This begins a new series called “Buddhism and Misunderstanding.” I want Buddhism to become once again a religion leading toward awakening. I operate this channel so more people can leave pointless suffering and experience a happier transformation of their lives. Yet in Korean Buddhism at the end of 2021, that road is extremely difficult to locate. Countless expedient devices and ideas close to superstition entered Buddhism and now act as its owners. Truth and non-truth have mixed so thoroughly that even rational people struggle to distinguish the Buddha’s teaching.
The thicket of misunderstanding must be cleared before the path to awakening appears. Rebirth is the first subject because it is the deepest misunderstanding. I have denied it in several videos already. Buddhism undermines the rebirth of a fixed self through dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self, but the condition of being born in ancient India allowed rebirth to return almost immediately after the Buddha’s death.
If everything is impermanent and without self, what undergoes rebirth?
In the Buddha’s India, nearly everyone treated rebirth as obvious. In that society he taught that nothing remains permanent and that no fixed self exists. These teachings directly conflict with the claim that an eternal entity changes bodies and is born again.
The problem was raised very early. In the Questions of King Milinda, produced in a region where Greek and Indian cultures met after Alexander, a king asks a Buddhist monk the central question: if things are impermanent and without self, what travels into the next life? The answer turns to images such as one candle lighting another. The effort required to make the explanation work reveals that the two ideas do not fit naturally.
This pattern repeated throughout Buddhist history. Rebirth was a basic Indian assumption, traveled with Buddhism, and entered scriptures through accounts of former and future lives. Even the southern early canons were compiled after rebirth had already entered the tradition. It therefore accompanied Buddhism through Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan.
Yet words written in a scripture are not automatically words spoken by Gautama Siddhartha. This is a principle the series will apply repeatedly. The twelve-linked chain of dependent origination also took shape as later stages were added to a simpler explanation, producing a cycle that included birth and death. People who already believed in rebirth altered dependent origination to suit that belief. Judged through dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self, that form of rebirth has no place.
The Buddha’s teaching shook Brahmin authority and caste order
Why was rebirth so difficult for Indian society to release? In Brahmanical and Upanishadic traditions, eternal self, rebirth, sacrifice, and caste were not merely theories. They supported the authority of priests who performed sacrifice and the structure of society. If the Buddha rejected gods, sacrifice, eternal self, rebirth, and caste, the religious and political foundation collapsed at once.
The Buddha’s reasoning was powerful, and many people became disciples. Existing religion found such a revolutionary teaching impossible to accept unchanged. Hinduism eventually absorbed the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu. It acknowledged him outwardly while retaining gods, sacrifice, caste, and an eternal self. This explains why he could be praised as Vishnu’s incarnation while impermanence and non-self were excluded.
The Bhagavad Gita also includes language resembling Buddhism: action without grasping, wisdom, and yoga. Yet it preserves god, sacrifice, caste, and war. It absorbed what could be used and removed the core that threatened the existing order.
The same process occurred inside Buddhism. When a dynasty established Buddhism as a state religion, large numbers of existing Brahmins and religious specialists could change labels and become monks. Without deeply understanding the Buddhist spirit, they reshaped the institution in familiar ways. To attract the public, they accepted gods, petitions for blessings, rebirth, and incantations. The Buddha was deified, and Vairocana, Amitabha, Avalokiteshvara, thousand-armed forms, and many other beings were added.
The Lotus, Avatamsaka, Thousand Hands, Heart, and Diamond sutras read in Korea today contain mixed elements of former lives, deification, and spells. Many people diligently recite the Great Compassion Dharani without knowing what its words mean. This series will examine such elements one by one.
Rebirth legitimizes caste and present inequality
Rebirth and karma conveniently justify caste. Someone born rich and high-ranking supposedly performed good deeds in a former life; someone born into poverty and discrimination supposedly bears past wrongdoing. Present conditions then need not be changed. The system tells the oppressed, “You deserved this birth, so do not try to escape.”
For Brahmins, abolishing rebirth threatened religious authority and livelihood. A state interested in maintaining a stable hierarchy could likewise use karma and rebirth to bind people to inherited positions. Religious, political, and social interests all helped bring rebirth back into Buddhism.
Even intellectual monks who criticize the great transformation of Mahayana may react fiercely to the claim that rebirth does not exist. Because former-life stories and rebirth occur repeatedly in Buddhist texts, they conclude that Buddhism cannot survive without them. A lifetime spent inside the Buddhist world makes its premises extremely difficult to question.
Step outside institutional religion and look through the eyes of a secular person and modern science: souls, heaven, hell, and rebirth appear deeply immature. A scholar may criticize the late creation of Mahayana scriptures and Chinese systems of classification, yet refuse to consider that rebirth language in the so-called earliest texts may also represent later layers. Criticism stops before scriptural authority.
No one has died, verified the afterlife, and returned. Rebirth is therefore not knowledge but belief. The Buddha discouraged wasting time on what cannot be known and does not solve suffering in present life. Emphasizing rebirth makes people believe what is unknown and strengthens superstition. It directly opposes that attitude.
First: when did rebirth begin in the history of life?
The first reason for rejecting rebirth comes from the view of modern science. Earth once contained no life. Simple life later appeared, underwent evolution and repeated mass extinctions, and eventually produced today’s organisms. Dates and details may be revised, but it is difficult to deny the broad fact that humans were not present from the beginning.
When, then, did rebirth start? Were souls circulating before any organism existed? Did it begin with the first microbe? Did dinosaurs die and return as humans, gods, animals, or inhabitants of hell? Did categories such as heaven, humanity, asura, animal, and hell exist as cosmic laws before human language and society named them?
If rebirth is an eternal natural law, it must explain its subject and beginning before life. It cannot tell us what moved where when no organism, sensation, or language existed. In the light of present knowledge, rebirth resembles superstition rather than scientific explanation.
Second: rebirth and an afterlife are intensely human inventions
Questions such as “Where did I come from, where do I go after death, and who am I?” arise when humans become conscious of personal existence and mortality. Age, the birth of one’s children, and witnessing another person’s death deepen awareness of one’s own end. Language, abstraction, and imagination make it possible to invent a destination after death.
The belief that rituals during a forty-nine-day period can send the dead somewhere better is a story made by humans for humans. Heaven and hell, asuras and animals, and an ancestor visiting the ritual table to eat all project human life and social order onto an afterworld.
Suppose a soul without a body can see, hear, smell, and taste. Eyes are required for visible light, ears for vibrations in air, and a nose and tongue for chemical molecules. How could sensation occur without organs? If a soul receives another body, what matter composes it and where is it? If heaven and hell are literal spaces, where in the universe do they exist?
From even a short distance, this appears as a primitive and human-centered imagination. It is unsurprising that scientifically educated people stop believing such stories and leave religion. Secularization in Europe and the United States, where Christianity was once dominant, is partly the rejection of superstition no longer credible to modern people.
Third: with no fixed self, there is no self to be reborn
The decisive reason lies in the Dharma itself. Dependent origination says everything arises through causes and conditions, changes with them, and disappears. Nothing therefore remains permanent, and nothing independent of conditions can be identified as a fixed self. Non-self follows directly from impermanence.
Later Buddhists created concepts to hold non-self and rebirth together. They denied the ordinary atman but proposed something such as a pudgala that travels. The four marks of self, person, living being, and lifespan in the Diamond Sutra reflect different forms imagined as “me” or the subject of rebirth. The sutra tells readers not to hold those marks while, as a later text, also containing stories of former lives. Internal contradiction is inevitable.
Body, feeling, thought, and memory—everything I call me—change continually according to conditions. They arise in relation and disappear together. When that fact is observed completely, one sees that there is nothing fixed that can be called me. When the fire of attachment to self goes out, what leaves the body to be born again? A real understanding of impermanence and non-self makes rebirth impossible.
Traditional expressions about returning or not returning in the four fruits need not describe a body entering another life a fixed number of times. They can describe the way a person becomes dark again after a first awakening and returns to a peaceful mind until reaching a stage that does not fall back. It is mind moving through clarity and darkness, not evidence of a permanent soul migrating between bodies.
The claim that a Buddha uses special power to stop rebirth is also contradictory
If rebirth is a universal law of nature, can the Buddha exempt only himself because he awakened? Billions of humans and living beings supposedly undergo rebirth, while one person declares, “I will not return.” Does that place him outside natural law? Was the Buddha a god with supernatural power?
Gautama Siddhartha taught a great awakening, but he lived and died as a human being. His body itself demonstrated impermanence. He did not circulate through innumerable lives and escape after awakening; he saw that there had never been a fixed self capable of circulation.
Rejecting rebirth is not annihilationism saying that everything ends with me
Critics often say that without rebirth people will believe death ends everything and live however they please. Yet the thought “The world ends when I die” also puts a fixed me at the center. The world continues after my death. Fathers, grandfathers, and the Buddha died, while nature and human life carried on.
I, the Buddha, and our ancestors are not isolated from nature. We live through relationships and conditions, leaving effects through speech and action. The fact that words spoken 2,500 years ago still affect us is itself dependent origination. Life remains connected without a soul traveling, and understanding that connection shows how to live today.
A person who realizes non-self does not decide to smoke, break every precept, and indulge every desire. Such behavior remains driven by “what I want,” and therefore by self. When the fire of fixed self goes out, relationships with others become clearer and conduct changes naturally.
When people in the Suttanipata press the Buddha about death and the end of existence, he says one who reaches the farther shore departs from attachment. Observe as it is that I too age, become ill, and die. See that what I believed to be me is not a fixed self. Then fantasies built to avoid death and empty attachment fall away, and the world is finally seen directly.
Even scripture must be tested by dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self
If Buddhism does not correct its claims about souls and rebirth, rational people will continue to leave. A teaching with a profoundly rational core will look like a strange religion advertising superstition. The life of Buddhism grows dim the moment every sentence attributed to the Buddha in scripture is believed solely because it is written there.
There are three reasons rebirth does not exist. Across the history of nature, including an era before life and humans, no beginning or subject of rebirth can be explained. The architecture of the afterlife reveals human beings projecting their fear, senses, and society into imagination. Most importantly, dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self leave no fixed person to be born again.
Test even words bearing the Buddha’s name. The criteria are not authority and tradition but dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self. When misunderstanding is removed by those standards, Buddhism returns from a religion of believing in an afterlife to a living teaching that frees us from attachment and delusion now.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.