what gets reborn?
Feb. 24th, 2019 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cattasallaI see this question a lot. If there is no Self, what is it that gets reborn? If consciousness is not continuous, what transmigrates? And I thought I'd throw in my understanding of it. Note that I actually don't really believe in rebirth (although Ian Stephenson's work does make me go, "huh").
When you go to sleep, your consciousness goes away. When you wake up, it comes back. In the view of Buddhist rebirth, as I understand it, the moments of consciousness are produced by karmic tendencies. There's a complex of karmic seeds from the past, and each new moment of consciousness springs from these. So, then, in this view, death is pretty much the same thing. If the karmic complex is immaterial, and a material body accretes around it, then that's what a new life is. And a new consciousness being produced in a new body is similar to going to sleep and then waking up.
When you go to sleep, your consciousness goes away. When you wake up, it comes back. In the view of Buddhist rebirth, as I understand it, the moments of consciousness are produced by karmic tendencies. There's a complex of karmic seeds from the past, and each new moment of consciousness springs from these. So, then, in this view, death is pretty much the same thing. If the karmic complex is immaterial, and a material body accretes around it, then that's what a new life is. And a new consciousness being produced in a new body is similar to going to sleep and then waking up.