Coming Back

Paul Williams,  Emeritus Professor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy at Bristol University, shocked everyone when he converted to Catholicism. He was distressed by the Buddhist understanding of death because it meant he would be separated from his beloved wife once he died for ever. No coming back together in their next lives or finding each other in heaven. I tell this story because while Buddhism does believe that we are reborn innumerable times, driven by the compulsion of our karma, the problem is, if we do not have an essential or permanent self that persist through time, who exactly is being reborn? It’s a tricky one and Buddhists have always struggled with it. Williams believed that once he died that would be the end of ‘Paul Williams’ as such and according to the Dharma he is in a way right.

The Buddha gave a very detailed account of how the journey between one life to the next occurs. It’s rather complicated and I have to look it up each time before I write it down – its called the ‘Twelve Links of Dependent Origination’. One way to make it simpler is to remember that it’s a description of what causes a new birth to begin, how this birth unfolds in great detail, and then how this leads to further rebirths in the future.

1. Being endlessly reborn in samsara is due to our ignorance of how things really are. This is where it all starts and what keeps it going.

2. Out of this ignorance we create habits that we then act upon – creating our karma.

3. And these leave imprints within consciousness and it is these imprints that are carried from one life to the next. (So here we have our answer: what takes rebirth? Imprints within a stream of consciousness.)

4. Now, as a new foetus, we initially have just a body and brain. (Here I think of a baby in the womb during the very earliest stages of gestation).

5. Next comes the development of the six senses and the mind that receives sensations.

6. Next these sense organs receive sensory information.

7. That is perceived as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

8. And this causes a craving to move towards pleasure and avoid pain. (Which is actually an attribute of all sentient life forms right down to a single celled amoeba. Moving towards favourable environments and away from the detrimental.)

9. And once we have what we want, pleasure, not pain, we then cling to it in the hope it will not stop.

10. And this gives rise to a sense of ‘me’ that fruitlessly starts to protect against unwanted experiences.

11. Which is of course to be ignorant of how things really are – impermanent – and this creates a new birth.

12. Which then moves through the whole cycle of birth, old age, sickness and death again – and again.

So links one to three describe what we are doing now. Out of ignorance creating lots of karma that will come to fruition during a rebirth in the future. Links four to ten chart the journey from the beginning of having a developing body to the emergence of the feeling of being a separate ‘me’. So intrauterine to perhaps somewhere around eighteen months old. Certainly the ‘terrible two’s’ and the discovery of the word ‘No’. And this in turn perpetuates the ignorance that just keeps it all going. Steps eleven and twelve.

One of the things this account gives us is a means to differentiate between two very easily confused ideas – rebirth and reincarnation. Reincarnation may be understood to mean that the same person moves from one life to the next. This is really a Hindu, Theosophical or New Age idea and is often linked to the belief in a soul who, through learning the lessons of each life, progresses – or doesn’t – towards the light of liberation. In a way it’s a hero story. On the other hand, rebirth, the Buddhist position, points to a causally created series of mental events – a stream of consciousness – that continues after death and then later becomes the basis for a new body and personality in the future. Think of this as a sea that has currents running through it. Within each current the water is constantly changing but none the less, the momentum of the current continues as a discrete movement. In this way we can neither say that I will be reborn, that ‘I’ as it presently is will not. The water is always changing. But neither can we say I will not be reborn, because the ‘I’ that is reborn is a continuation of the stream of consciousness that was once myself. The current retains its momentum. Knowing all this we can see Paul Williams’s point. Paul Williams will be gone at death but the stream of consciousness that was called ‘Paul Williams’ will nonetheless continue and become the basis of another life – one with a different name. Williams chose to see this as the absolute end of him but Buddhists generally, when not pressed, still feel some sort of personal continuation, even while knowing that there is no unchanging self, moving between lives, tucked away somewhere within them. And in fact the separation I have made here between reincarnation and rebirth in terms of language is not always that tight. Tibetan Rinpoches are very frequently referred to as ‘reincarnate’ Lamas, tulku, even when strictly speaking like everyone else they are reborn.

Different Buddhist schools later added to this description of what happens when we die. Theravada Buddhism believes that the transition from one life to the next happens in a fraction of a second. The last moment of the stream of consciousness that is this life ends and then, after a minute gap, the next moment of consciousness is the first in a new life. The current rushes on without pause. However, Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps influenced by trans-himalayans shamanism, tells a rather different story. It’s still a stream of consciousness that continues after death and is subsequently reborn but here the in-between state – the Bardo – lasts for forty-nine days. This is a liminal space which offers a diminishing possibility for the person who has died to achieve liberation. At the moment of death by resting into the blazingly luminous awareness of the buddha-nature, or failing that, recognising that the hallucinations of the Bardo realm are nothing but the projections of our own mind. Only when these opportunities are missed are we drawn back into some form of embodied rebirth. While this teaching only dates back to the 14th century and is not universally shared by all Buddhists, it still acts for those that believe in it as an invaluable support at the very vulnerable – and possibly very valuable – time of death. Knowing what comes next at the very least must make letting go easier.

And what about memories of ‘our’ last and previous lives? Many people over the years have shared with me their thoughts about previous incarnations and I have myself had experiences that could if so inclined be interpreted as ‘past lives’. And I believe quite a lot of anecdotal evidence has been gathered over the years by researchers listening to the memories of children before they are covered over by their lives in the present. Much of this seems easily dismissed for a variety of good reasons but what of those that survive more rigorous testing? My feeling here is that I am more interested in why we would or would not want to believe in rebirth. Observing myself I notice that when I’m feeling afraid of what the future will bring I definitely don’t want to be reborn within it – except of course it won’t be ‘me’. Conversely, when I feel particularly loving towards those in my life the possibility of continuing with them seems very desirable and then of course I want it to be me who will be me having that experience in the future.

On the back of this is the connected issue of why we might even want to imagine our past lives. There is in fact a specific therapeutic treatment for this – Past Life Regression – that uses a light form of hypnosis to take people back into memories supposedly originating in previous incarnations. Whether this is actually so or not remains uncertain. It is at least equally possible that the ‘memories’ are in fact being created unconsciously in the present as a means to resolve emotional conflicts and that the material the memory contains is again unconsciously culled from forgotten memories, books, films and stories we have previously had, read, seen or heard – but all within this life. My feeling on all this is mixed. On the one hand, the creation of another story about myself seems to be going in the wrong direction from a Buddhist perspective. It’s just more about me and potentially falls into the danger of increasing our sense of a reified self. However, on the other hand, sometimes having an explanation for something that simply makes no sense, a set of feelings, a peculiar repetition of circumstances, the familiarity of a place not visited before, can create a resolution. If that’s the case does it really matter whether it’s an authentic memory of a past life or not?

Finally on this matter I simply don’t know. Some Buddhist – perhaps most – would say that a Buddhist should believe in rebirth because it’s the logical consequence of karma. The Buddhist thinker Stephen Batchelor, by suggesting that the notion of reincarnation may possibly be a Hindu import into Buddhism and therefore not necessarily an integral aspect of its belief, could offer a means to let us off this particular hook. However, I think it’s obvious that the Buddha was himself a firm believer in rebirth with all the caveats above. Bottom line, rebirth can neither be proved nor disproved. The Buddha said if we act as if it is true then it’s win win. Win because we have led a good life in anticipation of the next and if this is true this will pay off. And if we don’t, acting in ways that don’t take karma into account, then its potentially lose lose. We lose by harming ourselves and others, and we lose by thereby ending up in a horrible rebirth. I love the pragmatism of this and I am happy to go along with it, embracing uncertainty and knowing that what I do now is important now, whether or not it may have consequences in the future.

NW. 23 April 2026