It is not hard to imagine that after we are dead and gone, some other life form will appear. After all, we appeared after Ben Franklin and a lot of other people were out of here.
After we are gone, an earthworm will be born. So will a fish. And gazillions of bacteria and people and life forms on other planets of which we are not even aware.
And somewhere in the universe, a being will be born with an IQ of 10,000. On that planet, the kids master differential equations in kindergarten and as adults their minds understand subjects that we don’t even know exist. They are smarter than us by as much as we are smarter than turtles. Or bugs.
So what does that have to do with rebirth? Who gets reborn? And in what consciousness?
Buddhism teaches that there is no permanent, abiding self that is reborn. It therefore follows that our next life will be conditioned by this one and the lifetimes that preceded it, just as this one was conditioned by all the previous ones. The next life flows from previous lives as a matter of cause and effect. The Buddha used the idea of citta to explain how each mind moment is followed by another mind moment but that is outside the scope of this brief blog entry.
Just as at age 50 we differ from our self at age 5, so will we differ in the next life from this one. At 50 we are hardly the same person as we were at 5, but we are not entirely different either.
Lives are connected in the same way. If we tore off butterfly wings at the age of 5, chances are that 50 finds us in prison. Where we are now is the sum total of every thing we’ve ever said, thought, or done. Nothing could be more obvious. Karma is just the law of cause and effect.
If our minds are clear and noble, and human, the next life will not be spent in fur and horns. It will be another human life that flows in the same stream of cause and effect as its previous lives.
If our mind is deluded, we may resonate with the conscience of a non-human lifeform.
How can we say these things with such assurance? There are two reasons.
First, those who have awakened report that they remember their past lives.
Secondly, it’s impossible to be conscious of death. We are either alive in one form or another. There will never be a moment when we can say: Well, I’m dead now.
New life will follow our death. That is a certainty. That new life doesn’t have to appear on this planet and this human consciousness.
The only question is which life form will our present lifestyle lead us to, as a matter of cause and effect? This life is the cause of the next. We will not be re-born on a planet where the average IQ of the beings that dwell there is 10,000. We are in the human dharma realm because we think like humans. Even the notion of the earth and other planets and other life forms is a part of the human dharma realm.
Master Hsuan Hua said that to be re-born as a dog, just think like one and that will do the trick. Or to be re-born as a Buddha, think like a Buddha. The Ten Dharma Realms Are Not Beyond A Single Thought.
Consciousness can be compared to a radio or television receiver. It gets only the station it is tuned to at the moment. We are in resonance with the human dharma realm, not the dharma realm of animals or super-beings that make us look like bacteria. So if we take no action and just continue to plod along as humans, our consciousness will remain in this human dharma realm.
Zazen helps us tune into the Buddha station. It helps us to enter into resonance with Buddha nature so that when this individual human consciousness ends, the next thought moment will be a citta that was the result of a lifetime of cultivation, not a lifetime of forgetfulness, not a citta generated by a lifetime of animalistic thought.
The “self” that practices zazen will be re-born as a self that resonates with the Buddhadharma. It will be drawn to it. If we are reading this blog entry now, we had affinities for the Buddhadharma in prior lives and that affinity has drawn us again to the Buddhadharma in this life. With ardent practice of zazen, those affinities will increase from lifetime to lifetime, from consciousness to consciousness. With neglect of zazen, those affinities will decrease.
And so it goes…Zen practice allows Buddhahood, our true nature, to appear. It is impossible to escape from consciousness, so we might as well choose a consciousness that transcends the illusion of individual life and death.
The concepts of individual life and death require the existence of a self that has a beginning and an end. But awareness is all there is and, like time, it has no beginning and no end.
Some authors argue that modern day Buddhism needs to separate itself from ancient belief systems. See Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. But re-birth is unavoidable, even if we wish it never happened. The foolish like the concept of re-birth, especially if they are enjoying their lifetime. Hooray, they say – all this fun and we get to do it over and over!. The wise know that not every lifetime is pleasant and that waking up from the dream of the human dharma realm is more desirable than remaining in that dharma realm.
Time can’t end because it never started. Awareness is the same. There is no creator that stands outside of time and there never was a moment of creation. Awareness is not a self, not a being. It has no beginning and therefore, like time, can have no end.
Nirvana is the annihilation of desire for an independent self, not the annihilation of awareness. We see every day that babies are born after old folks die. And every one of those babies is the effect of prior causes and conditions.
Sometimes the most obvious truth is hard to see. But every effect has a cause, and cause and effect have no beginning and no end. We are participating in the human dharma realm because every thing we’ve ever done, every thought we’ve ever had, every action we’ve ever performed, has led us to where we are now, to the consciousness of the human dharma realm.
And that beginningless and endless process is continuing and can never stop because it has no beginning. That is why we sit without moving and train our minds. Not to get future benefits, but just because there is a future and we can’t escape it. When we choose to sit in zazen, and to walk in Zen when not sitting, we choose to resonate with the Buddha dharma realm.
The Buddha dharma realm is just as real as the human dharma realm. The wise will sit in zazen and walk in Zen.
Why the hillbilly title? Some university started a contest years ago to see who could change one letter in a word and create a new word with a new meaning. My all time favorite was a change of one letter in the word reincarnation. Change the “c” to a “t” and what do you get?
