Reincarnation And Rebirth
Are Rebirth And Reincarnation The Same?
Reincarnation And Rebirth
Most people are not aware of the difference between reincarnation and rebirth. There is actually a subtle difference between reincarnation and rebirth. If you are not familiar with Buddhist teachings, you will not be able to distinguish between reincarnation and rebirth. So you need to know a bit of Buddhist teachings to understand. Generally speaking, there are broadly 2 main beliefs about life after death. The mainstream God-centered believers belief that there is a permanent soul. When a person dies this soul goes to either heaven or hell. The other group is made up of the non-believers. For both these groups, reincarnation or rebirth does not make sense because their belief system does not compute.
It is near impossible to comprehend how a life can be "reborn" into so many types of life-forms. How on earth can a human be reborn as a worm, for that matter!? And no way a worm can be reborn as a human! Logically these comments make sense, so long as we maintain a fixed mindset that "rebirth" is utterly nonsense. For those on unfamiliar ground, death would mean the disintegration of this physical body, and the "soul" will go to either heaven or hell.
Be that as it may, this article is not a sermon. The main purpose of this article is to explain the difference between reincarnation and rebirth, which I need to introduce a bit of Buddhist teachings to elucidate.
Reincarnation assumes a permanent entity that keeps on being reborn, or to use the more appropriate term "reincarnated". The same unchanging entity (or "soul", if you prefer) exists throughout these reincarnations. The Buddhist concept of "rebirth" assumes the presence of a life-stream consciousness which exists in a flux, always changing. This life-stream consciousness passes through rebirths, not as an exact entity, but as a stream of consciousness.
I won't be debating on this assumption. I only wish to share some of my thoughts in the Buddhist perspective about this phenomenon of rebirth. As in all the teachings of the Buddha, you are not required to agree, and can reject if they don't make any sense. Just treat this article as another source of information.
"Rebirth" Explained In Simple Concept.
The Buddhist concept of life is based on a continuous flow of life energy, taking temporary abode in physical forms. This life energy may be termed as the life-stream of consciousness. Take this physical body for example. What we can see is this physical mass of shape, we call a human being. It is more than that. A living body comprises of this physical form and something else, the mind consciousness. It's just like the computer; only when we switch on the current, the computer comes alive. It is this life-stream of consciousness that takes birth in different forms.
Take the example the light bulb. After a period of time, this bulb will eventually blow out. Then we replace it with a new one, and the new bulb lights up. Our life-stream consciousness is like this electric current. In this life-stream consciousness, we have a store-house of all our intentional or volitional actions that we generate during our life-time. In Buddhist parlance, we call these actions our karma (kamma) . This storehouse of kammic energies, both good and bad will determine the type of rebirth that will take place.
Now coming back to the electric bulb. When we fix a 1000-watt bulb, the light will be very bright. But if we fix a 5-watt bulb, the light is fairly dim. This is similar to our storehouse of kammic energy. Our consciousness is like the electric current, which does not change. The manifestation of our consciousness depends on our accumulated kamma or actions, just like the wattage of the bulb. If our kammic storehouse has more wholesome and pure actions, then we will have good rebirths, just like the bright 1000-watts bulb. If otherwise, with all the bad kammic actions, then we will have bad rebirths, just like the lowly 5-watts bulb!
This is the concept of "rebirth". There is this continuous flow of the stream consciousness passing through from one birth to another. This is rebirth.
The concept of "reincarnation" assumes a same entity, say "X", and "X" is always being reincarnated as "X". In "rebirth" there is no "X" personality but just the stream of consciousness.
Just think about it.
You may like to read my other related article "What is rebirth; what is reincarnation".