For these guidelines to be fully comprehensible, it is essential to understand the system of Tulku recognition and the basic concepts behind it. Therefore, I shall briefly explain them below. In order to accept reincarnation or the reality of Tulkus, we need to accept the existence of past and future lives.
Sentient beings come to this present life from their previous lives and take rebirth again after death. This kind of continuous rebirth is accepted by all the ancient Indian spiritual traditions and schools of philosophy, except the Charvakas, who were a materialist movement. Some modern thinkers deny past and future lives on the premise that we cannot see them. Others do not draw such clear cut conclusions on this basis.
Although many religious traditions accept rebirth, they differ in their views of what it is that is reborn, how it is reborn, and how it passes through the transitional period between two lives. Some religious traditions accept the prospect of future life, but reject the idea of past lives. Generally, Buddhists believe that there is no beginning to birth and that once we achieve liberation from the cycle of existence by overcoming our karma and destructive emotions, we will not be reborn under the sway of these conditions.
Therefore, Buddhists believe that there is an end to being reborn as a result of karma and destructive emotions, but most Buddhist philosophical schools do not accept that the mind-stream comes to an end. To reject past and future rebirth would contradict the Buddhist concept of the ground, path and result, which must be explained on the basis of the disciplined or undisciplined mind.
If we accept this argument, logically, we would also have to accept that the world and its inhabitants come about without causes and conditions. Therefore, as long as you are a Buddhist, it is necessary to accept past and future rebirth.
For those who remember their past lives, rebirth is a clear experience. However, most ordinary beings forget their past lives as they go through the process of death, intermediate state and rebirth. As past and future rebirths are slightly obscure to them, we need to use evidence-based logic to prove past and future rebirths to them. There are many different logical arguments given in the words of the Buddha and subsequent commentaries to prove the existence of past and future lives.
In brief, they come down to four points: the logic that things are preceded by things of a similar type, the logic that things are preceded by a substantial cause, the logic that the mind has gained familiarity with things in the past, and the logic of having gained experience of things in the past.
Ultimately all these arguments are based on the idea that the nature of the mind, its clarity and awareness, must have clarity and awareness as its substantial cause.
It cannot have any other entity such as an inanimate object as its substantial cause. This is self-evident. Through logical analysis we infer that a new stream of clarity and awareness cannot come about without causes or from unrelated causes. While we observe that mind cannot be produced in a laboratory, we also infer that nothing can eliminate the continuity of subtle clarity and awareness. As far as I know, no modern psychologist, physicist, or neuroscientist has been able to observe or predict the production of mind either from matter or without cause.
There are people who can remember their immediate past life or even many past lives, as well as being able to recognise places and relatives from those lives. This is not just something that happened in the past. Even today there are many people in the East and West, who can recall incidents and experiences from their past lives. Denying this is not an honest and impartial way of doing research, because it runs counter to this evidence.
There are two ways in which someone can take rebirth after death: rebirth under the sway of karma and destructive emotions and rebirth through the power of compassion and prayer.
Regarding the first, due to ignorance negative and positive karma are created and their imprints remain on the consciousness. These are reactivated through craving and grasping, propelling us into the next life. We then take rebirth involuntarily in higher or lower realms. Namely, that evolution is driven by fleeting pleasure. Humans seek satisfaction through eating and copulating, only to find that the pleasure from these activities is remarkably evanescent.
And yet, nevertheless, we get up and try to find satisfaction through them every day. Wright says that this is a neat trick of natural selection, which is driven simply by the blind will of the species to continue. The trouble is that this cycle of pleasure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction is, well, rather unsatisfying.
And this is what Buddhism understands and what mindfulness meditation can help cure. To perpetually pursue satisfaction is suffering. To become aware of this process and gain distance from it through mindfulness provides relief.
Early in his book, Wright makes a qualification about what he thinks is true in Buddhism. First, in the sense that every human bears traces of historical processes that happened long before any of us were alive.
Second, in that humans are driven by a fundamental process of the endless reincarnation of pleasure. Thus evolution, for example, solved the problem of how to keep the species going by creating other problems of survival for that very species — whether through epidemics of obesity or the greed for pleasure that leads people to pillage and destroy others.
And it would later become the devastating problem of many who followed Marx himself. The hope of this reckoning is that we might better understand these conditions and awake from these nightmares. This is the point at which Gautama and Marx and many others agree : for there to be progress in ending suffering, some elements of the world — poverty, racism, hatred — simply must cease to be reincarnated. The politics of reincarnation refuses to see the world as broken up into friends and enemies, victors and losers.
The political demands to end negative reincarnations are, in part, made possible by the ethical view of human interdependence that reincarnation affords us. One of the ideas that we learn in the classical doctrine is that reincarnation links many of us across the histories of our being. Indeed, one of the most intriguing elements of the classical view is that not everything or everyone is actually connected.
But some people and things always remain separate. We might think of it as a kind of Pascalian wager. There are analogies in other traditions. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, Jesus said that all who fed or clothed or cared for him, when he was downtrodden, would go to heaven.
Our lack of knowledge about our specific connections to the world should make us behave ethically toward the whole world. The politics of reincarnation that one can develop from this ethics refuses to see the world as broken up into friends and enemies, victors and losers. Because there is no unchanging permanent essence or soul, Buddhists sometimes talk about energy being reborn, rather than souls.
Buddhists believe in life after death because the Buddha taught that human beings are each born an infinite number of times, unless they achieve Nirvana. In the Dhammapada the Buddha states:. The Dhammapada contains many other teachings about samsara, enlightenment, and Nirvana:. The Buddha taught his disciples not to fear death.
This has been interpreted by Buddhists as suggesting that if they live well, their rebirth will be good. After his enlightenment, the Buddha could remember his previous lives. Some of these previous lives are recorded in the Buddhist scripture, the Jakata. In Tibetan Buddhism there are many writings about life after death including the ' Tibetan Book of the Dead '.
The first showed his own many previous lives; the second, depicting the general pattern of beings dying and being reborn throughout the cosmos, showed the connection between rebirth and karma, or action. When he did finally attain release from suffering, he recognized that he had achieved his goal because he had touched a dimension that not only was free from birth, but also had freed him from ever being reborn again. After he had attained release, his new-found freedom from rebirth was the first realization that occurred spontaneously to his mind.
What is it that gets reborn? The classical metaphor is of an acorn. An acorn becomes an oak tree. When the oak tree is here, the acorn is not, and no part of the acorn can be found in the oak tree. One simply has succeeded the other, just as one moment and one life succeeds the previous moment or life. For me, the most important thing about the teaching of rebirth—the part that seems true and that matters a great deal—is that life continues.
That is, there is more to our lives than the little span of time between birth and death. The teaching of rebirth tells us that our life and death are significant beyond their appearances, more significant than we know. Being born is important.
Dying is important. Death is definitely a hugely important transition, at least as huge as birth. Every moment of life is an important transition. For me, this is what the teaching of rebirth comes down to. The process of rebirth is conditioned by mental factors that have been cultivated, either consciously or unconsciously. These qualities of mind, such as desire, generosity, anger, and loving-kindness, then condition the energy and form of the next birth. We can see this process of conditioning at work in this life without necessarily believing in rebirth.
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