Rebirth · Pāli: punabbhava; Skt: punarbhava

Rebirth is the Buddhist account of what follows death: not a self that moves house, but a conditioned continuity. The early discourses treat the round of birth and death as having no findable beginning. In the Assu Sutta (SN 15.3) the Buddha says that “from an inconstruable beginning comes transmigration”, and that “beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving” are “transmigrating & wandering on”.

The Milindapañha, a Pali dialogue between the monk Nagasena and King Milinda, puts the puzzle directly. Asked whether it is so “that one does not transmigrate and one is reborn”, Nagasena agrees, and offers the image of one lamp kindled from another: the second lamp is lit from the first, yet no lamp travels across. Asked whether a soul is to be found, he answers that “according to ultimate reality, your majesty, a soul is not to be found”. What ties one life to the next is action: “it is by the deeds that one does in this mind-and-body, lovely or unlovely, that one is reborn in another mind-and-body”. Our guide to rebirth and reincarnation works the contrast through.

Traditions share the denial of a transmigrating soul and differ over where the process is meant to end. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that most Theravada practitioners aspire to become arhats, after which the person “will no longer be reborn, but will instead enter Nirvana at death”, whereas “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings”. Some modern teachers read the realms of rebirth as psychological states, though historically “most Buddhists have taken this system literally”.