, and even then I do not need either as a link.
3. The clear light at death is not a ground uncovered. On the Nyingma reading followed here, it is the empty, knowing clarity of appearing, recognized; and the preparation for recognizing it is practice now.
4. Each moment of the round is complete in its own position (Dōgen), and birth and death met without fixing are not other than freedom.
5. Freedom does not obscure cause and effect (Baizhang). Emptiness takes nothing away from karma.

Part V turns from the traditions to the doubts a modern reader brings.

Part V: Questions and Objections

The Brain, Memory, Fairness, Evidence, and Whether Buddhism Needs Rebirth

Introduction: Doubts Worth Taking Seriously

A modern reader does not usually doubt rebirth because of a worked-out argument. The doubt comes from a picture: the mind is what the brain does, the brain stops at death, and so the mind stops too. Other doubts follow. If I remember nothing of a past life, in what sense was it mine? If the one who suffers the fruit is not the one who did the deed, is karma fair? Is there any evidence? And can one not keep everything valuable in Buddhism while setting rebirth aside?

This Part takes these questions one at a time. It does not claim to settle them by argument, since Part I, §4, has already said that the logic of emptiness does not prove rebirth. It aims at something narrower: to show which doubts rest on the assumption of a carrier, and so fall away when that assumption does, and which are genuine questions of evidence, to be met in the ordinary way.

1. “The Mind Is What the Brain Does”

A. The Objection

Everything we know about the mind, the objection runs, shows that it depends on the brain. Damage to the brain changes memory, personality and perception. Drugs alter mood. Anesthesia abolishes experience. When the brain dies, there is nothing left for the mind to depend on. Rebirth would require a mind that floats free of the brain and moves to another, and there is no evidence of any such thing.

B. What the Objection Gets Right

The Buddhist tradition has no quarrel with the first part of this. The mind depends on conditions, and the body is among the most important of them. The early discourses describe name-and-form and consciousness as depending on each other like two sheaves of reeds leaning together, each standing because the other does (SN 12.67). A physical account of how experience depends on the brain is, within its scope, an account of real dependence, and it is right about what it traces.

C. Where the Objection Assumes a Carrier

The second part of the objection makes a further move. It assumes that rebirth would require a mind that “floats free” and “moves” to another body: a carrier, in other words. Part II showed that the Buddha refused exactly this. Consciousness, in MN 38, is not a thing that moves from fuel to fuel. It is named after its condition, as fire is named after what it burns.

So the objection, as usually stated, is directed against eternalism, not against the Buddha’s teaching. What it shows is that no soul leaves the body at death. The tradition agrees.

The objection also has its own substantialism, in the opposite direction. It takes the brain, or matter in general, as the one thing that really exists, of which the mind is a mere product. The Middle Way does not grant that either. Making matter the one real thing is the same mistake as making mind the one real thing. Brain and experience are designated together, in dependence on each other and on much else; neither is the ground of the other. Once matter is not taken as the final measure of what can happen, the claim that a life cannot condition another except by passing a substance through the brain is no longer a deduction from science. It is an assumption about what conditioning must be like.

D. What Remains

None of this shows that rebirth happens. It shows only that the standard argument that it cannot happen depends on a picture the tradition never held. What remains is a genuine question: are there conditions, beyond those a physical account traces, by which one life shapes another? The tradition says there are, and calls the chief of them action and craving. The physical account does not look for them, and so does not find them; that is not the same as finding that they are absent. The article follows the tradition, and claims nothing against physics.

2. “If I Remember Nothing, It Was Not Me”

A. The Objection

Most people remember nothing of a past life. If the person reborn has no memory of the one who died, the objection runs, then for all practical purposes they are a different person. A rebirth I cannot remember is no more mine than the life of a stranger.

B. Memory Was Never the Carrier

This objection assumes that memory is what makes a life mine: that the same one persists as long as the memories persist. But memory fails within a single life too. I remember almost nothing of my first three years, and very little of most days since. I remember nothing of deep sleep. If memory were what made me the same person, I would be a different person from the infant I was, and a different person each morning.

The ordinary world does not hold this. It holds the adult responsible for promises they have forgotten making, and recognizes the old woman as the girl in the photograph, though she remembers none of that day. What makes them the same person, conventionally, is not a stored memory but the dependence of the later on the earlier: of this body on that one, of these habits on those choices. Memory is one strand of that dependence, and an important one, but it is not the carrier. Nothing is.

C. Neither the Same Nor Another

So the right answer to “was it me?” is the answer Nāgasena gave the king: neither the same nor another. Not the same, because there is no carrier that was there and is here. Not another, because the later depends on the earlier, as the mangoes depend on the mango that was planted. The question “was it really me?” presupposes that there is a fact about sameness, beyond the dependence, waiting to be discovered. That presupposition is what the search finds empty.

3. “Then Karma Is Unfair”

A. The Objection

If the one who experiences the fruit is not the one who did the deed, then karma punishes the innocent. A child born into suffering is paying for the crimes of a stranger. That is not justice; it is cruelty dressed as justice.

B. Two Replies

The first reply is that the objection is directed at the annihilationist reading, on which the later being has nothing to do with the earlier. The tradition does not hold that. The one who experiences the fruit is not a stranger to the one who acted: the later life depends on the earlier, as the harvest depends on the sowing. The relation is closer than any relation between strangers, and it is the same kind of relation as holds between the person who made a promise and the person who keeps it.

The second reply is more important. Karma is not a court, and it is not a system of reward and punishment administered by someone. It is a description of how intentional action tends to shape what follows. Its point is not to explain why particular people suffer, still less to justify their suffering. The tradition is clear that not everything that happens to a person is the fruit of past action, and it is clear that compassion is the right response to suffering, whatever its conditions. To look at a suffering child and think “this is deserved” is to misuse the teaching, and to forget that the teaching of karma was given in order to free beings, not to judge them.

C. Responsibility Without an Owner

The deeper worry behind the objection is that without a self, responsibility has no one to attach to. Part III, §6C, gave the tradition’s answer. The mere I, designated on changing body and mind, is the one who acts and the one who meets the result, in exactly the way a person keeps their promises within a life. Responsibility does not need an owner beyond that. It never had one.

4. “Is There Any Evidence?”

A. A Question for Evidence

Whether a particular claim about rebirth is true is not a question that the logic of emptiness can answer, and not a question that the tradition’s affirmation can settle. It belongs in the third column of the table in Part I, §4.

The best known modern research on the question was begun by the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, whose Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) was the first of many studies of young children who report memories of a previous life. The work was continued by Jim Tucker, whose Life Before Life (2005) summarizes it for a general reader. The researchers report cases in which a child’s statements were recorded before the previous person was identified, and in which many of the statements were later found to match. Critics have raised questions about the interviewing methods, the cultures in which most of the cases were found, and the possibility of information passing by ordinary means.

B. How the View Holds the Evidence

This article does not adjudicate the research. It makes two points about how the view holds it.

First, the evidence, whatever its strength, cannot show that a soul travels. If a child accurately remembered a past life, that would show a relation of dependence between two lives, the very relation the tradition affirms. It would not show that one substance was present in both, any more than remembering yesterday shows that a substance kept watch through the night. The reports, if accurate, would fit the lamp, not the passenger.

Second, the view does not need the evidence in order to stand, and does not fall if a particular case is explained away. The tradition affirms rebirth as it affirms the rest of its teaching, and the practice of the path, as the four assurances showed (Part II, §8), does not wait on a proof. Both credulity and dismissal are mistakes here, and they are the same mistake: each treats a substance, a soul or matter, as the measure of what the evidence must mean.

5. “Can Buddhism Do Without Rebirth?”

A. The Agnostic Proposal

Some modern teachers have proposed that rebirth be set aside. Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997) argues for an agnostic stance: the Buddha’s teaching is a practice for this life, and claims about past and future lives are not needed for it and cannot be verified. On this view, rebirth is part of the culture the Buddha lived in, not part of what he discovered.

The proposal has real merits. It takes the four assurances seriously. It refuses to make the path hostage to metaphysics. And it rightly insists that the teaching be tested in experience.

B. Why This Article Does Not Follow It

This article follows the tradition instead, for three reasons.

First, the agnostic proposal often rests, without saying so, on the objection from the brain. Its starting point is that rebirth is implausible, and its implausibility is assessed against a picture in which matter is the final measure of what can happen. Once that picture is seen to be one more substantialism, the presumption against rebirth loses much of its force.

Second, rebirth is not a cultural ornament on the early teaching. It is woven through the night of awakening, the twelve links, the account of craving as what drives becoming, and the definition of nirvāṇa as the ending of birth. A teaching from which it has been removed has to reinterpret all of these.

Third, and most important, the main reason for doubting rebirth that a Buddhist would accept, namely that there is no self to be reborn, is not a reason at all. The Buddha taught rebirth and no-self together, and the whole of Parts II and III has shown how. The doubt arises only when no-self is misread as annihilationism.

C. What Is Shared

What the article shares with the agnostic proposal is the insistence that emptiness does not prove rebirth, and that particular claims need evidence. It differs only on where the presumption lies. The tradition affirms rebirth; the article holds that affirmation conventionally, as everything is held, and finds nothing in the logic of emptiness that counts against it.

6. Personal Identity Without a Further Fact

A. Parfit’s Reductionism

The philosopher Derek Parfit, in Reasons and Persons (1984), argued that personal identity consists in nothing more than physical and psychological continuity and connectedness, and that there is no “further fact” about whether a future person is me, beyond those relations. He noted the affinity of this view with the Buddha’s, and included a short appendix of Buddhist texts in the book.

Parfit also drew a personal conclusion. When he believed that his identity was a further fact, he wrote, he seemed imprisoned in himself; when he ceased to believe it, the walls of the glass tunnel through which he was moving seemed to disappear, and he cared less about his own death.

B. Where the Views Meet and Part

The meeting is real. Like the Buddha in SN 12.17, Parfit declines to say that a future person either is or is not “really” me, beyond the relations of dependence. Like Nāgasena, he finds that the question of sameness has no further answer.

The parting is also real. Parfit’s continuity is mostly psychological and physical, and it is assessed within a single body; he did not hold that it extends across death. The Buddhist view holds that the dependence that makes up a person, above all the dependence of what follows on intention and craving, does not stop at the death of the body. More deeply, Parfit’s reductionism reduces the person to more basic events, which are left standing as real. The Middle Way finds those events empty too. The person is not reduced to a substrate of experiences; nothing, person or event, is found to stand by itself.

7. Common Misreadings at a Glance

Part VI: Living With It

The Living, the Dying, the Grieving, and the End of Rebirth

Introduction: What the View Changes

A teaching on rebirth is not finished when its logic is clear. It has to be lived with: in the way one acts, in the way one meets death, in the way one grieves, and in the way one understands the goal of the path. This Part asks what the view of the previous Parts changes in each of these, and what it leaves exactly as it was.

1. Acting

A. Intention Matters Now

If karma is intention (Part II, §2), then the place where karma is made is the present moment: this act of kindness or of cruelty, this word, this turn of mind. The teaching of rebirth extends the reach of that moment beyond the end of this life, but it does not move its center. The tradition’s ethics do not rest on calculations about future lives. They rest on the observation that greed, hatred and confusion tend toward suffering, and their absence toward happiness, here and in whatever follows.

B. No Owner, Full Responsibility

A common fear is that the teaching of no-self weakens responsibility: if there is no one who acts, no one need answer for what is done. The view of this article shows the opposite. The person who acts is the mere I, designated on this body and mind, and it is the same mere I that meets the result. Nothing in emptiness excuses it, as Baizhang’s fox showed (Part IV, §3). What emptiness removes is not responsibility but the possessiveness that turns responsibility into anxiety: the sense that one’s deeds are a ledger held against a self, to be defended, hidden or balanced.

C. Practice Changes a Person

Because nothing about a person is fixed, practice can change them. A habit of anger is not a nature; it is a pattern of dependence, and patterns of dependence can be altered by altering their conditions. The teaching of rebirth makes this more, not less, hopeful. The changes made by practice are not lost at death, any more than the changes made by learning are lost in sleep. They condition what follows.

2. Dying

A. What the Fear Is Tracking

The dread of death presupposes two things: that experience is a possession, and that a possessor stands behind it. Death then looks like the theft of everything from the one who holds it: an experience held, a holder taken away, a holding left unfinished.

The view of this article removes both presuppositions. There is no possessor, so there is no one from whom experience is taken. And there is no possession, so there is nothing left unfinished in the way a task is left unfinished. Each moment of this life is complete in its own position, as Dōgen’s firewood is. Death is the ending of a set of conditions for a particular life and, as the tradition teaches, a condition for what comes next, as one flame lights another.

B. What the View Does Not Remove

The view does not remove the fear of pain, which is a fear about conditions and can be met by care. It does not make the loss of the people we love painless. It does not promise that the person continues as a carrier, the same one traveling on; a view that promised that would be claiming a self after all. What it affirms, with the tradition, is continuity without a carrier: actions bear their fruit, and one life conditions the next.

C. The Tibetan Counsel

The Tibetan teachers give the dying three counsels, which fit the view exactly. Let go of attachment to what is being left, since clinging is the fuel of the next becoming (Part II, §5). Rest the mind in kindness and in whatever practice one knows, since the last moments of intention condition what follows. And recognize what appears, at death and after it, as appearing: not as threats from outside, nor as a ground to merge into, but as the empty, knowing clarity of experience, unfixed (Part IV, §1D). None of these asks the dying to believe anything about what comes after. Each asks only that they meet what is present without the habit of fixing.

D. Being With the Dying

For those who sit with the dying, the view asks something simple: to be present, and to make the conditions as kind as they can be. A quiet room, a familiar voice, a hand held, freedom from pain where it can be given: these are not merely comforts. In the tradition’s account they are conditions, at the most consequential moment of a life. The Tibetan custom of reading aloud to the dying, and of avoiding disturbance around them, rests on this, and needs no further metaphysics to be understood.

3. Grieving

A. Grief Is Not a Mistake

Nothing in the view says that grief is an error to be corrected by understanding. Love is a real relation, and its ending is a real loss. The person we loved was not a carrier, but they were never less than a person: designated on a body and a mind we knew, with a voice, a manner and a history that were exactly theirs. Their death ends that, and grief is the right response to it.

B. What the View Offers the Grieving

What the view offers is not a consolation that denies the loss, but the removal of two extra weights that grief often carries. The first is the image of the dead as a self cut off: wiped out, with nothing following. The tradition does not hold that; the life that ended conditions what follows, and the kindness the dead person showed did not stop bearing fruit when they died. The second is the image of the dead as a self carried away, somewhere else, to be found again as they were. The tradition does not hold that either. Between the two is the lamp: a flame that was real, that has gone out, and that lit others.

C. The Practice of Dedication

Buddhist cultures have long dedicated the merit of their practice and generosity to the dead. Read with a carrier, this would be a transfer of credit from one account to another. Read without one, it is something more natural. The living act with kindness, in the name of one they loved, and that kindness becomes one more condition among those that shape the world the dead person’s life continues to condition. Nothing passes over. Nothing is unconnected.

4. The End of Rebirth

A. Nirvāṇa Is Not Annihilation

The goal of the path, in every Buddhist tradition, is the end of the round of rebirth. Read with a carrier, this sounds like annihilation: the soul that had been traveling from life to life is finally destroyed, or dissolved into something else. That is the reading the Buddha refused when he declined to say whether the Tathāgata exists after death (Part II, §7).

The image he gave instead was the fire that has gone out. It did not go east or west, north or south. It burned on its fuel, and when the fuel was used up and no more was added, it went out. What ends in nirvāṇa is not a someone, but the fuel: the craving and grasping on which the burning depended. Nothing that was real is destroyed, because nothing that was found was ever there to be destroyed.

B. Nirvāṇa Is This Same Appearing

Nāgārjuna adds that there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa (MMK 25.19–20). This does not mean that the round of suffering is already freedom. It means that nirvāṇa is not another place, and not a thing produced by practice and added to the world. It is this same appearing, with the fixing ended. Nothing is added and nothing is taken away. What changes is how things are held. No one owns nirvāṇa, and no one enters it, because there was never a traveler to arrive.

C. Why the Round Ends Where It Began

The round of rebirth turns on not-knowing (Part II, §6A): the habit of taking what is dependent as fixed, the person as an owner, the deed as a possession, the life as a holding. It ends with knowing: the seeing that what appears was never fixed. That seeing does not happen at the end of a long journey, in some other life. It can happen, the tradition says, in this one, in any moment in which appearing is met as it is. That is why the teaching of rebirth, rightly held, turns the practitioner back toward the present. The whole chain can be seen in a single afternoon, and it can be seen through in one.

5. One Flame Lights Another

Go back to the oldest image. A lamp burns through the night. In the last watch, its flame is not the flame of the first watch: the oil is different, the wick is shorter, the light falls differently in the room. And yet there was never a moment when one flame stopped and another, unrelated, began. The burning depended, at each moment, on the burning before.

Now let one lamp be lit from another. Nothing passes over. No small particle of the first flame jumps across to the second. The first lamp may go out a moment later, and the second burn on alone. And yet the second flame is not unconnected with the first. It was lit from it.

This is all the continuity there is. It is how the child becomes the adult, how the one who falls asleep becomes the one who wakes, how the deed becomes its fruit, and how one life becomes the condition of the next. It needs no traveler, and it leaves no one cut off. It is real in the only way anything is real: dependent, designated, working, and empty. The tradition affirms it. Emptiness removes the one objection that seemed to stand against it. And the path, which is the ending of the fuel and not the destruction of the flame, begins and ends where the lamp is burning now.

In the chain: this page goes with The Logic of Dependency (6 of 7). The chain starts at Seeing Comes First.

Sources and Further Reading

Texts Referred to in This Article

Early Buddhist Discourses

The quotations from MN 4 and MN 38 follow the translations of Bhikkhu Sujato, published by SuttaCentral, in the wording already checked for the companion article Knowing From Somewhere. All other discourses are paraphrased.

• Bhayabherava Sutta (Fear and Dread, Majjhima Nikāya 4): the three knowledges of the night of awakening.
• Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta (The Longer Discourse on the Ending of Craving, Majjhima Nikāya 38): Sāti’s view that the same consciousness transmigrates; consciousness as dependently originated; fire named after its fuel.
• Aggivacchagotta Sutta (With Vacchagotta on Fire, Majjhima Nikāya 72): the undeclared questions; the fire that has gone out.
• Cūḷakammavibhaṅga Sutta (The Shorter Analysis of Deeds, Majjhima Nikāya 135): beings as owners and heirs of their deeds.
• Acelakassapa Sutta (With Kassapa the Naked Ascetic, Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.17): the one who acts and the one who experiences; teaching by the middle.
• Naḷakalāpī Sutta (Sheaves of Reeds, Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.67): consciousness and name-and-form leaning on each other.
• Kutūhalasālā Sutta (The Debating Hall, Saṃyutta Nikāya 44.9): the flame carried by the wind; craving as the fuel between lives.
• Kesamutti Sutta (With the Kālāmas of Kesamutta, Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.65): the four assurances.
• Nibbedhika Sutta (Penetrative, Aṅguttara Nikāya 6.63): intention as action.

Indian Buddhist Sources

• The Questions of King Milinda (Milindapañha): neither the same nor another; the infant and the man; the lamp through the night; the lamp lit from a lamp; milk and ghee; the mango thief.
• Points of Controversy (Kathāvatthu): the Theravāda rejection of the intermediate state.
• Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), chapter 17: the rebirth-linking consciousness; the echo, the lamp, the seal and the mirror.
• Vasubandhu, Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa): chapter 3 on the intermediate being; chapter 9 on the refutation of the person.
• Asaṅga, Compendium of the Great Vehicle (Mahāyānasaṃgraha): the storehouse consciousness.
• Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way): 15.2 on intrinsic nature; chapter 17 on action and its fruit, including the seed (17.6–11), the imperishable (17.13–20), Nāgārjuna’s reply (17.21–30) and the magician (17.31–33); 21.18–21 on the joint between existences; 25.19–20 on saṃsāra and nirvāṇa; chapter 26 on the twelve links; chapter 27 on views about past and future, and the closing homage (27.30).
• Candrakīrti, Entering the Middle Way (Madhyamakāvatāra), chapter 6: why the storehouse consciousness is not needed.

Tibetan Sources

These could not be checked against the texts from the session, and are paraphrased from standard accounts.

• Tsongkhapa, Illumination of the Thought (dGongs pa rab gsal), his commentary on Entering the Middle Way: disintegratedness as a functioning thing; the mere I.
• Liberation Through Hearing in the Between (Bardo Thödol), attributed to Padmasambhava and revealed by Karma Lingpa: the bardos; the dissolution at death; the clear light.

Chan and Zen

• Gateless Barrier (Wumenguan), compiled by Wumen Huikai, case 2: Baizhang’s wild fox; “does not fall into cause and effect” and “does not obscure cause and effect”. The two phrases are translated afresh.
• Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō: “Bendōwa” (the Senika view); “Genjōkōan” (firewood and ash); “Shōji” (“Birth and Death”). Paraphrased from standard translations.

Modern Sources

• Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu, talks on dependent origination as the arising of the self-sense from moment to moment.
• Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966).
• Jim B. Tucker, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (2005).
• Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (1997).
• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), Part Three, and Appendix J, “Buddha’s View”.

Companion Articles

• Knowing From Somewhere, on the six higher knowledges, including the recollection of past lives and the divine eye.
• Beyond Cause and Effect, on freedom that is not produced and does not escape conditions.