4 : The Noble Truth of Rebirth

To move his listeners from mundane right view to transcendent right view, the Buddha used the teaching on rebirth to inspire not only a sense of heedfulness in his listeners, but also a sense of saṁvega: dismay and terror at the prospect of not gaining release from rebirth.

The relationship between heedfulness and saṁvega parallels the relationship between the second knowledge of the night of the Buddha’s awakening and the third. Seeing the way in which rebirth depends on one’s views and actions, he saw the need for heedfulness in one’s thoughts, words, and deeds. Seeing the precarious complexity and pointlessness of the whole process of repeated death and rebirth, he developed the sense of saṁvega that inspired him to look for a way out.

The way he chose—and that gave results—was to take the lessons about rebirth obtained in his first two knowledges, and to apply them to the actions of the mind in the present moment and to their effects both in the present and over time. In doing so, he arrived at the four noble truths as the form of right view that would lead to total release and the end of rebirth.

The connection between rebirth and the first noble truth is reflected in the fact that this truth lists birth as one of the forms of suffering that the fourth noble truth brings to an end. In fact, birth stands at the beginning of the list:

The connection between rebirth and the second noble truth is reflected in the fact that this truth defines the cause of suffering as any form of craving or clinging that leads to “further becoming,” which is the condition for further birth:

Writers who reject the idea that the Buddha is talking about the rebirth of a person in these two noble truths tend to argue in one of two ways: Either that the references to birth don’t imply rebirth; or that they refer to rebirth on the micro level of momentary mind-states, and not on the macro level of beings or persons over time. Neither interpretation, however, does full justice to what the Buddha had to say.

Writers in the first group have made much of the fact that the Buddha used the word “birth” rather than “rebirth” in the first noble truth, concluding that rebirth is not necessarily meant here. This conclusion, though, ignores the relationship of the first truth to the others. All the forms of suffering listed in the first truth are caused by the second truth, and brought to an end by the fourth. If birth were a one-shot affair, there would be—for a person already born—no point in looking for the causes of the suffering of birth, and no way that the fourth truth could put an end to them.

This point is especially clear when we look at the Buddha’s own account of how he explored the causes of suffering after having seen, in his first two knowledges, the sufferings caused by repeated birth. He looked into the possible causes of birth and traced them deep into the mind:

Had the Buddha assumed that birth were a one-time affair, he wouldn’t have explored its causes through becoming, clinging, and on down to name-&-form. He would have stopped his analysis of the causes of suffering at the realization: ‘Aging & death exist when birth exists. From birth as a requisite condition comes aging & death.’ He thus would have limited his analysis of the origination of suffering to what happens after birth. Only because he saw that birth was a repeated process did he probe into the causes of birth and trace them through the factors that he later taught in his description of dependent co-arising.

In other words, if the Buddha hadn’t assumed rebirth, he never would have discovered or taught the central tenets of his teaching: the four noble truths and dependent co-arising. His analysis of suffering and its causes would have been much more limited in scope. And as we will see, the Buddha discovered that the processes leading to suffering are self-sustaining, meaning that unless they are deliberately starved they will continue repeating indefinitely. In this way, not only birth, but also every factor in dependent co-arising is prefixed with an implicit “re-”, from re-ignorance to re-death.

As for the argument that the “birth” mentioned in the first noble truth could be a repeated process, but only on the micro scale of the momentary arising of mental states: The fact that the Buddha discovered the four noble truths and the factors of dependent co-arising by examining mental events in the present moment would seem to lend credence to this interpretation. But it ignores two important points.

The first is that when the Buddha himself explained birth, aging, and death in the context of these teachings, he did so with reference to birth on the macro scale—i.e., the birth, aging, and death of a person:

The second point is that to insist on limiting the four noble truths and the factors of dependent co-arising to one scale or the other is to miss a crucial feature of these teachings. Remember that the Buddha’s third knowledge came from applying to the micro level lessons learned on the macro level in the first two knowledges. The lesson he learned as a result is that the level of scale is a relative affair: The process is the constant. To compare this to modern physics, it was like Einstein’s proposal that the dimensions of space and time are not constants; the constant is the speed of light.

The fact that the Buddha gained release by discovering a process that held constant across many levels of scale was reflected in the way he taught, often switching scales in the course of his discussions and refusing to be pinned down to one scale or another. Sometimes he talked about “beings” in the standard sense of the word, and sometimes as attachments (SN 23:2), i.e., as processes on the mental level. And in particular with dependent co-arising: The teaching is always presented as a process without a fixed reference to where—on the level of scale in the world or in the individual—the factors of the process are playing out.

In this way it’s like a photograph of erosion patterns. Without an extraneous object such as a tree or an insect to indicate scale, it’s difficult to know whether the range of the photograph covers two miles or two inches, whether the erosion runs through a vast plateau or a small patch of sand by the side of a road, and whether the eroded bits in the photograph are boulders or grains of sand. Either way, the photograph can be studied to understand the complex causal patterns underlying erosion; and—more to the point—we can learn more about the processes of erosion by studying it on multiple levels than by limiting ourselves to just one.

In the same way, it’s a mistake to limit the Buddha’s teachings on birth/rebirth to just one level of scale. To limit them just to the micro level is to underestimate the potential for mental events in the present to create long-term suffering, and the radical nature of the cure needed to put an end to that suffering. To limit his teachings just to the macro level makes it impossible to observe directly in the present how birth and its attendant sufferings come about and can be brought to an end. To get the most out of these teachings, it’s best to drop any insistence, in line with one’s metaphysical assumptions, that they apply to one level and not another. Instead, it’s better to look at the processes as processes—true across many scales—and use this way of framing the issue as part of the strategy to put an end to suffering.