Can a Previous Life Explain the Conditions of Birth?
I previously uploaded several videos arguing that rebirth does not exist. A viewer raised an important question. Some people are born to good parents in comfortable circumstances, while others enter extremely deprived conditions. If there is no rebirth, how can we explain this difference? In familiar Korean language, the question becomes: “What did I do wrong in a former life to be born with this fate?”
That sentence combines two different traditions. Rebirth came from Indian thought and entered Buddhism through cultural mixture, while fate calculated from the year, month, day, and hour of birth belongs to the Confucian cultural sphere and its yin-yang and five-phase cosmology. Buddhism often mixed with local customs and religions so that people could understand its teaching. In that process, ideas unlike the Buddha’s teaching acquired a Buddhist name. “My fate from a previous life” fuses two forms of determinism: one based on former deeds and one based on the hour of birth.
Rebirth Cannot Be Proven, but It Can Be Questioned
I do not claim that I can experimentally prove the nonexistence of rebirth. Those who affirm it cannot prove it either. We cannot presently verify what is reborn after death or how. We therefore should not submit to authority on either side. We should ask whether an explanation accords with dependent arising, impermanence, and not-self, and whether it explains observable nature and human life.
The Buddha remained silent about questions such as whether the cosmos is eternal and whether a self survives death because they do not directly resolve present suffering or tell us how to live. A person struck by a poisoned arrow would die if he insisted on learning who made it and from which direction it came before removing it. The arrow must first be removed and the wound treated. The Buddha’s teaching is practical in this sense: it looks first at present pain and life, not an unverifiable afterlife.
Gods and Rebirth Returned after the Buddha
After the Buddha died, Indian beliefs in rebirth, gods, spells, prayer, and mystical power were absorbed into Buddhism. Familiar ideas may initially have served as expedient means for explaining his words, but over time the means hardened into the teaching itself. By deifying the Buddha and worshipping relics and supernatural powers, Buddhism returned to the kind of religion from which his insight had broken free.
Measured against impermanence, not-self, and dependent arising, however, an eternally unchanging soul, judge, or afterlife cannot stand. If everything arises through causes and conditions, affects other things, and changes, a god cannot be exempt. A religion founded on an immutable absolute is shaken by the simple statement that even gods are impermanent. The Buddha’s astonishing achievement 2,500 years ago was this movement beyond religion.
Why Impermanence and Dependent Arising Are Scientific
Even a rock that appears solid and unchanging is eroded by wind and rain. The sun, earth, living beings, and matter cannot remain eternally fixed because they affect one another. The world is not a collection of isolated substances but a process continually transformed through relationship. Viewed through dependent arising, countless superstitions and eternal entities fabricated by human imagination collapse.
This is why I call modern science a direct disciple of the Buddha. Science observes, proposes hypotheses, tests them, and revises the range of older explanations when discoveries appear. It does not stamp “I am supreme” or “This is eternal truth” on a theory. It uses the best present explanation while leaving open the possibility of error. That attitude corresponds to the Buddha’s refusal to declare one’s own view supreme.
The Fourth Warning Missing from Greed, Anger, and Ignorance
I understand an early teaching as warning against greed, anger, ignorance, and the claim that one’s view is supreme. Korean Buddhism preserved the first three in the compressed formula of the three poisons, but the fourth warning is difficult to find. Why was it dropped? If retained, it becomes difficult to proclaim, “Our Dharma is supreme” or “Every word of the Buddha and every scripture is unconditionally correct.”
Once that thorn was removed, unscientific habits spread: the Buddha was deified and scripture made infallible. When not-self conflicts with rebirth, teachers merely change their description of what is reborn. Because Pali texts contain many former-life stories, rebirth is declared indispensable. Well-known monks and Buddhist doctors affirm it, and some monks even say that denying it makes one non-Buddhist. Yet scriptures must be read by distinguishing literal claims from expedient speech addressed to people of a particular time.
What Buddhism Must Do in a Post-Religious Age
Modern people leave religion because eyes trained by science no longer accept gods, spells, miracles, souls, and rebirth as facts. Ancient people might have believed that Thor literally threw and retrieved his hammer; today we watch him as a film superhero. We no longer treat beings from myth and fiction as empirical reality.
Buddhism contradicts itself when it clings to rebirth and mysticism while teaching impermanence, not-self, and dependent arising. How can anyone see the world, life, and death as they are while wearing a veil of superstition? I therefore say emphatically that rebirth does not exist even while acknowledging that its nonexistence cannot be conclusively proved. In an environment filled almost entirely with affirmations of rebirth, the contrary voice makes people think again.
Science offers a powerful way to see the external world, but it does not sufficiently address how to handle my mind and live my life. The Buddha applied the same observational attitude to world and self. If Buddhism discards superstition and recovers that scientific attitude, it can supply the self-observation and practical question of life that science often leaves aside.
How the Dinosaur-Extinction Hypothesis Was Tested
To explain the conditions of birth through dependent arising rather than former karma, consider the apparently unrelated story of dinosaurs. Before the 1980s, the cause of their extinction was unclear. Researchers noticed an abnormally high concentration of iridium—a substance rare at Earth’s surface but relatively common in asteroids—in geological layers about 66 million years old. They proposed that a massive impact caused the extinction.
The hypothesis was initially mocked because no sufficiently large crater had been found. Satellite observation later revealed a vast circular structure spanning the northern coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Drilling and geological research confirmed the Chicxulub crater. The hypothesis did not become accepted through authority. Evidence was sought, research accumulated, and an explanation gradually became the prevailing account. Science advances by placing the unknown in a testable hypothesis and revising knowledge.
An Enormous Chain of Conditions That Looks like Chance
An asteroid roughly ten to fifteen kilometers in diameter struck Earth at about twenty kilometers per second, many times the speed of sound. Heat, shock waves, and tsunamis followed, while dust containing pulverized rock and sulfur filled the atmosphere. The surface first became infernally hot and then rapidly cooled when sunlight was blocked. Photosynthesis by plants and phytoplankton stopped, and food chains collapsed. About seventy-five percent of species vanished, although some small, light birds and small mammals living in concealment survived.
With giant dinosaurs gone, ecological space opened for mammals, and humans appeared much later. Had the asteroid arrived earlier or later, or struck a different site—especially deep ocean—the amount of sulfur and dust might have differed and mass extinction might not have occurred. Humanity might never have emerged. Our existence rests not on anyone’s former-life karma but on an enormous causal network of celestial orbits, gravity, the geology of the impact site, climate, ecosystems, and evolution.
For What Karma Were the Dinosaurs Destroyed?
If birth conditions are explained by karmic rebirth, the same logic must be applied to the age of dinosaurs. Into what did they reincarnate? Before humans existed, whose perspective supplied the six realms of humans, heavens, hells, and animals? Can a cosmology arranging humanly imagined gods and humanly known animals simply be projected backward onto a prehuman Earth?
The asteroid did not fall to punish dinosaurs for evil conduct. Celestial bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter were affected by gravity and other conditions; one left its orbit and met Earth. There were causes and effects, but no moral judgment. Dependent arising does not mean that things occur without reason. It means that results arise through countless interacting causes and conditions, which must not be converted into a cosmic system of reward and punishment for individuals.
A Dandelion Seed Has No Former-Life Guilt
Now reduce this cosmic story to a nearby dandelion. When its flower has passed and seeds disperse, one lands in fertile soil while another falls on concrete and is trampled. Another reaches a tiny pocket of soil in a stairway crack and struggles to bloom. The seed in rich earth did not perform good deeds in a former life, and the seed in barren ground committed no sin.
Wind strength and direction, the instant of release, surrounding buildings and terrain, soil, rain, and sunlight interact. Where each seed lands is a result of causality and dependent arising, but not a moral result of good receiving good and evil receiving evil. The asteroid crossing space and the dandelion seed riding the wind differ in scale, not in their dependence on conditions.
Birth Conditions Are Neither Punishment nor Reward
A person born into wealth or poverty, health or illness, safety or violence also appears within innumerable relations and conditions. Parents and ancestors, society and economy, war and institutions, nature, and contingent encounters are entangled. A newborn has not been rewarded for former goodness or punished for former wrongdoing. Karmic explanations of deprivation add blame to those already suffering.
Buddhism does not require belief in rebirth, calculated fate, or destiny. It helps us shed such coverings and see the world as it is. The question “Why was I born with this fate?” should become “What causes and conditions made this life, and what can I do and change within them?” Instead of blaming an unverifiable past life, observing present conditions and changing accessible causes is how we remove the poisoned arrow first.
How Shall We Live Now in a World without Rebirth?
Our existence is the outcome of relations as difficult to enumerate as dinosaur extinction and the flight of dandelion seeds. It is neither divine judgment nor predetermined fate. Life is therefore not time served as punishment for a former life. It is time in which we see present conditions clearly and create new relationships. There is no reason to interpret one’s birth as guilt or to dismiss another person’s poverty and suffering as karma.
Science gives us methods for observing nature, while Buddhism rightly seen turns that eye toward self and life. Who am I, how should I live, what conditions produce present suffering, and what can be changed? Shedding the superstition of rebirth and fate, seeing the dependently arisen world as it is, and choosing how to live within it—this is the path the Buddha opened 2,500 years ago.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.