0 : Introduction

Each time you choose one course of action over another, you’re making a wager as to the consequences of your choice. This is especially true if the choice is between something easy that promises pleasant short-term rewards, and something hard that promises great rewards but only after a long time. Will the harder choice be worth the effort? Will the easier one be irresponsible in the long run? As a person embedded in time, there’s no way you can know for sure.

To begin with, there are the particulars of your own personal future: Will you or those you love live long enough to experience the results of your choices? Will disaster interfere to wipe out everything you’ve done?

Then there are the larger uncertainties of life in general: Do we even have choices in our actions, or are all our choices predetermined by some past or outside power beyond our control? If we do have choices, is it worthwhile to struggle over difficult ones? Do they really matter? And even if our choices do matter, how far into the future should we calculate the consequences? Do they shape only this life, or can they shape lives after death?

Arguments based on logic or reason have never been able to settle these issues conclusively, the world’s great religions don’t agree on their answers, and the empirical sciences have no way of answering these questions at all. Yet we all keep having to grapple with these questions. We don’t leave it at, “I don’t know,” to and refuse to entertain them, for even the refusal to think about these things is a wager: that ultimately they won’t matter.

The Buddha taught, however, that they do matter a great deal, and that awakening—in going beyond the dimensions of space and time—gives perspective on how choices operate within those dimensions. You see that choices are real, that they do make a difference, and that the consequences of your choices can shape not only this life but also many lifetimes in the future—as long as the mind still has the craving that leads to rebirth after death. Prior to awakening, you can’t know these things for sure, but as the Buddha states, if you want to gain awakening and to minimize suffering in the meantime, it’s wisest to assume these principles as working hypotheses.

Of course, that’s taking the Buddha at his word—which as long as you haven’t gained awakening, is a wager, too. The purpose of this small book on the Buddha’s teachings about rebirth is to show why, as you engage repeatedly in the wagers of action, the wisest course is to place your bets with him.