What?! Richard Gere says Buddhists believe in reincarnation and so does that guy from the Beastie Boys not to mention nearly everyone else. “Of course Buddhists believe in reincarnation, you old goat! Millions of people all over the world who call themselves Buddhists believe very strongly in reincarnation.” I didn’t actually say this. I just sort of sat there with black smoke coming out of my ears. I did that a lot in those days.
We’re all scared of dying and we all want some kind of assurance that we’re going to live forever. Having a kindly old man in black robes tell you you’re going to be reborn after you die is pretty comforting. Plenty of old men in robes have made a good living that way. Nishijima’s stock answer assures that at least half of the participants at his retreats go home extremely unhappy. “There is no life after death,” he always says. “When you die, you never come back to life again.”
When Nishijima says Buddhism doesn’t accept reincarnation, arguments usually follow. But I’ve never once seen the old man back down.
It seems that for a lot of people today, Buddhism is the belief in reincarnation. There must be a hundred books at your local New Age book shop that give detailed explanations of how we move from life to life. Most of them cite the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book accepted by many as a Buddhist scripture. You can find references to the idea of rebirth in pretty much any Buddhist sutra you choose to look at. Even Dogen’s Shobogenzo is packed full of stories of people dying here and being reborn somewhere else, or even as something else—a fox, for instance. Clearly, then, Nishijima must be wrong. Buddhists do believe in reincarnation.
Whenever anyone—and it has frequently been me—points this out to Nishijima, particularly in connection with his beloved Dogen, he will say that these stories are just based on old Indian mythology. They’re in there to add a little color to the piece. We were never meant to actually believe these people really, literally did die and get reborn somewhere else later. He likes to cite a chapter called “The Wholehearted Way” in the Shobogenzo, in which Dogen says the following about reincarnation:
According to that non-Buddhist view, there is one spiritual intelligence existing within our body. When this body dies, however, the spirit casts off the skin and is reborn. If we learn this view as the Buddha’s Dharma we are even more foolish than the person who grasps a tile or pebble thinking it to be a golden treasure.
The standard thing for me to do right here would be to to explain to you all of the ways in which the Buddhist idea of rebirth is completely different from the older Brahmanistic notion of transmigration. According to that theory of transmigration, there is a soul, an atman, that lives inside our bodies like a person renting an apartment. When the landlord, God, kicks the person out for making too much noise or not paying rent on time, the person moves to another building. We do not know if the soul gets its security deposit back, but I’m guessing that God pockets it and claims it was spent on cleaning and repairs. The Buddhist idea of rebirth, it is said, is a much more subtle view. There is no soul as such, the standard line goes on to say, but the conditions that created the body and mind you have now will continue after your death and manifest themselves as another form, perhaps another kind of sentient being, usually a human, in the future.
This idea ends up sounding like, “You do reincarnate, but you just don’t have a soul.” For years and years that’s exactly how I took it. After reading Philip Kapleau’s The Zen of Living and Dying in which he gives a very thorough and detailed explanation of why the Buddhist idea of rebirth is different from the usual idea of reincarnation I figured I had the whole thing down pat. Though Kapleau’s ideas are well presented and logical, I think the best answer to the question of what Zen people think about reincarnation goes like this:
A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, “Is there life after death? The Zen Master says, “How should I know?” The guys replies indignantly, “Because you’re a Zen master!” “Yes,” says the Zen master, “but not a dead one.”
~~Hardcore Zen -by- Brad Warner
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