The answer depends upon whether we are thinking of the narrower idea of rebirth(i.e. a series of literal births within the biological process of this world) or the wider idea of rebecoming (i.e. the continuation after death of the individual system of dispositions, whether in this or other ‘worlds’); for as Jayatilleke says, ‘rebirth is only a special case of re-becoming when a person comes back to an earth-life’. This wider concept of rebecoming (punabbava, literally ‘existence again’) is clearly essential to Buddhism. For samsara entails that the individual bundle of dispositions, constituting the karmic deposit of its past history, continues its processive existence in one form or another through aeons of time until its craving for existence is exhausted and it attains to nirvana. But to designate this basic Buddhist theme the word ‘rebecoming’ is more appropriate than ‘rebirth’. For birth, as the beginning of a new animal life-span, is only one form of rebecoming. The way in which the term ‘rebirth’ is used in much of the literature has tended to obscure this important distinction and to reduce the wider concept to the narrower. Accordingly ‘rebirth’ has generally been treated as an alternative term to ‘reincarnation’ in referring to the process whereby human beings are born again and again to live further human (or other animal) lives. The reports of individuals who are said to remember fragments of a past life, often discussed in support of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, have also helped to fix the meaning of the word as signifying rebirth within the evolution of life on this earth. But the idea that rebecoming must take the form of rebirth from the womb is not a Buddhist belief. The traditional Buddhist view is rather that it may take either this form or other forms in the numerous purgatorial and heavenly ‘worlds’. For the Buddha himself taught that only a small minority of rebecomings are as human beings:
Just as, monks, in this Rose-apple Land [i.e. India] trifling in number are the pleasant parks, the pleasant groves, the pleasant grounds and lakes, while more numerous are the steep, precipitous places, unfordable rivers, dense thickets of stakes and thorns, and inaccessible mountains, - just so few in number are those beings who, deceasing as men, are reborn among men. More numerous are those beings who, deceasing as men, are reborn in Purgatory, who are reborn in the wombs of animals, who are reborn in the Realm of Ghosts.
In these other ‘worlds’ rebecoming is not a matter of being born as a baby but rather of the stream of personal consciousness, which from the point of view of an earthly observer terminates at death, continuing in another environment - as in the Buddha’s story of a great king: ‘When the Great King of Glory, Ananda, had died, he came to life again in the happy world of Brahma.’ Or again, ‘as that person fares along . . . so will he arise, at the breaking up of the body after dying, in a good bourn, a heaven world’.
I suggest then that from the point of view of the logic of the Dharma it is a question of fact, to be determined by appropriate observations, whether rebecoming sometimes or always takes the form or rebirth in this world. In the Buddha’s and other arhats’ reports of their own recollections of their former lives Buddhist tradition contains strong reasons for supposing rebirth to occur. But if these stories came to be given a mythological interpretation, and it were held that rebirth (as distinguished from rebecoming in other spheres) either never or only seldom occurs, this conclusion would not, I suggest, involve an abandonment of the central structure of Buddhist faith. It would not, for example, affect the validity of the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path to deliverance. Thus if scientific disproof of rebirth should at some future time be forthcoming, Buddhism would be able to adjust itself to such new knowledge as Christianity has - though not without great pains - adjusted itself to the knowledge of biological evolution. I am not predicting that this will happen; though I should think it possible that the growing influence of science and technology within the traditional Buddhist cultures may gradually lead to belief in rebirth becoming a ‘dead letter’ - not officially repudiated and yet no longer seriously believed by most educated Buddhists. If this should happen, future Buddhist thinkers may well find it proper to reconsider the status of the rebirth doctrine.
It is worth noting that to the extent that rebecoming in other
‘worlds’ is emphasized, rather than rebirth in this world, there is essential
agreement between the pareschatologies of Buddhism and of Christianity
in the irenaean tradition. It is true that these other ‘worlds’ are depicted
in Buddhist (as also in Hindu) literature as places of reward, punishment,
rest or purgation rather than as realms in
which new moral and spiritual acts take place and in which progress
towards nirvana is accordingly possible. They thus correspond, in Christian
thought, more to the purgatory of the augustinian-catholic tradition than
to the continued person-making beyond death postulated by the irenaean
type of theology. But if we want to imagine a Buddhism in which the doctrine
of rebecoming has ceased to be associated with earthly rebirth, it will
be one in which the idea of the other worlds has been developed to take
over from this world the function of accommodating the many linked rebecomings
which are to lead eventually to nirvana. It will be a doctrine of ‘vertical’
rather than ‘horizontal’ reincarnation.
This simile offers itself for possible development in to different directions, one of which links it to the Vedanta whilst the other moves towards the thought of a common or world karma - an idea which might well constitute the moral content of a reincarnation myth. The issue turns upon the notion of karma and upon whether or not this is kinked with memory. Karma, moral cause and effect, it the natural law of the spiritual world whereby every action, including every volition, has it’s appropriate effect: ‘If one speaks or acts with wicked mind, because of that, suffering follows one, even as the wheel follows the hoof of the draught-ox . . . If one speaks or acts with pure mind, because of that, happiness follows one, even as one’s shadow that never leaves.'
The theme is not confined to religions which teach reincarnation; the Christian scriptures, for example, also affirm that ‘whatever a man sows, that he will also reap’. Within the present life the effects of action are felt both inwardly, in what it does to the agent’s own character, and outwardly in the world, by contributing to the future circumstances in which he (and hence, inevitably, to some extent others also) shall live. The inward effects are obviously inseparable from the agent. Every thought and choice helps to form his character-structure. In acting kindly one reinforces and develops one’s own kindliness. In acting brutally one brutalizes oneself. Every violation, important or trivial, does something to strengthen or to modify one’s own personal nature. As William James wrote,
This is the reflexive operation of the moral law of karma, seen by James as physical as well as mental; and if the agent lives a second or third or any number of lives, so long as he is the same person he must take with him the character which he has been forming and reforming in all his past violations. For it is the basic shape of this character that is said to be passed on from life to life in the form of unconscious karmic energies which transfer their operation from the dying person to a new embryo.
It is less obvious however that the external effects, constituting what we may call circumstantial karma, always fall upon the agent himself. It is claimed however that they affect the agent by selecting the circumstances of his next birth. Thus we read in the Milindapanha:
We must now bring in the question of memory. For it is the notion of individual karma plus memory that makes the idea of rebirth morally intelligible. Is there, then, a unique set of memories recording the experience of a series of successive lives, such that the latest and current individual in the series has, or may have, all the memories, whilst no one else can have any of the memories, comprising that particular set? Given such a continuous thread of memory it is morally intelligible that inner karma (the effects of one’s actions on one’s own character) should accumulate from life to life, and that the basic traits which show in the growing child should be the result of the volitions of previous existences. It is likewise morally intelligible that external karma (the effects of action upon the world), as well as affecting other people, should operate to select the basic circumstances of the next birth of the karmic continuant.
But all this is intelligible only if the current individual can remember the past lives whose harvest he is now repaying. He would then be in essentially the same situation as one who reaps the results of his own past action in the same life. If a man loses a leg in a motor accident caused by his own drunken driving he is conscious of a natural cause and effect which, although it may seem harsh, cannot be said to be arbitrary or unjust. And if he were born lame in one leg as a result of the same accident in his previous life, which he could still recall, he might again see his lot as an intelligible one. But suppose that he has no awareness at all of any previous lives. Suppose, as must normally be the case if rebirth is a universal process, all such memories are erased by the traumas of death and birth. In what sense can he then be said to be the person who was responsible for an accident of which he knows nothing and which occurred before he was born? It may be that certain psychic formations which were part of the previous individual are now part of him. But if they are not accompanied my memory, can they be said to constitute the same person? - ‘the same immaterial substance, without the same consciousness’, as Locke argued, ‘no more making the same person by being united to any body, than the same particle of matter, without consciousness, united to any body, makes the same person’.
I am not sure however that this argument is in the end valid. For it might be said that so long as the ever lengthening chain of memories of past lives is brought to consciousness sooner or later, it does not fundamentally matter that in the meantime it is in abeyance. Suppose that as a result of an accident caused by himself, in which a man loses a leg, he also suffers amnesia and can remember neither the accident nor the circumstances leading to it. And suppose that after ten years he recovers his memory. He would then see retrospectively what he had been unable to see during the intervening ten years, namely that the legless condition was the consequence of his own action. As C. J. Ducasse says, ‘The supposition that, at some time, memory of earlier lives is recovered suffices to make rebirth of one person mean something different from death of one person followed by birth of another person.’ It seems reasonable to suppose that the memory which renders the operation of karma from life to life morally intelligible might be suppressed from consciousness through many lives so long as, either from time to time (perhaps in the intervals between earthly lives) or at the end of the karmic process, the unity of the whole series of lives is seen in retrospect. Such a picture is consistent with the Buddhist conception of self as a stream of conscious and unconscious mental life in which a gradually changing pattern of dispositional characteristics, including memory, is continually being passed on from one momentary state to the next. The rejection of the Hindu doctrine of the permanent atman lying behind these momentary states and being conscious of them - as in the simile of the two birds - ensures that any memories of earlier lives are memories of those lives as experienced ‘from within’ and not merely as observed ‘from without’. For it is a continuing thread of memory ‘from within’ that is necessary to make the concept of rebirth morally significant.
We see here once again the crucial role of memory in any version of
the reincarnation doctrine that is to be factually true or false and subject
to the possibility of confirming or disconfirming evidence. But there is
also in Buddhist literature the basis for a quite different use of the
rebirth idea, at which we should now look, as a mythological expression
of certain moral and spiritual realities.
Now none of these similes restricts the operation of karma to a linear model, like the dots in a dotted line, in which a given ‘bundle’ of karma is transmitted from A to B (and only B), and then from B to C (and only C), and so on. For a flame can kindle many flames; a teacher can teach the same verse to many pupils; and a mango tree can produce many fruits. And so we must consider the possibility that, in the absence of threads of memory linking successions of lives, karma - that is to say, the effects of actions - should be thought of as more life the waves expanding from a stone thrown into a pond than to a linear succession like that of the kings and queens of England.
At this point however we must distinguish again between inner or character, and outer or situational, karma. Inner karma must by definition remain with the individual whose karma it is, since it is another name for his basic character. If after bodily death his life continues with actual or latent memory in other spheres, then his basic character or inner karma will of course continue as an aspect of him. If on the other hand he perishes totally at death then his character perished also. It is however possible to suppose an intermediate case in which the system of his character dispositions, without even latent memory, persists and ‘enters’ into a fresh embryo. Unlike the Buddhist and Hindu claims so far examined, this would involve no possibility of verification in the memory of the arhat or the jivanmukta. It would thus be a purely metaphysical theory - metaphysical in the pejorative sense that its truth or falsity makes no actual or possible experimental difference. When we omit the factor of an actual or latent memory accompanying the lives which are said to be linked in karmic series, we have nothing left which there could be any reason to assert or which could be of any practical interest to anyone. It is only when we add memory - even if this should only become conscious at the end of the series of lives - that we have either the Buddhist, the Hindu, or the popular conception of reincarnation or rebirth. I shall therefore not pursue further this systematically unverifiable and unfalsifiable conception of packages of ‘inner’ karma transmigrating without any accompanying consciousness or memory. Our conclusion so far, then, is that the inner karma constituting an individual’s basic character either ceases to exist at death (apart, perhaps, from the kind of mental ‘husk’ referred to above) or continues as the character of that same individual if he lives beyond the grave.
On the other hand, external or circumstantial karma, so far as we can observe it, neither perishes with the individual nor accompanies him into realms beyond this world. It operates within this world, and it usually affects other people at least as much as it affects the agent. For our environment is all the time being changed for better and worse by the actions of others, as we in turn are all the time contributing to the environment in which others live. We have here the notion of collective karma operating both within the history of humanity as a whole and within the various sub-groups which form relatively bounded fields of action - racial, national, cultural and linguistic; and families, classes, castes, etc. Within all these context of life we are all the time shaping both the environment which we share with others and also that in which later generations will have to dwell.
Thus we all exist within the common karmic history of humanity, inheriting a world which others have fashioned and fashioning a world in which others must live. Today this common karma of humanity has become more evident than ever before as a field of moral responsibility. This is true both as regards the manifest interdependence of nations and as regards the effects of present policies and life-styles upon the future human environment. The former regional histories have merged in the present century to form a single world history within which events anywhere are liable to have repercussions elsewhere. The earth has become to a great extent a communicational and economic unity in which national decision makers have a responsibility for the effects of their actions far beyond the borders of their own country. We have all become conscious in recent years, for example, of the effects upon millions of lives of the American ‘dominoes theory’ in Asia, of European Economic Community policies in relation to developing countries, and of the influence of the oil-producing states upon at least half the world. We have likewise become aware in recent years of the grossly prodigal ways in which we in the west are consuming the earth’s limited resources of metals and fuels. And what we are becoming aware of in all these ways is the pressure of world karma.
If, then, reincarnation is not a literal truth, and we do not return in person to bear in later earthly lives the consequences of our present actions, does not the idea nevertheless express mythically the fact that someone will have to bear those consequences? And if, following the Buddha (and also the Christ), we transcend the interests of the ‘beloved ego’, we shall be as concerned for others who must suffer the consequences of our present mistakes as if we were to suffer them ourselves; and we shall be as eager to bring about good consequences for others as for ourselves. The moral meaning of karma is the claim upon us of this non-self-regarding outlooks. If the reincarnation doctrine is a religious or ethical myth this, surely, is its positive significance.
Whether, as J.G. Jennings argues, the Buddha himself in effect demythologized the idea of reincarnation and taught the moral reality of collective karma, I do not profess to know. Jennings says,