“If there is no rebirth, why should we keep the precepts and practice?” This is one of the questions I have heard most often since I began saying that rebirth does not exist. The same question arose in a conversation between Venerable Hyangbong and Venerable Heojeong on Yadanbeopseok TV. If one person kills ten people while another lives virtuously, keeps the precepts, and practices throughout life, do both simply come to an end at death without receiving consequences appropriate to their actions? If so, why keep the precepts or practice at all?
I will answer by examining four points in order. First, I will ask what assumption is hidden inside the question. Second, I will consider whether cause and effect are truly the same as retribution. Then I will ask again what a precept is and what practice is. To state my conclusion first, neither precepts nor practice are transactions for rewards after death. Precepts are agreements we make in order to live together, and practice is the work of turning back to examine the delusions in which I am living now.
Turning the Question “Why Practice Without Rebirth?” Around
Turn the question around just slightly and its underlying meaning appears. “If there is no rebirth, why keep the precepts and practice?” means, “I keep the precepts and practice because rebirth exists.” Beneath it lies the idea of retribution: a person who does wrong must receive a bad consequence, while a person who does good must receive a good consequence.
But who is the subject that receives this reward? If I kept the precepts and performed good deeds throughout my life, I must be the one who receives the reward. If an entirely different person receives it, the question makes no sense. Whether one goes to heaven or hell or is born again in another life, the being who receives the price of present actions must remain the same “I.”
The question of why one should keep the precepts without rebirth rests on the premise that an “I” continuing after death must receive the reward for my actions.
Even people who verbally speak of rebirth without a self believe in rebirth with a self at this point. Calling the continuing entity consciousness or karmic consciousness instead of “I” changes nothing. If it preserves past deeds, goes into a next life, and receives their exact rewards, it is effectively an unchanging subject. If, on the contrary, it is impermanent and can change, disperse, and disappear, no one can guarantee that it will receive the result of what I did.
The Subject of Retribution and No-Self, Impermanence, and Dependent Arising
Buddhism says that nothing is permanent. I am not permanent, the world is not permanent, and everything gathers and disperses, arises and disappears, while giving and receiving influence. No-self means that there is no eternal, independent, and immutable entity that can be called “I.” Impermanence means that everything continues to change, and dependent arising means that things arise through causes, conditions, and relationships. These are not isolated doctrines but different aspects of the same reality.
What remains if we bind a self in a former life and the self in this life into one consistent subject and say that my present awakening is the reward for practice in a former life? If numerous stories of former lives connect a past being and the present Buddha as one continuing “I,” that subject effectively abides permanently. It may be called no-self, but its structure is no different from a soul.
The belief that I must receive after death what I did in this life is difficult to reconcile with no-self, impermanence, and dependent arising, because it requires an unchanging subject of retribution.
Even if we assume that something exists after death, from a Buddhist standpoint it too must be impermanent. It must be affected by other conditions, change, and be capable of dispersing at any moment. Who can guarantee that it will not disappear before entering another body? If “that something” continues eternally, it is permanent. If it can disappear, it cannot be the subject guaranteed to receive my karmic result. This is why I call the question itself non-Buddhist.
Cause and Effect Negates Retribution
People use “cause-and-effect retribution” as if it were one word and regard it as a central Buddhist teaching. Cause and effect, however, concerns relations between causes and results, while dependent arising means that countless causes and conditions influence one another. Retribution, by contrast, is a one-to-one calculation in which my act returns to me as a matching reward or punishment. They do not have the same structure.
Suppose I give a loaf of bread to someone who is hungry. That person may feel grateful and later return far greater help. But the person may also see me as an easy target and keep exploiting me because I appeared kind. One good deed does not return precisely as one good deed. A person’s character and circumstances, surrounding people, social conditions, and accidental events all enter between an act and its outcome.
Retribution is a one-to-one straight line, whereas causation in dependent arising is a many-to-many network. Cause and effect therefore does not guarantee retribution; it dismantles that simple calculation.
Even the saying that sowing red beans yields red beans must not erase conditions. Depending on the soil, nutrients, water, and weather, the seed may never sprout, or it may flourish and cover the field. A cause acts upon a result, but no single cause monopolizes a single result. This is how causation works in the actual world.
How Should We Understand Suffering Without Personal Wrongdoing?
I may have done nothing wrong, yet I can be harmed if Mount Baekdu erupts. When Little Boy fell on Hiroshima, did all those who died receive retribution corresponding to their personal evil deeds? No. War and state decisions, technology and history, and even the accident of being in that place became entangled as innumerable conditions that overwhelmed individual lives.
When Russia and Ukraine wage war, the price of flour rises far away. When tensions between Iran and Israel increase, oil prices and inflation move and affect me as well. Nor does hitting another person’s cheek guarantee that the person will hit mine. The other person may ask what hardship I am facing and offer to help, or may vent the anger on someone else. An outcome is not made by only me and the other person.
Wanting the world to work in a certain way is different from claiming that it actually works that way.
It is humanly understandable to hope that an evil person will be punished after death and that an independence activist will go to a good place. Such thoughts may provide comfort. But our wish does not turn postmortem retribution into fact. If we entrust injustice in this world to judgment after death, we may neglect what the living must do now.
Belief in Retribution Can Erase Compassion and Justice
If everyone is precisely receiving karmic retribution in their present condition, there is no reason to help poor people or free slaves. One could simply say that people under bombardment and impoverished descendants of independence activists are receiving results from past karma. This logic transfers responsibility for suffering onto those who suffer instead of helping them.
But the world does not work that way, which is why we correct unjust realities. If proper gratitude did not reach the descendants of independence activists, we who are alive must build institutions and provide it. If we believe Chun Doo-hwan died without receiving serious punishment, we who are alive must record his deeds in history and call him a murderer. Justice in reality is not administered on our behalf by cosmic retribution. We must make it.
Calculating that a good result must return to me because I did good is not compassion. Only when we see the world through dependent arising do we find a reason to change the suffering of others together.
If I behave well because I expect my good deed to return to me, the act resembles a transaction. Genuine compassion does not arise from a certificate guaranteeing reward. It arises when we see that self and others are interconnected and that anyone can suffer because of conditions they did not create.
Precepts Are Agreements Humanity Made in Order to Live Together
What, then, is a precept? I understand precepts as universal agreements that human societies have developed in order to live together. Teachings similar to the five Buddhist precepts appear in Jainism, and comparable provisions can be found in the Code of Hammurabi, the Code of Ur-Nammu, and the Ten Commandments, all outside or earlier than Buddhism. This shows that precepts did not arise solely through a transcendent revelation unique to one religion; they accumulated as humans formed societies.
We cannot easily live together if we kill one another, and society cannot endure if words and promises cannot be trusted. Once concepts of property arose, people needed an agreement not to steal what belonged to others. Buddhist renunciant communities also had to live within society, and members of the Sangha needed rules among themselves. Precepts and disciplinary rules developed in that way.
A precept is not an absolute command that the Buddha carved into the universe. It is an agreement made within relationships so that people can live together.
Agreements change with conditions. We can reconsider whether every rule of the Sangha from 2,600 years ago must apply unchanged in the twenty-first century. Questions such as whether monastics may marry can also be judged anew and changed by the community. This does not mean treating precepts lightly. It means thinking more deeply about why a precept was needed and what result it produces under present conditions.
Can Killing Alone Determine Good and Evil?
Can the bare fact that someone killed twenty people determine the entire moral context of the act? A psychopath may have murdered innocent people, but someone else may have killed armed attackers while trying to save others. Yi Sun-sin drowned thousands of invading Japanese naval forces while defending Joseon. If we look only at the category of killing, was he evil? Must he therefore go to hell or be born as an animal?
If killing itself is absolutely evil under every condition, life cannot continue. Fish eat smaller fish, and lions cannot digest grass and must eat other animals. Humanity also survived through hunting and gathering, and in an ice age it would have been difficult to live on plants alone. If we imagine tracing every being backward through rebirth while claiming that any creature that killed must be born only in a worse form, no one could ever have evolved into a human being.
Absolute good and evil do not adhere to the name of an act alone. To practice Buddhism is to judge each time by examining conditions, relationships, and results.
In a situation such as the trolley problem, where one person may have to be sacrificed to save many, there is no automatic absolute answer ready for use. A single rule from peaceful daily life cannot replace the judgments that Venerable Samyeong or Yi Sun-sin made in war. We must continue to discuss and judge which agreements to keep, which rules to change, and what is more right under present conditions.
Practice Is Not an Investment in Reward After Death
Finally, let us ask what practice is. In Buddhism, we practice in order to become a Buddha. Becoming a Buddha does not mean accumulating enough merit to acquire a good body in the next life. It means discovering why I am not a Buddha now: because I am caught in delusion, fail to see the world as it is, and live by mistaken judgments.
Practice is turning back to examine my actions, words, and mind. It is asking whether what I believed I knew is really correct, recognizing what delusion confines me, and breaking out of it. The time we spend today reconsidering precepts, rebirth, and retribution can itself be practice. But if you merely believe my words as a new doctrine, you become trapped in another delusion.
Buddhist practice is not accumulating karmic results that will return to me. It is turning back to examine myself and escaping the delusions in which I am caught.
We must not believe something merely because it appears in a book or is transmitted as the Buddha’s word. Books are written by human beings, and words in a book do not automatically become historical fact or truth. We must ask why Buddhism is filled with stories of former lives, rebirth, and retribution, and whether they are truly consistent with dependent arising, impermanence, and no-self. You may question me as well. What matters is not stopping the questions.
The Real Reason to Keep Precepts and Practice
We cannot completely avoid killing. One antibiotic kills countless bacteria in the body. Washing one’s hair or taking a step also destroys innumerable living things. Nor are we completely unrelated to deaths involved in the food we eat and the social processes that produce it merely because we did not hold the knife ourselves. We therefore cannot easily declare, “I have kept the precept perfectly.”
Keeping precepts, practicing, and doing Buddhism all require deep thought. We must leave open the possibility that what I know is not everything and that what I call right may itself be delusion. A person may study for ten or twenty years without progress not merely from lack of knowledge but because the conditions never arose to look back upon one’s own delusions.
We do not keep precepts because rebirth exists. We establish precepts to improve the relationships in which we live together, and we practice in order to notice that we may be seeing those relationships wrongly.
When we hear something we had never heard before, we must ask, “Could that really be so?” and think deeply in light of our own lives. The possibility of awakening opens at that point. Precepts are not a list of conditions for reward after death, and practice is not savings for a next life. Both are practical Buddhist processes for seeing relationships clearly here and now, correcting mistaken judgments, and escaping our own delusions.
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