play at least some role, and we would assume that scientific investigation is
the best way to gather and assess it. But here we encounter an unsurprising
division between pious Hindus and Buddhists who write books gathering
what seems to them the incontrovertible evidence for reincarnation, and
Western scientists who, seeing no evidence whatsoever, don’t even raise the
question. This is to say that, constrained by a variety of traditional and
modern doctrines, this question hasn’t been asked in a serious way, both
out of deference to religious belief and because the question itself eludes
conclusive response because what it pursues is by definition beyond the
world in which we live, that is, fully metaphysical. That leaves most of
us in the position of needing to sort out the possibilities ourselves, but in
the meantime the most honest and therefore spiritually and intellectually
compelling response is to admit that we simply don’t know what happens
to us after we die. Better, it would seem, to allow the mystery and gravity
of human mortality to press upon us, and to stimulate our asking the kinds
of questions that reflect our deepest human concerns, rather than to leap in
one direction or the other on the question of afterlife.
The second point, however, is the difficulty that Buddhists have had historically
in getting a doctrine of rebirth to cohere with their other central
values. Those of us who have read through Abhidharma literature are familiar
with the contortions that Buddhist intellectuals went through in the
process of explaining what rebirth might mean in view of the Buddhist claim
that there is no permanent or substantial self because all things are both
impermanent and dependent on other impermanent conditions. Wherever
in Buddhist thought rebirth is given a strong and substantial role, no self
and other dimensions of the teachings are reduced in significance. Wherever
the teaching of no self and related doctrinal elements are given strong and
consistent application, very little is left that rebirth could mean. Philosophers
in the future will continue to raise questions about the tension between
these two early and important dimensions in Buddhist thought, and to examine
what possibilities for thought were left unexplored in the Buddhist
tradition due to logical difficulties on this one issue. For some, it has already
been tempting to suspect that the idea of rebirth in Buddhism is an intellectual
relapse, a place within the teachings where practitioners were simply
unable or unwilling to consider the radical consequences of their teachings,
and where they may have fallen prey to the dangers of grasping for the
immortal self, or for the kinds of permanence and security that Buddhist
psychology warned against so perceptively. These two areas, I suspect, will
be the places where the debate about rebirth and its role in the workings
of karma will tend to focus. But we’ll see; these are questions that require