Questions around rebirth—from how it works to whether it’s even real—have energized and divided Buddhists for millennia. In this excerpt from his book "Rebirth," Roger R. Jackson unpacks the complexity of it all and offers four basic approaches to incorporating it (or not) into our own practice.
  • gandalf_der_12te
    1·
    4 months ago

    How Do We Make Sense of Rebirth?

    I’m not sure whether that is a serious question because it’s a rather obvious one.

    It is a well-known fact that humans sleep throughout the night and bears hibernate through the winter. What’s also well-known is that insects often die in fall and are born in the spring.

    Basically, death is just a deeper version of sleep. If you can wake up from deep hibernation and still be the same person than you were before you fell asleep, then why wouldn’t the same be true for insects which don’t fly around during the winter?