Karmic Rebirth Is a Lie
Many Buddhists live as though karmic rebirth were a fact. They believe that living well leads to a favorable rebirth, while wrongdoing sends a person to hell or into an inferior form of life. I want to reverse that claim in the clearest possible terms: karmic rebirth is a lie. The story that a person goes to heaven or hell after death, or is reborn in a heavenly realm or falls into hell, is not confined to Christianity. Almost the same structure exists in Buddhism today.
Buddhism and Christianity may look like religions separated by a vast distance, but the civilizations in which they formed were not as isolated as we imagine. By around the fifth century BCE, Persia had created an enormous imperial and commercial network stretching from Egypt and parts of Greece to northwestern India. There is no need to invent a novel in which Jesus traveled to India to learn Buddhism. Long before then, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Indian ideas and cultures already influenced one another through trade and government. The similar structures of heaven and hell, the end of the world, and judgment according to good and evil can also be understood within that civilizational network.
Christian heaven and hell and Buddhist karmic rebirth are the same kind of imagination: both expand standards of good and evil created by human beings into a cosmic system of judgment.
Precepts and Laws Are Agreements Made by Human Society
What separates heaven from hell? Good and evil. Buddhism has the Five Precepts, and Christianity has the Ten Commandments. Do not kill, do not lie, do not steal, and do not commit sexual misconduct: the items resemble one another strikingly. Yet there is no reason to explain that resemblance through supernatural revelation. Codes far older than Buddhism and Christianity, such as the Code of Hammurabi and the Code of Ur-Nammu, already contained similar rules for sustaining society. Human beings decided what people living together could and could not do, then gave those rules different names: law, precept, dharma, morality, good, and evil.
The problem begins when people refuse to admit that human beings made these rules. To make their commands more powerful, they attribute them to a god or transcendent being. Once an empire is built by force, law and religion are used to govern its people. When the indoctrination—“A being greater than us made this law, so you must obey it”—succeeds, the rules of one society and one era harden into what appears to be eternal truth.
Buddhism should examine precisely those conditions and acts of construction. A law made by human beings for a purpose is a conditioned phenomenon. It arises and changes according to time, place, and social need, so it is not absolute. Once we understand that, we take a step away from the indoctrination that good and evil exist in themselves. Buddhism today, however, treats karmic rebirth as fact and keeps people trapped in superstition.
A precept is not an absolute command engraved in nature. It is a conditioned law made to sustain human society—an agreement that changes as its conditions change.
The Anthropocentrism Hidden in the Age of the Decline of the Dharma
Buddhists often speak of the age of the decline of the Dharma, when the Buddha’s teaching collapses and people live without restraint. Behind this idea, however, lies a pre-Buddhist Indian cosmology. Indians imagined that the universe repeatedly passed through four stages: formation, duration, destruction, and emptiness. They called these immense cosmic spans kalpas and associated gods such as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva with the universe’s creation, preservation, and destruction.
Once human good and evil are inserted into that model, the structure of the declining Dharma appears. At the beginning of a universe, most people obey the law. As time passes, more people become evil, and when the law finally disappears, the universe itself is destroyed. The doctrine that entered Buddhism after the Buddha’s death renamed this older cosmology in Buddhist terms. The Book of Revelation has a similar structure: when demons and evil beasts run rampant, the day of judgment approaches.
What both stories conceal is anthropocentrism. They imagine that the creation and destruction of the universe depend on whether people obey laws made by human society. Yet good and evil are not objects that originally existed in nature. They are standards made by human beings for human purposes. The moment we tie the moral condition of society to the life and death of the universe, we imagine that even the cosmos revolves around us.
The decline of the Dharma and the day of judgment seem to describe the universe, but they actually project the good and evil of human society onto the cosmos.
Reconsider the Five Precepts and the Ten Commandments Through the Eyes of Nature
Ask who created the rule against killing. Was it a fish, a spider, or a lion? Fish eat smaller fish, and lions spend their lives hunting herbivores. For them, killing is not a moral problem but a way of living. Human beings also survived the Ice Age in part by eating meat. I am not saying this to encourage killing. I am asking us to see that the moral standard of non-killing arose in human society and is not the standard of nature as a whole.
The rule against stealing also requires the prior idea of ownership. Human beings draw boundaries around land, mountains, and livestock and declare, “This is mine.” At times, they drive other people away with swords and guns, draw a national border, and insist that the land belongs to them. The distinction between stealing and not stealing rests on that constructed idea of possession. The rule against lying arose from the social need to trust one another. Rules against intoxication or sexual misconduct likewise reflect the order that people in a particular time and place considered necessary.
The Ten Commandments also reveal the period and position of their authors. A command not to covet male and female slaves, a wife, a house, or livestock was written from the viewpoint of a person who possessed slaves and property. Would a slave have written, “I belong to my master, so no one should steal me”? If we wrote precepts today, we would begin by condemning the enslavement of another human being. Polyandrous, polygynous, and monogamous societies also judge one another differently. Law and morality continue to change through social agreement.
If we do not call a lion’s killing of a deer evil, we must first admit that moral standards, including non-killing, are human standards.
There Is No Universe That Judges Human Beings
What does it mean to say that someone who violates human precepts will go to hell after death, while someone who obeys them will enter heaven or receive a favorable rebirth? It packages social rules as cosmic reward and punishment. The names of that lie are heaven and hell and karmic rebirth.
The universe existed before human beings appeared. Humans are part of nature alongside monkeys, ants, dolphins, cats, chimpanzees, viruses, amoebas, and flies. Yet people long imagined themselves to be the masters of the universe. They thought the cosmos watched them, punished wrongdoing, rewarded good conduct, and used either a god or a system of karma and rebirth to evaluate each person. But there is no reason for the universe to care about good and evil invented by human beings.
In the past, people could picture hell beneath the earth and a heavenly realm above the sky. Within that worldview, the imagination of a soul leaving the body and traveling there could also seem plausible. But this was not a conclusion from observation. It was a story created from the premise that humans stand at the center of the cosmos.
The universe does not exist to grade human conduct. Heaven, hell, karma, and rebirth as systems that judge human morality are human inventions.
Science Broke the Illusion That Humanity Is the Center of the Universe
Once we began actually observing the universe and nature, the anthropocentric worldview collapsed. The stars were not tiny lights decorating a sky around Earth. There are countless stars like the sun; they form galaxies, and galaxies form clusters and superclusters. In that immense universe, Earth is close to a speck of dust, and a human being is dust upon that dust. We can then see how anthropocentric it is to suppose that a cosmic being watches every human violation and assigns heaven or hell.
After Darwin, the history of life made it even clearer that human beings are part of nature and continuous with other living things. The belief that the cosmos and life were made for us collapsed twice over: Earth is not the center of the universe, and humanity is not the center of life.
We learn science and history in school, but we rarely think through the shock these discoveries should deliver to our worldview. We train to memorize quickly and choose the correct answer, not to compare what we learn with inherited religious assumptions and think critically. That is why people living in the twenty-first century still cling to the premodern idea that the universe will judge human morality.
Earth is not the center of the universe, and humanity is not the center of life. As observation widens, heaven, hell, karma, and rebirth reveal themselves as anthropocentric imagination.
The Buddha’s Path and the Corruption of Later Religion
Twenty-six centuries ago, the Buddha already criticized superstition that misled people by invoking worlds no one could observe. He spoke about the real world that we can sense and examine together. In his era, numerous śramaṇa movements appeared, including skepticism, materialism, and moral anti-realism. They questioned and dismantled anthropocentric gods, souls, rebirth, and absolute morality. Buddhism was part of that philosophical movement. The Buddha wrestled with those ideas and formed his path upon that foundation.
After his death, however, Buddhism was transformed into a religion of rebirth. States and rulers used religion to enforce social morality and threaten people with an afterlife. As later powers and religious institutions, including those associated with Emperor Ashoka, turned Buddhism into an instrument of state order, they had to deny the critical śramaṇa spirit on which Buddhism stood. They created a religion in which life did not end at death, good people rose to heaven, and bad people fell into hell—a religion that made people foolish.
Christianity is no different. We must separately examine what the historical Jesus and Buddha actually said and practiced, but the core preserved in the Sermon on the Mount and the Aṭṭhakavagga has the power to break human delusion. After their deaths, however, religious institutions again became systems that threatened people with heaven and hell or karmic rebirth. When modern religious figures repeat those superstitions, they are not continuing their teachers’ paths. They are reviving the imaginings those teachers tried to destroy.
Making people believe, in the name of Buddhism, the superstitions the Buddha dismantled is not the Buddha’s teaching but the corruption of later religion.
Verify Together in Observable Reality
The heart of Buddhism is dependent-origination thinking, questioning, critical thought, and observation. Observation here does not mean entering meditation and using mysterious powers to see past lives or the other side of the planet. It means shared observation: I can see it, another person can see it, and together we can ask whether the same fact works in this way. Telling others to believe in past lives, souls, the afterlife, heaven, or hell that only I claim to see is not wisdom. It is fraud, superstition, and fiction.
Escaping anthropocentric thought is not easy. Because I am human, I cannot instantly know where human prejudice is hidden in my own thinking. That is why we must question, criticize, and observe from many directions. Asking again about moral judgment through the lives of fish and lions is one such exercise.
This does not mean that people should steal, lie, kill, or commit sexual misconduct. We can make agreements so that we do not harm one another and can live together in human society. Like modern law, we can revise them when problems appear and search for a better consensus. We must simply stop disguising those agreements as absolute good and evil or commands of the universe. Only after leaving behind the heaven, hell, karma, and rebirth imagined within an anthropocentric worldview can we properly ask how to live in this world and in this moment.
Leaving superstition does not mean abandoning ethics. It means knowing ethics as human agreement, building better agreements together, and taking responsibility for the life we can observe here and now.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.