Santipada

I have been asked to dis­cuss the per­spect­ive of early Buddhism on the notion of rebirth, and more spe­cific­ally, how it may or may not be related to the empir­ical research on Near Death Exper­i­ences (NDEs).¹ To address this topic it is neces­sary to first con­sider the scope of what we call ‘Early Buddhism’. Next we need to have a look at some of the gen­eral, main­stream ways that rebirth is dis­cussed in Early Buddhism. Then we will be in a pos­i­tion to review the texts that may be taken to sup­port the real­ity of the ‘in-between state’. In the con­clu­sion, I will draw together what seem to me to be some of the more import­ant strands con­nect­ing this paper with the ‘sci­entific’ ori­ent­a­tion of the conference.

Early Buddhism

We’re get­ting into trouble­some polit­ical waters by even sug­gest­ing that there was such a thing as ‘Early Buddhism’, and that it might dif­fer in import­ant ways from the accep­ted teach­ings of the Buddhist schools. Of course, all the schools of Buddhism believe that their teach­ings derive from the his­tor­ical Buddha in some sense: and they’re all right, in some sense. There’s no doubt that we can trace a deep con­tinu­ity among the schools of Buddhism, such that they can all be legit­im­ately regarded as heirs to the Buddha’s teach­ings. Yet at the same time, it would be pecu­liar, if not unpre­ced­en­ted, if some things had not changed in the 2500 years of Buddhist his­tory: and it’s down­right un-Buddhist to pro­claim that Buddhism never changes!

The earli­est period of Buddhism was uni­fied, with no clearly defined sep­ar­ate schools. This period las­ted until roughly the time of Aśoka, say 200 years after the Par­in­ib­bana.² The early Buddhist com­munity gradu­ally frag­men­ted into the vari­ous ‘schools’, tra­di­tion­ally numbered as ‘18’. The school we know as ‘Theravāda’ was one of these ‘18’ schools, while the school we know as ‘Mahāyāna’ was formed later. All the texts as we have them today were edited into their cur­rent form by the schools, using the shared mass of tex­tual mater­ial passed down through the Early Buddhist com­munity. The early mater­ial is primar­ily found in the Sut­tas as col­lec­ted in the four or five Āgamas/Nikāyas, which I will refer to as the Āgama Sut­tas.³ The Vinayas con­tain much com­mon mater­ial (e.g. the pāṭimokkha) but also many later addi­tions. The Abhid­ham­mas are later com­pos­i­tions. Hence any ser­i­ous attempt to invest­ig­ate Early Buddhism must be based primar­ily on the Āgama Suttas.

Com­par­ing the Pali, Chinese and other sources, we hope to peer back into the time before the sects split into sep­ar­ate camps. From a strict schol­arly point of view, that’s about the best we can hope for. But we would be dis­hon­est if we were not to admit that the real pur­pose of the exer­cise is not to uncover what the early Buddhist com­munity thought, but what the Buddha him­self thought. How close we can approach that will prob­ably forever remain a mat­ter of faith.

We should sound a pre­lim­in­ary note of cau­tion here. The Sut­tas are old texts, formed in a very dif­fer­ent cul­tural con­text, and informed by ideas and val­ues that are some­times incom­pre­hens­ible to us. It is hard enough to fig­ure out even when they refer to con­crete objects like plants or build­ing styles; how much more dif­fi­cult must it be to con­vey ideas about ‘the bey­ond’? We may be cer­tain that we have access to only a tiny frac­tion of the lin­guistic and philo­soph­ical cur­rency of the times. Moreover, the Sut­tas were the work of many hands, and we can­not assume that they teach one con­sist­ent doc­trine. It is even pos­sible, though faith may deny it, that the Buddha changed his mind dur­ing his life, or taught incon­sist­ently. So let us pro­ceed with care, and hold our con­clu­sions lightly.

Rebirth and the Four Noble Truths

In his first ser­mon, which is rep­res­en­ted by at least 17 ver­sions in all Buddhist lan­guages, the Buddha presen­ted the Four Noble Truths: suf­fer­ing, its ori­gin, ces­sa­tion, and the path. The first term in the defin­i­tion of suf­fer­ing is jāti, which we trans­late as ‘birth’, although ‘con­cep­tion’ might be more accur­ate. Note that birth is an exist­en­tial prob­lem, to be over­come, and hence can­not merely refer to one’s birth in this life. It must refer, as the uni­ver­sal testi­mony of the Buddhist tra­di­tions affirm, to rebirth in saṁsāra, as part of an end­less stream of lives. Hence the second Noble Truth is yāyaṁ taṇhā ponobbhavikā, ‘that crav­ing per­tain­ing to future exist­ence’, and the Third is ‘the com­plete fad­ing away and ces­sa­tion of that very crav­ing’ (yo tassāyeva taṇhāya asesavirāganirodho…). These few phrases estab­lish rebirth as cent­ral to the Buddha’s fun­da­mental teach­ings. From them we can draw some import­ant conclusions.

1. Rebirth is regarded as an ongo­ing pro­cess to be escaped from in the search for liberation.
2. Rebirth is determ­ined by one’s own mind, par­tic­u­larly one’s eth­ical choices.
3. The prac­tice of Buddhism aims at end­ing rebirth.

Pre­cisely these three prin­ciples have been estab­lished by McEvil­ley as the basic con­stitu­ents of a ‘rein­carn­a­tion belief com­plex’, shared by many philo­soph­ers in ancient Greece and India, and nowhere else (except places that have bor­rowed from these sources).⁴ Of course, many cul­tures have some kind of belief in rebirth or rein­carn­a­tion, but only in these places do we have these cent­ral ideas figured together. It is clear, then, that Buddhist ideas on rebirth have import­ant things in com­mon with ideas that were cur­rent in the Buddha’s cul­ture. In fact, the two best known Indian reli­gions today – Hinduism and Jain­ism – also share this belief com­plex. This alerts us to an import­ant point: the way the Buddha spoke about rebirth was a part of the wider cul­tural dis­course of his time, and used cur­rent con­cepts and vocab­u­lary, though, of course, he may well have used the words in his own way. This means we must ask: ‘What did the Buddha’s teach­ings on rebirth mean to the people he was addressing?’

How­ever, it would be incor­rect to claim that the Buddha simply absorbed the uni­ver­sal Indian belief in rebirth. In fact, the ancient Vedas speak little of rebirth,⁵ and it only slowly appears in the post-Vedic lit­er­at­ure. The rad­ical śramaṇa move­ments, among which the Buddha coun­ted him­self, rejec­ted the author­ity of the brahmanical tra­di­tion as a whole, and many of the śramaṇas rejec­ted rebirth out­right.⁶ There is no doubt that the Buddha would have rejec­ted rebirth if he did not believe in it. Moreover, the Āgama Sut­tas reg­u­larly say that the Buddha real­ized the truth of rebirth with his own dir­ect know­ledge, and he expli­citly states that he does not affirm rebirth because of what he has learned from another.⁷ His­tor­ic­ally, the Āgama Sut­tas are the old­est texts that place this rebirth com­plex in a cent­ral pos­i­tion, and we could well argue that the Hindu belief in rebirth was con­di­tioned by the Buddhist belief rather than the other way around.

So right away we get a good sense for the soteri­olo­gical sig­ni­fic­ance of rebirth within Early Buddhism. But we have learned little of the mech­an­ics of it: How does it hap­pen? What makes it work? How do we ana­lyze the pro­cess in detail? We must admit that the Āgama Sut­tas do not offer us a detailed explan­a­tion of such mat­ters. But this itself has its own sig­ni­fic­ance: for the Āgama Sut­tas, the under­ly­ing basis of rebirth is not the issue. The issue is that rebirth is suf­fer­ing, and prac­tice is needed to find free­dom. A detailed ‘sci­entific’ under­stand­ing of rebirth is mar­ginal to the lib­er­at­ive teach­ings of the Āgama Sut­tas. Per­haps the main import­ance of ‘sci­entific’ invest­ig­a­tion of rebirth is that it brings Buddhist teach­ings within a con­tem­por­ary mode of dis­course. This has cer­tain bene­fits, not least that it engages some people who oth­er­wise might dis­miss import­ant aspects of Buddhist teach­ings as ‘unscientific’.

Rebirth and the Aggregates

The defin­i­tion of the first Noble Truth sums up the prob­lem: ‘in brief, the five grasping-aggregates are suf­fer­ing’ (saṅkhittena pañcūpādākkhandhā dukkhā). What exactly are these five aggreg­ates, and how do they fig­ure in rebirth?

The basic mean­ing of the aggreg­ates is well-known: phys­ical form (rūpa), feel­ing (vedanā), per­cep­tion (saññā), voli­tional activ­it­ies (saṅkhārā), con­scious­ness (viññāṇa). These are all observ­able aspects of con­scious exper­i­ence. We are used to think­ing of rebirth involving some mys­ter­i­ous entity such as a ‘soul’, so the pro­saic nature of these aggreg­ates comes as a bit of a sur­prise. But the Saṁyutta tells us: ‘Whatever ascet­ics or priests there are that recol­lect their man­i­fold past lives, all of them recol­lect the five grasping-aggregates or one of them’.⁸ This sug­gests that the aggreg­ates are empir­ical real­it­ies that char­ac­ter­ize not just this life, but past lives as well. Thus the Saṁyutta tells us that the unawakened indi­vidual runs and circles around these five aggreg­ates from one life to the next.⁹

We often find sec­tarian the­or­ies or other non-Buddhist con­texts which inter­pret the ‘soul’ as one or other of the aggreg­ates. In the Brah­ma­jāla Sutta, to quote the best known example, the Self is said to be ‘formed’ (rūpī) or ‘exper­i­en­cing pleas­ure’ (sukhapaṭisaṁvedī) or ‘per­cipi­ent’ (saññī) after death.¹⁰ Sim­il­arly, saṅkhārā is closely asso­ci­ated with rebirth,¹¹ and one Sutta describes how one can use saṅkhārā to dir­ect one’s rebirth.¹² And con­scious­ness is reg­u­larly spoken of as the phe­nomenon that under­goes rebirth, not only in a Buddhist con­text,¹³ but also by those who mis­takenly take it for some­thing per­man­ent.¹⁴

It seems to me that the five aggreg­ates must have been used in the Buddha’s cul­ture as a scheme for clas­si­fy­ing soul the­or­ies. This is not to reduce the five aggreg­ates to merely a mech­an­istic clas­si­fic­a­tion scheme, but to bring for­ward an aspect that I believe would have been assumed by many of the Buddha’s listen­ers, but is not obvi­ous to us. Vari­ous more or less refined con­cep­tions of rebirth were cur­rent, and the more soph­ist­ic­ated the­or­ists must have arranged and com­pared these. I have not found a pas­sage out­side of Buddhism where the five aggreg­ates as such were a recog­nized teach­ing; but the Sut­tas reg­u­larly por­tray sec­tari­ans as being famil­iar with the aggreg­ates.¹⁵ Moreover, cer­tain of the pre-Buddhist Self the­or­ies are clearly expressed in terms of the aggreg­ates: for example, the Upaniṣadic sage Yajñavālkya iden­ti­fied con­scious­ness as the highest Self.¹⁶ These the­or­ies no doubt des­cen­ded in part from simple anim­ist ideas, and in part from the­or­et­ical spec­u­la­tion; but at least some­times the the­or­ies were based on a dir­ect exper­i­ence. How­ever, even med­it­at­ive exper­i­ence might be sub­ject to mis­in­ter­pret­a­tion.¹⁷

If we are cor­rect in sup­pos­ing that the five aggreg­ates are a scheme for cat­egor­iz­ing Self-theories, this would explain why the teach­ing of not-self is so strenu­ously emphas­ized in this par­tic­u­lar con­text. The Sut­tas say that the five aggreg­ates exhaust the pos­sible range of Self the­or­ies,¹⁸ and the Buddha was scath­ingly crit­ical of any­one who asked how the not-self aggreg­ates could affect the Self.¹⁹

The In-between State

After gain­ing a gen­eral impres­sion of the role of rebirth in a few main­stream con­texts in the Āgama Sut­tas, we may now have a look at the con­tro­ver­ted ques­tion of the ‘in-between state’. The basic prob­lem is whether one life imme­di­ately fol­lows another, or whether there is a period of time in between. This ques­tion was dis­puted among the early Buddhist schools. In their debates, all parties accep­ted the Sut­tas as author­it­at­ive, and quoted them in sup­port of their pos­i­tion. So we usu­ally find that when the early Buddhists could not agree, this was because the ques­tion was not addressed in a straight­for­ward or expli­cit way in the Āgama Sut­tas. In this case the Theravād­ins denied the in-between state, while many other schools affirmed it.²⁰

It should be noted that many mod­ern Theravād­ins do in fact accept the in-between state, des­pite the fact that it’s ‘offi­cially’ heretical. Pop­u­lar belief is, so far as I know, on the side of the in-between state; so is the opin­ion of the forest monks of Thai­l­and, based on their med­it­at­ive exper­i­ence; and so is the opin­ions of most monks and schol­ars I know, whose ideas are based on the Suttas.

The main canon­ical argu­ment against the in-between state, relied on by the Kathāvat­thu,²¹ is that the Buddha men­tions only three states of exist­ence (bhava): the sense world, the form world, and the form­less world. If the inter­me­di­ate state exists, it should fit into one of these worlds, but it doesn’t: there­fore, there’s no such thing. This argu­ment, how­ever, rests on mere lin­guistic ped­antry. If I say my house has three rooms, someone might object that it also has a cor­ridor, which is an ‘in-between room’. Is this a fourth room, or is it merely a space con­nect­ing the rooms? That simply depends on how I define it and how I want to count it. Maybe my defin­i­tion is wrong or con­fused – but that doesn’t make the cor­ridor disappear!

The Kathāvat­thu offers a fur­ther argu­ment, based on the idea of the ānantarikakamma. These are a spe­cial class of acts (such as mur­der­ing one’s par­ents, etc.) which are believed to have a kam­mic res­ult ‘without inter­val’: i.e. one goes straight to hell. But again this argu­ment is not con­vin­cing, for the mean­ing of ānantarika here is surely simply that one does not have any inter­ced­ing rebirths before exper­i­en­cing the res­ults of that bad kamma. It has noth­ing to do with the inter­val of time between one birth and the next.

These argu­ments sound sus­pi­ciously post hoc. The real reason for the oppos­i­tion to the in-between state would seem rather that it sounds sus­pi­ciously like an anim­ist or Self the­ory. Theravād­ins of old were staunch oppon­ents of the Self the­ory: the cri­tique of the thesis that a ‘per­son’ truly exists and takes rebirth is the first and major part of their dox­o­graph­ical treat­ise, the Kathāvat­thu; a sim­ilar though shorter debate is attrib­uted to the Kathāvatthu’s author Mog­gali­put­tatissa in the Vijñānakāya of the Sar­vāstivād­ins.²² The idea of an imme­di­ate rebirth seems to me a rhet­or­ical strategy to squeeze out the pos­sib­il­ity of a Self sneak­ing through the gap. It agrees with the gen­eral tend­ency of Theravādin Abhid­hamma, which always seeks to min­im­ize time and elim­in­ate grey areas. But philo­soph­ic­ally this achieves noth­ing, for whatever it is that moves through the in-between state, it is imper­man­ent and con­di­tioned, being driven by crav­ing, and hence can­not be a ‘Self’.

There are some places in the Sut­tas that tell ‘real life’ stor­ies of people who die and are reborn. For example, the Anāthapiṇḍika Sutta says that Sāri­putta and Ānanda went to see Anāthapiṇḍika as he was dying, and: ‘Soon after they had left, the house­holder Anāthapiṇḍika died and reappeared in the Tus­ita heaven.’²³ While this does not men­tion any in-between state, neither does it rule it out. If I were to say, ‘I left the mon­as­tery and went to the vil­lage’, no-one would read as sug­gest­ing that I dis­ap­peared in one place and reappeared instantly in another! Such nar­rat­ive epis­odes are too vague to determ­ine whether they assume an in-between state or not.

The most expli­cit state­ment in sup­port of the in-between state is prob­ably the Kutuhalasāla Sutta, which speaks of how a being has laid down this body but has not yet been reborn into another body.

‘Vac­cha, I declare that there is rebirth for one with fuel [with grasp­ing],²⁴ not for one without fuel [without grasp­ing]. Vac­cha, just as fire burns with fuel, not without fuel, even so, Vac­cha, I declare that there is rebirth for one with fuel [with grasp­ing], not for one without fuel [without grasping].’

‘But, mas­ter Got­ama, when a flame is tossed by the wind and goes a long way, what does mas­ter Got­ama declare to be its fuel?’

‘Vac­cha, when a flame is tossed by the wind and goes a long way, I declare that it is fuelled by the air. For, Vac­cha, at that time, the air is the fuel.’

‘And fur­ther, mas­ter Got­ama, when a being has laid down this body, but has not yet been reborn in another body, what does the mas­ter Got­ama declare to be the fuel?’

‘Vac­cha, when a being has laid down this body, but has not yet been reborn in another body, it is fuelled by crav­ing, I say.²⁵ For, Vac­cha, at that time, crav­ing is the fuel.’²⁶

From this we can con­clude that the Buddha, fol­low­ing ideas cur­rent in his time – for Vac­chag­otta was a non-Buddhist wan­derer (parib­bā­jaka) – accep­ted that there was some kind of inter­val between one life and the next. Dur­ing this time, when one has ‘laid down’ this body, but is not yet reborn in another, one is sus­tained by crav­ing, like a flame tossed by the wind is sus­tained by air. The simile sug­gests, per­haps, that the inter­val is a short one; but the pur­pose of the simile is to illus­trate the depend­ent nature of the period, not the length of time it takes. Here, as in the other con­texts we shall exam­ine below, it is not really pos­sible to draw any con­clu­sions about the length of time in the in-between state. While a fire is burn­ing nor­mally, it is sus­tained by a com­plex of factors, such as fuel, oxy­gen, and heat. But when a tongue of flame is moment­ar­ily tossed away from the source fire, it can last only a short while, and in that time it is tenu­ously sus­tained by the con­tin­ued sup­ply of oxy­gen. Sim­il­arly in our lives, we are sus­tained by food, sense stim­u­lus, and so on, but in the in-between, it is only the slender thread of crav­ing that pro­pels us for­ward. The dif­fer­ence is, of course, that the flame will eas­ily go out, while the fuel of crav­ing pro­pels the unawakened inex­or­ably into future rebirth.

There is a stock descrip­tion of the vari­ous grades of awakened beings, which appears to speak of one who real­izes nir­vana in-between this life and the next. This pas­sage starts by men­tion­ing the one who becomes fully awakened in this life, then one who real­izes nir­vana at the time of dying, then speaks of a kind of non-returner:

… with the utter destruc­tion of the five lower fet­ters, one becomes an attainer of nir­vana ‘in-between’ (ant­arā­par­in­ib­bāyī).²⁷

The next kind of non-returner real­izes nir­vana ‘on land­ing’ (upa­hac­ca­par­in­ib­bāyī). Given the con­text – between dying and ‘land­ing’ in the Pure Abodes – it seems likely that this pas­sage refers to an indi­vidual who, dying as a non-returner, real­izes full nir­vana in the in-between state. This is how the pas­sage was inter­preted by the Pug­ga­lavād­ins and Sar­vāstivād­ins,²⁸ as well as in mod­ern stud­ies by Har­vey and Bodhi.²⁹

The Pur­isag­ati Sutta makes these cat­egor­ies much more vivid with a series of similes, com­par­ing the ant­arā­par­in­ib­bāyī to a spark of hot iron, which when beaten, flies off the block and ‘cools down’ before strik­ing the ground.³⁰ Again, it seems dif­fi­cult to inter­pret this as any­thing but an in-between state.³¹

Like the pre­vi­ous pas­sage, here the descrip­tion is informed by the meta­phor of fire, which sym­bol­izes pain and entrap­ment. The ‘going out of the flame’ is the goal of Buddhist prac­tice, so the fiery imagery asso­ci­ated with rebirth is entirely apt. The fact that nir­vana can appar­ently occur dur­ing this stage sug­gests that it is of spir­itual sig­ni­fic­ance. It might be taken to imply that the pro­cess takes a reas­on­able length of time, unlike the more ‘instant­an­eous’ feel we noted in the ‘tossed flame’ image. Nev­er­the­less, the ‘going out’ here is just the nat­ural cool­ing off, the cul­min­a­tion of a pro­cess that was already nearly com­plete, and so it does not imply that one should give any spe­cial import­ance to the in-between state as a realm for prac­tice of Dhamma.

There is evid­ently an allu­sion to the in-between state in the Chan­nov­āda Sutta, where Mahā Cunda instructs Channa the Vajjī, quot­ing the Buddha thus:

‘For one who is depend­ent there is waver­ing (cal­ita); for one who is inde­pend­ent, there is no waver­ing. When there is no waver­ing, there is tran­quil­lity. When there is tran­quil­lity, there is no inclin­a­tion (towards crav­ing or exist­ence) (nati). When there is no inclin­a­tion, there is no com­ing and going (agatig­ati). When there is no com­ing and going, there is no passing away and rebirth (cutūpapāta). When there is no passing away and rebirth, there is neither here nor bey­ond nor in between the two (na ubhayaṁ ant­ar­ena). This itself is the end of suf­fer­ing.’³²

While the ter­min­o­logy used here is per­haps a little too vague to insist on a defin­it­ive inter­pret­a­tion, nev­er­the­less in the light of the pre­vi­ous pas­sages it is reas­on­able to see this as a fur­ther allu­sion to the in-between state.

A some­what mys­ter­i­ous usage of the term gand­habba has also been taken as refer­ring to the in-between state.³³ By the time of the Buddha, gand­habba had almost entirely reached its clas­sical mean­ing of a class of celes­tial musi­cians. But earlier Vedic usage var­ied, and it seems to have been as vague as our ‘spirit’.³⁴ This quasi-animist mean­ing appears in the fol­low­ing passage.

Bhikkhus, the des­cent of the being-to-be-born (gabbhassâvakkanti) takes place through the union of three things. Here, there is the union of the mother and the father; but the mother is not in sea­son, and the being-to-be-born (gand­habba) is not present. In this case, no des­cent of a being-to-be-born occurs. But when there is the union of the mother and father; the mother is in sea­son; and the being-to-be-born is present, through the union of these three the des­cent of the being-to-be-born occurs.³⁵

The Assalāy­ana Sutta attrib­utes the same doc­trine to brah­mans of the past, show­ing that the Buddha had no objec­tion to adopt­ing cur­rent views on rebirth into his teach­ing, as long as they did not pos­tu­late a Self.³⁶ The accept­ance of the con­ven­tional term gand­habba sug­gests that whatever is in the in-between state is in some sense a func­tion­ing ‘per­son’, not just a mech­an­istic pro­cess or ener­getic stream devoid of con­scious­ness. How­ever, the use of the term is so cas­ual and uncer­tain that it would be unwise to make much of it.

A stock pas­sage on the four ‘foods’ (i.e. four phys­ical or men­tal sup­ports for life) intro­duces the term sambhavesī. Inter­preted by the com­ment­ary to mean ‘one seek­ing rebirth’, mod­ern gram­mari­ans prefer to con­strue the term as ‘one to be reborn’.³⁷ In either case it appears to refer to the being in the in-between state.

Bhikkhus, there are these four kinds of food for the main­ten­ance of beings that already have come to be (bhūtā) and for the sup­port of beings seek­ing a new exist­ence (sambhavesī). What are the four? They are phys­ical food, gross or subtle; con­tact as the second; men­tal voli­tion as the third; and con­scious­ness as the fourth.³⁸

While the early Sut­tas do not give us any fur­ther inform­a­tion, the fact that the sambhavesī is con­tras­ted with the bhūta, which clearly means one in a state of being (bhava), sug­gests that the sambhavesī is in a state of poten­tial.³⁹ The in-between state is truly ‘in-between’, it is only defined by the absence of more sub­stan­tial forms of exist­ence, and one in that state, so it seems, is exclus­ively ori­ented towards a more fully-realized incarnation.

We have already noted the use of similes to render the in-between state more vivid. A stock pas­sage found in the Sāmaññaphala Sutta in explain­ing the recol­lec­tion of beings faring accord­ing to their kamma (cutūpapātañāṇa) employs this simile:

‘Great king, just as if there were a palace in the cent­ral square [of a town where four roads meet] (siṅghāṭaka), and a man with good eye­sight stand­ing on the top of it were to see people enter­ing (pav­is­anti) a house, leav­ing (nikkham­anti) it, wan­der­ing (sañ­caranti) along the carriage-road, and sit­ting down (nisinnā) in the cent­ral square. The thought would occur to him, “These people are enter­ing a house, leav­ing it, walk­ing along the streets, and sit­ting down in the cent­ral square.” ’⁴⁰

Of course, a simile can only ever be sug­gest­ive. Nev­er­the­less, it is hard to under­stand why the Buddha would use such a descrip­tion of the pro­cess of rebirth if he wanted to exclude the pos­sib­il­ity of an in-between state. Peter Har­vey inter­prets this pas­sage on the basis of the Kiṁsuka Sutta.⁴¹

Here the usage of enter­ing (pav­is­anti), leav­ing (nikkham­anti) and wan­der­ing (sañ­caranti) refers respect­ively to one being reborn, dying, and seek­ing a new birth. The house rep­res­ents the body or form of rebirth, and sit­ting down (nisinnā) in the cent­ral square [where four roads meet] refers to the con­scious­ness find­ing a new birth in the sense-world (the four roads rep­res­ent­ing the four ele­ments, earth, water, fire, wind). Here, the sit­ting down of the simile refers to the dis­cern­ment [con­scious­ness] com­ing to be estab­lished in a new per­son­al­ity, after wan­der­ing in search of ‘it’.⁴²

Con­clu­sion: the aggreg­ates, the in-between state, and the status of science

If the five aggreg­ates are a way of under­stand­ing rebirth into dif­fer­ent states of being, it would only be plaus­ible to sug­gest that they are also involved in the pro­cess in-between births as well.⁴³ A little reflec­tion con­firms that the aggreg­ates are indeed exper­i­enced in NDEs or OOBEs. One sees ‘forms’, lights, images, and has a sen­sa­tion of mov­ing out of the body. These are all part of the form aggreg­ate. It should be noted that ‘move­ment’ is a phys­ical prop­erty, so that the feel­ing of mov­ing out­side a body is a phys­ical phe­nomenon, and can­not be explained with ref­er­ence to a purely imma­ter­ial soul (this was, incid­ent­ally, one of the reas­ons why I gave up my belief in a soul). To be able to ‘see’ light, one must in some way inter­act with photons. There must be some phys­ical dimen­sion present, oth­er­wise the photons would simply pass straight through without res­ist­ance. This qual­ity is called ‘resistance-contact’ (paṭighasamphassa) in the Sut­tas.⁴⁴ Of course, we ima­gine this ‘phys­ical’ pres­ence not in terms of coarse phys­ical mat­ter (oḷārika), but some kind of ‘energy body’, or ‘subtle body’, the best term for which in the Sut­tas would be the ‘mind-made body’ (man­o­mayakāya), which is said to be a ‘phys­ical’ (rūpī) rep­lica of the coarse body.⁴⁵ So the form aggreg­ate is cer­tainly part of this exper­i­ence, even if it is not the ordin­ary body we typ­ic­ally identify with.

The sub­ject typ­ic­ally exper­i­ences feel­ings of bliss, which are part of the feel­ing aggreg­ate. Often, they will recog­nize fam­ily or friends who come to meet them. The abil­ity to recog­nize is a part of the aggreg­ate of per­cep­tion. There comes a time when the sub­ject often feels as if they must make a choice, to remain or return. This choice is included in the aggreg­ate of voli­tional activ­it­ies. Finally, the sub­ject is clearly aware dur­ing this pro­cess, hence con­scious­ness is oper­at­ing. Thus for the unawakened per­son the pro­cess of rebirth may be described in terms of the five aggreg­ates; con­versely, the awakened ara­hant may not be described after death in terms of the five aggreg­ates, for these have all ceased.⁴⁶

The fact that the NDE can be under­stood or explained in terms of the five aggreg­ates is no arbit­rary or mar­ginal detail. It shows that for Early Buddhism rebirth was an empir­ical, com­pre­hens­ible pro­cess that involved noth­ing more mys­ter­i­ous than the ordin­ary work­ings of the mind and body. In this instance we see the bene­fits of learn­ing from all the schools. For while the Theravād­ins have pre­served the clearest and best-understood early texts refer­ring to the in-between state, their philo­soph­ical pos­ture pre­ven­ted them from invest­ig­at­ing and describ­ing this in any detail. For that we shall have to listen to the other schools, start­ing with the Pug­ga­lavād­ins and Sar­vāstivād­ins, and passed down through the Chinese and Tibetan traditions.

It seems to me there is some­thing deeper we can learn from reflect­ing on the in-between state. Change is trau­matic, and we need a period of adjust­ment. The similes the Buddha gives – wan­der­ing from house to house, or fly­ing like a spark in the air – cap­ture some­thing of the feel­ing of being alone and uncer­tain in the cos­mos. The being who has left their body is flung into the unknown, where all their fears and hopes may be real­ized. The acts, exper­i­ences, desires, and habits of this and past lives make an impres­sion on the stream of con­scious­ness: we know this, we feel it every moment. Such things take time to digest them­selves and crys­tal­lize in a new pat­tern. We do not decide the import­ant things in life in one instant. The time of ambi­gu­ity, hav­ing left one thing and not reached another, allows space for con­scious­ness to integ­rate the les­sons of the past and ori­ent itself for the future.

Des­pite all we have said in sup­port of the ‘in-between’ state, I would still make an import­ant reser­va­tion. The idea of a ‘state’ sug­gests a defined mode of being, but what we have seen sug­gests rather a lack of being. The in-between state is not a sep­ar­ate realm that some­how stands in the space between other realms. We might ima­gine it so, but this is just a meta­phor to help us make sense of the exper­i­ence. The ref­er­ences to the ‘in-between state’ do not focus on the object­ive or cos­mo­lo­gical exist­ence of such a realm, and to this extent I think the Kathāvatthu’s objec­tions to the in-between state can be sus­tained. Rather the pas­sages focus on an individual’s exper­i­ence of what hap­pens after death, but before the next life. It is a pro­cess of change, of seek­ing, of yearn­ing to be. To speak of this as an ‘in-between state’ is admit­tedly a reific­a­tion of the concept, which already stretches the actual state­ments from which it is derived. Nev­er­the­less, it is prob­ably inev­it­able that we keep using this ter­min­o­logy, which is fine as long as we remem­ber that it is just a con­veni­ent way to gen­er­al­ize about indi­vidual exper­i­ences, not a def­in­ite realm or zone of existence.

In addi­tion to indic­at­ing the onto­lo­gical status of the in-between state, the Sut­tas also give us epi­stem­o­lo­gical guidelines: how can we know the truth about rebirth? The most obvi­ous way is through the devel­op­ment of the psychic abil­ity to recol­lect one’s past lives and to see the arising and passing away of beings accord­ing to their kamma. These know­ledges are taught through­out the Sut­tas, where they are depic­ted as arising from the pur­i­fied con­scious­ness of the fourth jhana. A second way is through infer­ence: based on dir­ect insight into present exper­i­ence, we infer that past and future exper­i­ence must have oper­ated accord­ing to sim­ilar prin­ciples.⁴⁷ Finally, we may learn about rebirth from a reli­able teacher. While less rig­or­ous, per­haps, than the two pre­vi­ous means, this should not be neg­lected, for the vast major­ity of people in fact accept or reject the idea of rebirth by depend­ing on someone they regard as a reli­able teacher. For some, that is the Buddha; for oth­ers, someone who may have exper­i­enced a NDE; for oth­ers, it may be the sci­entific com­munity. The Buddha fre­quently gave teach­ings on his past lives, on the rebirths of oth­ers, or on the dif­fer­ent realms of beings, and it seems reas­on­able to sup­pose that he would only have given such teach­ings if they were bene­fi­cial. In any case, such means of know­ing (pamāṇa), while they may or may not lead to cor­rect res­ults, are per­fectly rational and do not require the pos­tu­la­tion of any meta­phys­ical entity.

By way of con­trast, the Pāyāsi Sutta gives examples of wrong ways to learn about rebirth.⁴⁸ Prince Pāyāsi per­forms an elab­or­ate series of exper­i­ments to test whether the soul exists. He takes con­demned crim­in­als and suf­foc­ates them in sealed jars to see if their soul escapes; or he weighs them before and after death; and I’ll spare you the other grue­some tests. But the monk Kumāra Kas­sapa cri­ti­cizes him for seek­ing for a soul in a fool­ish way. The les­son is worth bear­ing in mind. We have no guar­an­tee that our mod­ern sci­entific meth­ods will neces­sar­ily be any more effect­ive than Pāyāsi’s; and we are more con­strained in how we treat our test subjects!

Notes

1. This paper relies very heav­ily on research and trans­la­tions by Piya Tan, espe­cially his paper ‘Is Rebirth Imme­di­ate? A study of canon­ical sources’. For the Majjhima Nikāya I rely on Bhikkhu Anālayo’s A Com­par­at­ive Study of the Majjhima Nikāya (forth­com­ing). ↩
2. The exact date of the first schism is dis­puted. Most schol­ars place it in between the Second Coun­cil and Aśoka, while in my Sects & Sec­tari­an­ism I argue the first schism could not have been until after Aśoka. ↩
3. The five Nikāyas of the Pali col­lec­tions; the four Āgamas and vari­ous other places in the Chinese Canon; vari­ous Sanskrit and other Indic lan­guage Sut­tas recon­struc­ted from ancient manu­scripts; occa­sional texts found within the Tibetan Canon. Much of the Āgama mater­ial stems from the (Mūla) Sar­vāstivāda school, although other schools, par­tic­u­larly the Dharmagup­taka, are also rep­res­en­ted. Due to con­straints of time, I am not able to fully research each point in this essay on a com­par­at­ive basis. I note any pas­sages I have found where the Chinese or other texts dif­fer sig­ni­fic­antly from the Pali. I do not list all par­al­lel ver­sions, as in some cases there are very many; par­al­lel sut­tas may be loc­ated through www​.sut​tacent​ral​.net. Ref­er­ences to the Majjhima and Dīgha Nikāyas (MN, DN) refer to the Sutta num­ber and sec­tion of the Wis­dom Pub­lic­a­tion trans­la­tion. SĀ, MĀ, etc., refer to the Saṁyukta Āgama (T no. 99), Mad­hyama Āgama (T no. 26), etc. ↩
4. Thomas McEvil­ley, The Shape of Ancient Thought (All­worth Press, 2002), pg. 98ff. ↩
5. But see Jean­ine Miller, The Vedas: Har­mony, Med­it­a­tion, and Ful­fill­ment (Rider, 1974), sec­tion 3. ↩
6. E.g. Ajita Kesakam­balī at DN 2. 23. ↩
7. Itivut­taka 70, 71. ↩
8. SN 22.79 ↩
9. SN 22.99, 100 ↩
10. DN 1.2.38. Sim­ilar views are described at SN 24.37–44, although these omit the descrip­tion as ‘per­cipi­ent’. ↩
11. Saṅkhāra is defined as cetanā ‘inten­tion’ at SN 22.56, 57: Chay­ime, bhikkhave, cetanākāyā: rūpas­añcetanā, sad­dasañcetanā, gand­has­añcetanā, rasas­añcetanā, phoṭṭhabbasañcetanā, dham­mas­añcetanā. Ime vuc­canti, bhikkhave, saṅkhārā.; SA 41 and 42 sim­il­arly define saṅkhārā as ‘inten­tion’, though the phras­ing is a little dif­fer­ent. AN 6.63 defines kamma as ‘inten­tion’: Cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi. Cet­ay­itvā kammaṃ karoti kāy­ena vācāya man­asā. ‘It is inten­tion, monks, that I call kamma. Hav­ing inten­ded one acts through body, speech, mind.’ Saṅkhāra and kamma, then, which are both formed from the same root, would seem to be identical in mean­ing, fur­ther under­scor­ing the rela­tion between saṅkhāra and rebirth. The dif­fer­ence is that saṅkhāra tends to be used in philosophical/existential con­texts like the aggreg­ates or depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion, while kamma is used in eth­ical con­texts. ↩
12. MN 120. This Sutta is pecu­liar in emphas­iz­ing only one’s aspir­a­tion based on whole­some kamma as the con­di­tion for rebirth, even in the Brahmā realms, even though this would nor­mally be under­stood to require the devel­op­ment of jhana. The only Chinese par­al­lel for this Sutta (MĀ 168) dif­fers con­sid­er­ably and lacks these pecu­li­ar­it­ies. Some unpub­lished Gand­hārī frag­ments par­al­lel part of MN 120. ↩
13. Hence such phrases as the ‘sta­tions of con­scious­ness’ viññāṇaṭṭhiti (i.e. planes of rebirth) at DN 15.33, the viññāṇasota (stream of con­scious­ness) at DN 28.7, or the saṁvattanikaviññāṇa (on-flowing con­scious­ness) at MN 106.3. The Chinese ver­sion of this lat­ter pas­sage ( MĀ 75 at T I 542b22) seems to use 本意 ‘root thought’ for saṁvattanikaviññāṇa.While it may be purely coin­cid­ental, this term is sug­gest­ive of the Mahāsaṅghika concept of the mūlavijnāna (root-consciousness), which accord­ing to Vasubandhu’s Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa played a role under­ly­ing rebirth sim­ilar to the bhavaṅga of the Theravād­ins or the ālayavijñāna of the Yogacārins. See Stefan Anacker, Seven Works of Vas­ub­andhu (Motilal Barnas­i­dass, 1998), pg. 114. ↩
14. MN 38.3; the par­al­lel at MĀ 201 is sim­ilar. ↩
15. E.g. SN 22.59 Anattalakkhaṇa, MN 35 Cūḷasaccaka. The Chinese par­al­lels to MN 35 ( SĀ 110 at T II 35a-37b and EĀ 37.10 at T II 715a-717b) dif­fer slightly in word­ing, but all indic­ate Sac­caka was famil­iar with the aggreg­ates, and indeed pro­claimed them to be the Self. ↩
16. Bṛhadāraññaka 2.5.12. ↩
17. E.g. DN 1 Brah­ma­jāla, MN 136 Mahākammavibhaṅga. The Chinese ver­sions are sim­ilar in this respect. ↩
18. SN 22.47: Ye hi keci, bhikkhave, samaṇā vā brāhmaṇā vā anekavi­hitaṃ attānaṃ samanu­pas­samānā samanu­passanti, sab­bete pañcupādānakkhandhe samanu­passanti, etesaṃ vā aññataraṃ. Sim­il­arly SĀ 45 at T II 11b4: 若諸沙門．婆羅門見有我者。一切皆於此五受陰見我; and SĀ 65 at T II 16b16: 若沙門．婆羅門計有我。一切皆於此五受陰計有我. ↩
19. SN 22.82. The Chinese word­ing is a little dif­fer­ent: ‘So if there is no self, who will in future time receive the res­ults of kam­mas per­formed by the not-self?’ SA 58 at T II 15c. Trns. Choong Mun-keat, The Fun­da­mental Teach­ings of Early Buddhism, Har­ra­sow­itz Ver­lag, 2000, pg. 67. ↩
20. Accord­ing to Thich Thien Chau, The Lit­er­at­ure of the Per­son­al­ists of Early Buddhism (Motilal Barnas­i­dass, 1999), pg. 208, note 764, cer­tain Mahāsaṅghika branches and the early Mahīśā­sa­kas rejec­ted the in-between state, while the Pug­ga­lavād­ins, Sar­vāstivād­ins, cer­tain Mahāsaṅgika branches, later Mahīśā­sa­kas, and Dārṣṭāntikas accep­ted it. ↩
21. Kathāvat­thu 8.2 (Points of Con­tro­versy, pg. 212–3) ↩
22. T XXVI, no. 1539. See http://​en​.wiki​pe​dia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​V​i​j​n​a​n​a​k​aya. A recent dis­cus­sion of the argu­ment on time in the Vijñānakāya is at http://​buddhism​.lib​.ntu​.edu​.tw/​F​U​L​L​T​E​X​T​/​J​R​-​A​D​M​/​b​a​s​t​o​w​.​htm. ↩
23. MN 143: Atha kho anāthapiṇḍiko gahapati, acirapakkante āyas­mante ca sāri­putte āyas­mante ca ānande, kāla­makāsi tus­itaṃ kāyaṃ upapa­jji. ↩
24. Upādāna can mean either ‘fuel’ or ‘grasp­ing’, and this pas­sage puns on the two mean­ings. ↩
25. Yasmiṃ kho, vac­cha, samaye imañca kāyaṃ nikkhip­ati, satto ca aññataraṃ kāyaṃ anupapanno hoti, tamahaṃ taṇhūpādānaṃ vadāmi. ↩
26. SN 44.9. The Chinese par­al­lel SĀ2 190 at T II 443b04 is sim­ilar: 身死於此。意生於彼。於其中間。誰為其取 (When this body dies, and there is desire to be born else­where, what sus­tains the inter­val between?) How­ever SĀ 957 at T II 244b4 is not so expli­cit: 眾生於此處命終。乘意生身生於餘處. (When one ends one life, desire is the means by which one grasps hold of a another body.) This pas­sage is not noticed in the Kathāvatthu’s dis­cus­sion. ↩
27. DN 33.1.9, SN 46.3, SN 48.15, SN 48.24/5, SN 48.66, SN 51.26, SN 54.5, SN 55.25.8, AN 3.86.3 (only last & first kinds men­tioned), AN 3.87.3, AN 4.131, AN 7.16, AN 7.17, AN 7.52, AN 7.80, AN 9.12, AN 10.63, AN 10.64. A Chinese par­al­lel SĀ 736 at T II 196c16 is sim­ilar: 而得五下分結盡。中般涅槃. ↩
28. See Thien Chau, pp. 208–9. ↩
29. Peter Har­vey, The Self­less Mind (Curzon Press, 1995), pg. 100; Bhikkhu Bodhi, Con­nec­ted Dis­courses of the Buddha (Wis­dom, 2000), pg. 1902, note 65. ↩
30. AN 7.52 ↩
31. Peter Har­vey, The Self­less Mind, pg. 101; Peter Mase­field, Divine Rev­el­a­tion in Pali Buddhism (Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 116, 120; cf Alex Way­man ‘The Intermediate-State Dis­pute in Buddhism’ in Buddhist Stud­ies in Hon­our of I.B. Horner, ed L. Cous­ins et al. (Dordrecht & Boston:D. Reidel, 1974), pp. 227–239. ↩
32. MN 144.11 = SN 35.87 = Udāna 81; cf SN 12.40. See also Māluṅkyāputta Sutta, SN 35.95. ↩
33. MĀ 201 at T I 769b24 has 香陰 ‘fra­grance’, evid­ently deriv­ing from Indic gandha (vl. 生陰 ‘birth aggreg­ate’), while EĀ 21.3 at T II 602c19+20 has 外識 ‘external con­scious­ness’ or 欲識 ‘desir­ing con­scious­ness’. The EĀ ver­sion is trans­lated by Thích Huyên-Vi and Bhikkhu Pāsādika in col­lab­or­a­tion with Sara Boin-Webb, ori­gin­ally pub­lished Buddhist Stud­ies Review 20.1, 2003, p 76–80. Avail­able at http://​ekot​tara​.google​pages​.com/​e​k​o​t​t​a​r​a​a​g​a​m​a​2​1​.22. ↩
34. See Oliver Hec­tor de Alwis Wijesekera, R.N. Dondekar, M. H. F. Jay­as­ur­iya. Buddhist and Vedic Stud­ies: A Mis­cel­lany. (Motilal Banarsi­dass, 1994), pp. 175–212. ↩
35. Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta, MN 38.26. ↩
36. MN 93.18. ↩
37. See Bhikkhu Bodhi, Con­nec­ted Dis­courses, pp. 730–1, note 17. ↩
38. SN 12.11, 12.12, 12.63, 12.64, MN 38.15/1:261. Cf Metta Sutta, Sn 1.8 = Kh no 9. ↩
39. In the Abhidharmakoṣa, a Sanskrit Buddhist work, the term saṁbhavaiśinis one of the five names for the inter­me­di­ate exist­ence, along with man­o­maya, gand­harva and (abhi)nirvṛtti (Abhk:P3.40c-41a/2:122). ↩
40. DN 2.96. Sanskrit par­al­lel in Kon­rad Meisig, Das Śrāmaṇyaphala Sūtra (Otto Har­rassow­itz, 1987), pg. 352. Cf MN 39.19, the two Chinese ver­sions of which, MĀ 182 at T I 724c-725c and EĀ 49.8 at T II 801c-802b, how­ever lack the sec­tion with this simile. ↩
41. SN 35.204. ↩
42. Peter Har­vey, The Self­less Mind, pg. 103. ↩
43. The Pug­ga­lavād­ins expli­citly described the in-between state in terms of the aggreg­ates. See Thien Chau, pg. 207. ↩
44. DN 15.20 ↩
45. DN 1.3.12; DN 2.85–86. ↩
46. SN 22.85. Also see SA 105, SA 72. ↩
47. SN 12.33, 34. ↩
48. DN 23. In addi­tion to sev­eral Chinese par­al­lels, this is pos­sibly the only Buddhist Sutta with a Jaina par­al­lel. See Willem Bollée, The Story of Paesi, Wies­baden: Har­rassow­itz, 2002. ↩