Non-Self, Rebirth, and Nirvana

"What self, then, will deeds done by what is nonself affect?" — a monk's question in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi¹

"Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling." — Derek Parfit, 1984²

"It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." — Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:44³

Summary

Buddhism teaches that a person has no self (Pali anattā, "not-self"), and also that a person is reborn again and again until reaching nirvana (Pali nibbāna, "extinguishing").  A skeptic and a Christian ask the same question:  if there is no self, what is reborn, whose are the deeds, and who reaches nirvana?  This article states the Buddhist answers in their own texts, tests them, and then applies the same tests to the Christian hope of resurrection.

1. The early texts deny that any part of a person is a self, and refuse to say more. The Buddha's second sermon goes through the five "aggregates" (Pali khandha: body, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness) and says of each, "This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self."¹ Asked point-blank "is there a self?" and "is there no self?", the Buddha stays silent, because either answer would side with a wrong view.¹ He rebukes a monk who taught that "this same consciousness" travels from life to life.⁴ These discourses belong to the oldest layer of the canon. The famous chariot dialogue and the formula "neither the same nor another" come from the Questions of King Milinda, whose oldest part was composed between about 100 BC and AD 200; the classic Theravāda account of rebirth comes from Buddhaghosa, about AD 370 to 450.⁵⁵
2. The canon raises the coherence question itself, and answers it with a middle way. A monk asks, "What self, then, will deeds done by what is nonself affect?" The Buddha calls the thought one "dominated by craving" and turns him back to impermanence.¹ Elsewhere he rejects both "the one who acts is the same as the one who experiences the result" and "the one who acts is one, the one who experiences the result is another."¹ What links one life to the next is a chain of causes, not a thing that moves.
3. The schools split over what carries the chain. Theravāda says a new "rebirth-linking consciousness" arises, caused by the last one but not carried over from it. The Personalists (Sanskrit Pudgalavāda) held that there is a "person" that is neither the same as the aggregates nor different from them. The Theravāda refuted them in the longest debate of its Kathāvatthu,⁵ yet in the seventh century they made up about half of all non-Mahāyāna monks.⁶ The Yogācāra school posited a "storehouse consciousness" that carries the seeds of past deeds. The Madhyamaka school held that persons and the aggregates alike are "empty" of any nature of their own.
4. The no-self view of rebirth is coherent, but it pays for coherence. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit held that the view is true and that "Buddha would have agreed."² Mark Siderits shows that rebirth and no-self do not contradict each other.⁷ The memory objection is answered: memory can be a causal process without a rememberer who lasts. Three costs remain. Deserved reward and punishment pass to someone who is "neither the same nor another." Nothing in a causal chain stops it from branching into two, and in nature one fertilised egg becomes two people about half a million times a year.⁸ And the only evidence offered that the chain crosses death is the children's past-life cases, which a sibling article finds weak.
5. The texts leave nirvana undefined, on purpose. The early discourses define it as "the ending of greed, hate, and delusion,"⁹ speak of "an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned,"¹⁰ and refuse to say whether a freed person exists after death: "'They're reborn', 'they're not reborn', 'they're both reborn and not reborn', 'they're neither reborn nor not reborn'—none of these apply."¹¹ They also deny that nirvana is annihilation.⁴ Scholars and schools have read it as extinction, as an unconditioned reality or consciousness, and as beyond both. The texts best support the last reading, which is a refusal to describe, not a description.
6. The Christian hope is a different goal, not a better-described version of the same one. Paul promises the same persons raised in changed bodies: "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body," and believers will see God "face to face."³³ Buddhism counts the wish to go on existing as a form of craving. Christianity counts the loss of persons as a loss. Neither destination can be observed. The difference in evidence is that the Christian hope rests on a claim about one dated event, the resurrection of Jesus, which history can examine.
7. By the same standard, Christian accounts of identity face matching puzzles. If the dead have no soul, what makes the raised person the same one? Peter van Inwagen once suggested that God might secretly preserve each corpse. If God could make one perfect copy, he could make two, and John Hick's "replica" view has the same branching problem as Buddhist rebirth. Matter is reused: every living body holds an estimated 10^22 to 10^23 carbon atoms that were once in earlier human bodies at death, 0.4 to 9 grams of its 16 kilograms of carbon.¹² Christianity does better in one way: it keeps a subject who can deserve, be forgiven, and be loved. It does worse in another: it needs either a soul no one can observe or an act of God no one can check. Neither side's mechanism of identity can be tested. On these questions the honest score is close to even, and the decision between the two hopes turns on the evidence each offers for its founding claims.

Part 1: What the early texts say

Conclusion first.  The oldest Buddhist discourses teach three things about the self.  None of the five parts that make up a person is a self.  Everything in a person arises from causes and passes away.  And the Buddha would not answer the bare question whether a self exists, or whether a freed person exists after death.  The early texts give no theory of a thing that is reborn.  They deny that consciousness is such a thing.

Which texts are early

The discourses quoted in this Part come from the four main collections of the Pali canon (the Nikāyas) and a few early books of the fifth.  Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali, who defend these texts' authenticity, count as early "the bulk of the Suttas in the main four Pali Nikāyas and parallel Āgama literature in Chinese," plus "significant parts of the Sutta Nipāta, Udāna, Itivuttaka, Dhammapada," and they exclude the "Abhidhamma, Mahāyāna Sūtras, Buddha biographies" and the commentaries.¹³  Even these texts were passed on by memory for three to four centuries before anyone wrote them down.  The sibling article The Historical Buddha and the Early Texts weighs how far they reach back to the Buddha himself.

Three later works matter here and must be dated separately:

Not-self

The Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, "The Characteristic of Not-Self," is remembered as the Buddha's second sermon.  It takes each of the five aggregates in turn.  The aggregates (Pali khandha, "heaps") are form, meaning the body;  feeling, pleasant, painful or neutral;  perception, the recognising of things;  volitional formations, the will and other mental activity;  and consciousness, the bare knowing of an object.  Of the first the Buddha says:  "Bhikkhus, form is nonself.  For if, bhikkhus, form were self, this form would not lead to affliction, and it would be possible to have it of form:  'Let my form be thus; let my form not be thus.'"  He then asks whether anything "impermanent, suffering, and subject to change" is "fit to be regarded thus:  'This is mine, this I am, this is my self'?"  The monks answer no, and he concludes that every aggregate "should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom thus:  'This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.'"¹

The argument has two premises.  A self would be under its owner's control, and a self would be lasting and satisfying.  No aggregate is either.  So no aggregate is a self.  This argument shows that nothing a person can find in experience is a self.  It does not, by its own terms, show that there is nothing else.  That gap is where modern scholars divide, as Part 3 shows.

Another discourse is blunter about the self of the philosophers.  The view "after death I shall be permanent, everlasting, eternal, not subject to change; I shall endure as long as eternity" is called "an utterly and completely foolish teaching," because "a self and what belongs to a self are not apprehended as true and established."⁴

Dependent origination

In place of a self the texts put a chain of conditions, "dependent origination" (Pali paṭicca-samuppāda).  Its standard form has twelve links:  "With ignorance as condition, volitional formations come to be; with volitional formations as condition, consciousness; with consciousness as condition, name-and-form; with name-and-form as condition, the six sense bases; with the six sense bases as condition, contact; with contact as condition, feeling; with feeling as condition, craving; with craving as condition, clinging; with clinging as condition, existence; with existence as condition, birth; with birth as condition, aging-and-death."  "Name-and-form" is the living mind and body.  Ending ignorance ends the chain, "the cessation of this whole mass of suffering."¹

The chain is how the texts explain rebirth.  Consciousness is said to enter the womb:  "If consciousness were not conceived in the mother's womb, would name and form coagulate there?"¹⁴  A conception needs three things:  the parents' union, the mother's fertile time, and the presence of the gandhabba, a being ready to be born.⁴  Yet the same discourse condemns the monk Sāti, who taught that "it is this same consciousness that runs and wanders through the round of rebirths, not another."  Asked what that consciousness is, Sāti says it is "that which speaks and feels and experiences here and there the result of good and bad actions."  The Buddha calls him a "misguided man":  "have I not stated in many ways consciousness to be dependently arisen, since without a condition there is no origination of consciousness?"⁴

So consciousness links one life to the next, but as a cause that gives rise to a new consciousness, not as one consciousness that travels.  The early texts say this much and no more.

The middle way about the doer

Twice the canon puts the identity question in plain words.  A brahmin asks, "is the one who acts the same as the one who experiences the result?"  The Buddha answers:  "'The one who acts is the same as the one who experiences the result':  this, brahmin, is one extreme."  "'The one who acts is one, and the one who experiences the result is another':  this, brahmin, is the second extreme.  Without veering towards either of these extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma by the middle," and he recites the twelve links.¹  To the ascetic Kassapa he adds that the first extreme "amounts to eternalism" and the second "amounts to annihilationism."¹  Eternalism is the belief in a permanent self.  Annihilationism is the belief that a person is destroyed at death.

The answer does not say who suffers the result of a deed.  It replaces the question with a description of causes.

The silence

The wanderer Vacchagotta asks the Buddha directly:  "How is it now, Master Gotama, is there a self?"  The Buddha is silent.  "Then, Master Gotama, is there no self?"  Silent again.  After Vacchagotta leaves, the Buddha tells his attendant Ānanda why.  To say "There is a self" would side "with those ascetics and brahmins who are eternalists."  To say "There is no self" would side with "those ascetics and brahmins who are annihilationists," and Vacchagotta, "already confused, would have fallen into even greater confusion, thinking, 'It seems that the self I formerly had does not exist now.'"¹

The passage is short, and much rests on it.  Bhikkhu Sujato translates the same question as "does the self survive?", which makes it a question about death rather than about existence.⁹  Either way the Buddha declines to say "there is no self" as a flat metaphysical claim.  Those who read anattā as a method for letting go, rather than a doctrine, lean on this text.  Those who read it as a doctrine point out that the Buddha's first reason is that "There is a self" would contradict "the knowledge that 'all phenomena are nonself'."¹

The chariot

The most famous image of the doctrine is already in an early verse.  The nun Vajirā answers the tempter Māra:  "This is just a pile of conditions, / you won't find a sentient being here.  / When the parts are assembled / we use the word 'chariot'.  / So too, when the aggregates are present / 'sentient being' is the convention we use."⁹

The Questions of King Milinda turns this verse into a dialogue between the Greek king Menander, who ruled in the north-west in the second century BC, and a monk called Nāgasena.  Indologist Oskar von Hinüber calls it "an ahistorical text":  the real king is placed in conversation with men who lived centuries before him.⁵  Nāgasena says his name "is only a generally understood term, a designation in common use.  For there is no permanent individuality (no soul) involved in the matter".  The king objects that then there is no Nāgasena at all.  Nāgasena asks him whether the pole, the axle or the wheels is the chariot he rode in, and the king admits that "chariot" is the name for all these parts together.  Nāgasena replies that "just even so it is on account of all those things you questioned me about ... that I come under the generally understood term, the designation in common use," of his name.¹⁵

Then the king asks the identity question:  "He who is born ... does he remain the same or become another?"  "Neither the same nor another."  A lamp burns all night;  the flame of the first watch is not the flame of the third, yet "The light comes from the same lamp all the night through."  "Just so, O king, is the continuity of a person or thing maintained.  One comes into being, another passes away; and the rebirth is, as it were, simultaneous.  Thus neither as the same nor as another does a man go on to the last phase of his self-consciousness."¹⁵

What is reborn?  "Name-and-form is reborn."  Not the same name-and-form:  "by this name-and-form deeds are done, good or evil, and by these deeds (this Karma) another name-and-form is reborn."  Is the new one free of the old one's deeds?  No.  A man who steals a mango cannot plead that the mango he took is not the one the owner planted, "because ... he would be guilty in respect of the last mango which resulted from the first one."  "Just so, great king, deeds good or evil are done by this name-and-form and another is reborn.  But that other is not thereby released from its deeds (its Karma)."¹⁵

These dialogues are the clearest statement of the Buddhist answer, but they are not early discourse.  They show what monks were teaching some two to five centuries after the Buddha.

Part 2: What is reborn? The schools' answers

Conclusion first.  Every Buddhist school kept the chain of causes.  They split over whether the chain needs something to hold it together.  Theravāda said no:  a new consciousness arises from the old one, and the "experiencer" of a deed's result is a figure of speech.  The Personalists said that a person exists who can be called neither the same as the aggregates nor different from them.  The Yogācāra school placed a store of seeds beneath ordinary awareness.  The Madhyamaka school said that nothing at all, person or aggregate, has a fixed nature of its own.  The size of the Personalist school, and the way Yogācāra had to warn against its own doctrine, show that many Buddhists found the bare chain too thin to carry deeds from one life to the next.

Theravāda: caused, not carried

Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification gives the standard Theravāda account.  At death a last moment of consciousness ceases.  At once a "rebirth-linking" consciousness (Pali paṭisandhi) arises in a new womb, "linking across the gap separating the beginning of the next becoming."  It "has neither come here from the previous becoming nor has it become manifest without the kamma, the formations, the pushing, the objective field, etc., as cause."¹⁶  It is "not a lasting being, not a soul."¹⁶

Buddhaghosa gives four images for a thing that is caused without being carried:  "an echo, a light, a seal impression, a looking-glass image."  Each "come[s] into being without going elsewhere."  "And with a stream of continuity there is neither identity nor otherness.  For if there were absolute identity in a stream of continuity, there would be no forming of curd from milk.  And yet if there were absolute otherness, the curd would not be derived from the milk."¹⁶

He states the hardest objection himself:  "And whose is the fruit since there is no experiencer?"  His answer is that "experiencer" is a convention, as people say that a tree "fruits" when fruit appears on it.  "There is therefore no need at all here for a superfluous experiencer."¹⁶  He quotes older teachers:  "There is no doer of a deed / Or one who reaps the deed's result; / Phenomena alone flow on— / No other view than this is right."¹⁶  Steven Collins, author of the standard study of the Theravāda doctrine of the person, sums up the scheme:  the rebirth-linking moment "is part of the mental side of a new name-and-form."¹⁷

On this view there is no gap between lives.  The Kathāvatthu rejects an in-between state, which its commentary describes as "an interim stage where a being awaits reconception for a week or longer," because the Buddha named only three realms of existence and an in-between state fits none of them.¹⁸  Other schools, and later Tibetan Buddhism with its bardo, kept the in-between state.  Buddhists do not agree whether rebirth is instant.

The Personalists: a person neither the same nor different

The Personalist school (Sanskrit Pudgalavāda, "teaching of the person") had a discourse on its side.  The Buddha calls the five aggregates a burden and asks who carries it:  "It should be said:  the person, this venerable one of such a name and clan."¹  Most of the school's books are lost.  One treatise survives in Chinese translation.  It says:  "it cannot be said whether the skandhas and the self are different or not different."  The person is named in dependence on the aggregates as fire "derives its name from the fuel on which it depends," and "this life and the future life receive their respective results."¹⁹  By its own account, the Personalists' "person" was not the permanent soul of the Hindu schools.  It was an answer to the question of who carries a deed's result across a death.

The Theravāda answer opens the Kathāvatthu.  "Is 'the person' known in the sense of a real and ultimate fact?"  The Personalist says yes.  "Is the person known in the same way, as a real and ultimate fact is known?"  He says no, for he does not count the person as one more element alongside the aggregates.  The Theravādin closes the trap:  "Acknowledge your refutation."¹⁸  Either the person is one more ultimate thing, which the Personalist denies, or it is not ultimate at all, which concedes the Theravāda case.  The Personalist reply was that the person is a third kind of thing, neither ultimate nor merely a name.  Mark Siderits, a leading modern defender of the Buddhist reductionist view, notes that the sources disagree about exactly what the school claimed, and that the only "non-hostile" text survives "only in Chinese translation."²⁰  Its translator, K. Venkataramanan, held that they "have been accused of a view which, as we understand now, is not theirs, viz., a belief in a real individual ending in the heresy of eternalism."¹⁹  The Belgian historian Étienne Lamotte calls it "the disguised animism which caused the Vatsiputriya-Sammatiyas to adopt an indescribable pudgala."⁶

The Personalists were not a fringe.  When the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang counted the monks of India and Central Asia in the early seventh century, the largest non-Mahāyāna school was the Personalist Saṃmitīya, which by Lamotte's reckoning alone made up half of the non-Mahāyāna monks.  Xuanzang counted 134,800 non-Mahāyāna monks and 119,430 Mahāyāna monks.⁶  So about 67,000 of some 254,000 monks, roughly a quarter, belonged to a school that held a person carries the results of deeds from life to life.

Yogācāra: a storehouse of seeds

The Yogācāra ("practice of yoga") school, "founded in the fourth century C.E.,"²¹ gave the chain a carrier of another kind.  Beneath the six ordinary kinds of consciousness lies a "storehouse consciousness" (Sanskrit ālaya-vijñāna), which holds the "seeds" left by past deeds until they ripen.  Vasubandhu's Thirty Verses call it "the holder of all seeds" and say that "It always evolves like a flowing stream / And is abandoned in the stage of arhatship."²²  The great Chinese commentary on the verses admits the danger:  "sentient beings grasp it as an inner self."²²

The scripture that introduced the doctrine, "apparently composed in the second century c.e.,"²¹ says the same in a verse placed in the Buddha's mouth:  "The appropriating consciousness is profound and subtle indeed; all its seeds are like a rushing torrent.  Fearing that they would imagine and cling to it as to a self, I have not revealed it to the foolish."²¹  A doctrine that must be hidden from ordinary believers lest they mistake it for a self is, at the least, close enough to a self to be mistaken for one.

Madhyamaka: empty all the way down

Nāgārjuna, who "lived in South India in approximately the second century C.E." and founded the Madhyamaka ("middle way") school,²³ attacked the question from the other side.  If the self "were the aggregates, / It would have arising and ceasing."  "If it were different from the aggregates, / It would not have the characteristics of the aggregates."²³  But the aggregates too are "empty":  they have no nature of their own, because everything that exists depends on something else.  "Whatever is dependently co-arisen / That is explained to be emptiness. / That, being a dependent designation, / Is itself the middle way."²³

For Madhyamaka the question "what is reborn?" assumes too much on both sides.  There is no ultimate self, and no ultimate aggregates either.  Persons are as real as anything else, which is to say conventionally real.  Nāgārjuna even says that the buddhas taught "That there is a self," "the doctrine of no-self," and the "Doctrine of neither self nor nonself," each to the hearers who needed it.²³  This removes the Personalist's motive, since the aggregates are no more ultimate than the person.  It also removes the Theravādin's footing, since there are no ultimate elements left to do the linking.

Part 3: Does rebirth without a self hold together?

Conclusion first.  As logic, yes.  The view contains no contradiction, its best modern defenders show this, and the oldest objection to it, the argument from memory, has a good answer.  But the view buys its coherence by giving up three things.  It gives up a subject who deserves the results of deeds.  It gives up any guarantee that a life has only one successor.  And it rests on a link across death for which there is no independent evidence.

Test 1: Is the view consistent?

The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit argued in Reasons and Persons (1984) that "We are not separately existing entities, apart from our brains and bodies, and various interrelated physical and mental events," and that a person's identity over time "just involves" psychological connectedness and continuity "with any cause."²  He called this the Reductionist View, held that it is true, and added:  "As Appendix J shows, Buddha would have agreed."²  His Appendix J is a page of Buddhist texts set side by side, with no comment.

Mark Siderits has worked out the Buddhist version in detail.  "The Buddhist Reductionist claims that the statement 'Persons exist' is conventionally true but ultimately false."²⁰  On this view "identity over rebirth clearly involves no physical continuants; rebirth linkage is understood entirely in terms of causal connections between psychological events."²⁰  His conclusion:  "the theory of two truths and the claim that persons are conventionally real may be used to show that rebirth and non-self are not incompatible.  If Buddhists ought to stop believing in rebirth, it is not because that belief is inconsistent with their central tenet that there is no self."⁷

This much is right.  A chain of causes can run from one life to the next without a thing that runs along it, as a fire spreads across a field without any one flame travelling.  A skeptic who calls the doctrine self-contradictory has not understood it.  Siderits himself grants the cost in plain words:  "rebirth without a transmigrating self is widely seen as highly counter-intuitive."²⁰  Counter-intuitive is not incoherent, but the next four tests show where the cost falls.

Test 2: Who remembers?

The classic Hindu objection comes from Śaṅkara, the great teacher of Advaita Vedānta, who lived in the eighth century AD.²⁴  If everything lasts only a moment, the perceiver does too, and then memory is impossible.  "That remembrance can take place only if it belongs to the same person who previously made the perception; for we observe that what one man has experienced is not remembered by another man.  How, indeed, could there arise the conscious state expressed in the sentences, 'I saw that thing, and now I see this thing,' if the seeing person were not in both cases the same?"²⁵

Vasubandhu, the Abhidharma master "who is believed to have lived during the fourth century,"²² had already answered.  His opponent asks:  "If there is no Soul, who is it that remembers?"  Memory, he replies, needs no rememberer apart from the process:  "Consciousness, being in a special condition and connected with a (previous) knowledge of the remembered object, produces its recollection."  Why does one person not remember another's experience?  Because "there is no connection between them.  They are not mutually related as cause and effect, as is the case between moments belonging to the same stream of thought."  And what does "Caitra remembers" mean?  "In the current (of phenomena), which is designated by the name Caitra a recollection appears.  We notice the fact and express it.  It is no more!"²⁶  Parfit printed this exchange in his Appendix J.²

The reply works.  Śaṅkara shows that remembering feels like one subject at two times.  He does not show that the feeling needs a subject that lasts, rather than a causal stream that produces the feeling.  His sharper point, that a judgment of likeness needs "one mind grasping the similarity of two successive momentary existences,"²⁵ bites only against the strict Abhidharma claim that every element lasts an instant, not against a self that is a process.  Modern thinkers on both sides agree on this much.  The philosopher Evan Thompson, who draws on Buddhist sources, warns that "To infer from the absence of a single substantial self to the absence of the person, agent, or subject altogether is to fall prey to the nihilist or annihilationist extreme."²⁷  Galen Strawson calls the claim that there are no subjects of experience at all "demonstrably false," and notes that Buddhists "don't in fact deny the existence of short-lived subjects of experience."²⁸  The memory objection defeats a view no Buddhist school held.

One limit remains.  Within one life, the causal stream runs through one brain, and memory has a physical carrier.  Across death the stream has no known carrier.  That is Test 5.

Test 3: Whose are the deeds?

Here the cost is real, and the canon knows it.  The monk's question, "What self, then, will deeds done by what is nonself affect?", draws a rebuke, not an answer.¹  Buddhaghosa states the objection fully:  if nothing passes over, "that fruit could be another person's or due to other [kamma] ... And whose is the fruit since there is no experiencer?"¹⁶  His answer is that "absolute identity and absolute otherness are excluded."¹⁶  An early teacher quoted by Vasubandhu saw the danger from the other side:  if people "did cease to believe in the existence of a conditioned Self, then the tender child of its moral merit would perish."²⁶

The Milinda's mango argument is the best-known defence, and it proves less than it needs.  In the story the thief is the same man who stole;  only the mango has changed.  In rebirth the one who stole dies, and a newborn bears the result.  The image shows that a changing object does not cancel guilt.  It does not show that guilt passes to a different agent.

Siderits, who defends Buddhist reductionism, draws the hard conclusion in a note:  "While belief in rebirth is compatible with Reductionism, the karma-rebirth ideological complex as a whole requires a strong form of retributivism that is incompatible with Reductionism."²⁰  Retributivism is the view that wrongdoers deserve to suffer for what they did.  If the reborn being is "neither the same nor another," then the one who suffers is not, in the full sense, the one who did wrong.  The doctrine stays consistent by treating desert as a figure of speech, as Buddhaghosa treats the "experiencer."  Whether karma then still works as an account of why people suffer is the subject of the sibling article Karma, Caste, and the Problem of Evil.

Test 4: Could the chain branch?

A cause can have two effects.  Nothing in "causal connections between psychological events" limits a dying person to one successor.  Philosophers call this case "fission," and it is not only a thought experiment.  When one fertilised egg splits, the result is identical twins.  Identical twinning happens in "about 4 per 1000 deliveries everywhere in the world."²⁹  With about 132 million births a year,³⁰ that is roughly half a million cases a year in which one conception becomes two people.⁸

Buddhist teaching, as the Buddhist ethicist Damien Keown sums it up, holds that individual life begins at fertilisation.  He considers whether the consciousness "of the intermediate being which took rebirth has divided into two parts, with one part in each twin," and rejects it as "at variance with basic Buddhist views on personal identity."  His answer is that the first embryo keeps its identity and the second is "a new individual life informed at the time of its creation by the spirit of an intermediate being — one at fertilisation and the other at the time of twinning."³¹  That answer is coherent.  It is also new:  the texts do not say it.  As Part 5 shows, Christians who hold that the soul begins at conception face the same case and answer it the same way.

Test 5: Does anything cross death?

This is not a question of logic.  Siderits puts it fairly:  "The doctrine of karma and rebirth is not a part of our common-sense world-view.  So it would be reasonable for us to ask what evidence there is that this doctrine is true."⁷  Parfit, who agreed with the Buddha about persons, rejected rebirth for lack of evidence.  He granted that "If there was sufficient evidence of reincarnation, we might have reason to believe" in a soul-like entity, and then said, "We do not in fact have the kind of evidence described above."²

The only empirical evidence offered for the link is the children who seem to remember past lives.  The sibling article Reincarnation and Past-Life Memories finds that of over 2,500 cases only 33 were written down before the previous person was identified, that a few remain unexplained, and that the cases' features follow local belief.  Even a genuine case would show that memory can cross death.  It would not show whether a self, a soul, or a bare causal stream carries it.

The verdict on coherence

The no-self account of rebirth is a coherent piece of metaphysics.  The memory objection does not refute it.  But "neither the same nor another" is a refusal to answer the identity question, and that refusal leaves desert without a full subject and the chain without a limit to one successor.  The Personalists and the Yogācāra storehouse were attempts by Buddhists themselves to fill those gaps.  They show that the gaps were felt inside the tradition, not invented by its critics.

Part 4: What nirvana is said to be

Conclusion first.  The early texts say what nirvana ends and decline to say what remains.  In this life nirvana is "the ending of greed, hate, and delusion."  After death the freed person "cannot be reckoned."  The texts speak of "an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned," which sounds like something real, and they deny that nirvana is annihilation, which rules out the simplest negative reading.  Scholars have read nirvana as extinction, as a positive unconditioned reality, and as a deliberate silence.  The schools split the same way.  The early evidence fits the third reading best.

In this life: the fires go out

The word means "blowing out" or "extinguishing."  Rupert Gethin, in a standard textbook, explains:  "Literally nirvana means 'blowing out' or 'extinguishing'," and "This is not a 'thing' but an event or experience."³²  The fires are greed, hatred and delusion.  Asked "What is extinguishment?", the Buddha's disciple Sāriputta answers:  "the ending of greed, hate, and delusion is called extinguishment."⁹  Another discourse gives the same definition for "the unconditioned":  "The destruction of lust, the destruction of hatred, the destruction of delusion:  this is called the unconditioned."¹

The texts distinguish two stages.  A living arahant (Pali arahant, one who has reached the goal) has nirvana "with residue":  "Their five sense faculties still remain," so they still feel pleasure and pain.  At death comes nirvana "with no residue":  "everything that's felt, being no longer relished, will become cool right here."³³

After death: beyond reckoning

What becomes of the arahant after death is one of the questions the Buddha would not answer.  Vacchagotta asks where a freed mind is reborn.  "'They're reborn' doesn't apply," the Buddha says, and the same for "not reborn," "both," and "neither."¹¹  Then he asks Vacchagotta about a fire that has gone out:  "in what direction did it go—east, south, west, or north?"  Vacchagotta answers that the question "doesn't apply":  the fire went out "due to lack of fuel."¹¹  "A realized one is freed from reckoning in terms of form.  They're deep, immeasurable, and hard to fathom, like the ocean."¹¹

A verse in the Sutta Nipāta, an early collection of poems, uses the same image.  "As a flame tossed by a gust of wind ... comes to an end and cannot be reckoned; so too, a sage freed from the set of mental phenomena comes to an end and cannot be reckoned."  The questioner presses:  "One who has disappeared—do they not exist?  Or are they free from disease for eternity?"  The answer refuses both:  "One who has disappeared cannot be defined ... When all things have been eradicated, eradicated, too, are all ways of speech."³⁴

The texts deny one reading outright.  A monk named Yamaka held that "a bhikkhu whose taints are destroyed is annihilated and perishes with the breakup of the body and does not exist after death."  His fellow monks call this a "pernicious view" and tell him, "Do not misrepresent the Blessed One."¹  The Buddha himself complains that he has been "baselessly, vainly, falsely, and wrongly misrepresented" as one who "teaches the annihilation, the destruction, the extermination of an existing being":  "both formerly and now what I teach is suffering and the cessation of suffering."⁴

The unconditioned

A few early verses sound positive.  "There is that sphere, monks, where there is no earth, no water, no fire, no air ... no this world, no world beyond, neither Moon nor Sun."  "There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned.  If, monks there were not that unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, you could not know an escape here from the born, become, made, and conditioned."¹⁰¹⁰  The translation matters here.  Bhikkhu Sujato renders the same line "There is, mendicants, freedom from rebirth, freedom from what has been produced, made, and conditioned,"³⁵ which turns a "something" into an "escape."  Another early verse speaks of "Consciousness where no form appears, / infinite, radiant all-round," and then ends:  "with the cessation of consciousness, / here they cease."¹⁴

Later texts are bolder.  The later parts of the Milinda say:  "Nirvâṇa exists, O king.  And it is perceptible to the mind," and "Nirvâṇa, O king, has nothing similar to it."³⁶  Buddhaghosa asks, "Is Nibbāna non-existent because it is unapprehendable, like the hare's horn?" and answers, "That is not so, because it is apprehendable by the [right] means."¹⁶

How scholars read it

Nineteenth-century Western scholars argued, in Gethin's summary, "either that nirvana was mere annihilation or that it was some form of eternal bliss."³²  T. W. Rhys Davids, the founder of the Pali Text Society, pushed back against the first reading:  the nirvana of the Milinda, he wrote, "is of course not a salvation to be enjoyed by a 'soul' after death, and in some other world; but a state of mind to be realised and enjoyed by a man here, on this earth, in this life, and in this life only."³⁶

The strongest case for extinction was made by Robert Caesar Childers, compiler of the first Pali–English dictionary.  He held that "Nirvana is used to designate two different things, the state of blissful sanctification called Arhatship, and the annihilation of existence in which Arhatship ends," and that "it is deliberately stated in innumerable passages, with all the clearness and emphasis of which language is capable, that the Arhat does not live again after death, but ceases to exist."³⁷  Guy Welbon's history of the Western debate ends by refusing to choose:  "nirvana's 'meanings' are many and include both annihilation and bliss, negation and affirmation, non-existence and existence."³⁸

Gethin separates three senses:  nirvana as "a particular event," as "the content of an experience," and as "the state or condition enjoyed by buddhas and arhats after death."³²  On the first two the tradition speaks plainly.  On the third, "one cannot say that the arhat after death exists, does not exist, both exists and does not exist, neither exists nor does not exist.  The ontological status of nirvana thus defies neat categorization and is 'undetermined'."³²  He adds that Buddhist writings contain "material that can be interpreted in isolation to support the view that nirvana amounts to annihilation ... and material to support the view that it is an eternal reality.  But this is not the point; the Buddhist tradition knows this."³²

Steven Collins, in his 2010 book on the subject, holds that in the systematic texts "nirvana is an unconditioned Existent (a dhamma) outside space and time."³⁹  On the fire image he rejects both easy readings.  He denies that the fire returns to a hidden state, since then "their invisible existence and potential reappearance would make release impossible."³⁹  And he denies that the image settles the matter for annihilation:  "The image does not solve the aporia; it states it."³⁹  An aporia is a puzzle with no way through.  The puzzles, he argues, "are there on purpose."³⁹

Other modern scholars read the positive verses as the key.  Peter Harvey argues that nirvana is a consciousness without any object, a "stopped" consciousness that does not cease to exist:  "just as space is a physical void, but not nothing ... so nibbana is a mental void ... but not nothing:  it is infinite discernment, with no object to limit it."  On his reading "the total non-existence of a tathagata beyond death seems to be ruled out."  He grants that the key passage could instead describe the freed monk's mind "before or at the moment of death."⁴⁰  The philosopher Miri Albahari goes further and argues that the Pali texts give no real evidence that the mind of an arahant and the unconditioned nirvana are two separate things.⁴¹  On the other side, the American monk Thānissaro Bhikkhu reads the fire image in the light of the old Indian belief that a fire which goes out is not destroyed but becomes too subtle and diffuse to locate, and concludes that "All attempts to describe the experience of nibbāna or the state of the Tathāgata after death—as existing, not existing, both, or neither—are refuted by the Buddha."⁴²

How the schools read it

The schools divided as the scholars later would.  Gethin:  "the followers of Sarvastivada Abhidharma argue that nirvana should be regarded as 'real' (dravya), while followers of the Theravada state that it should not be said to be 'non-existence' (abhava).  But for the Sautrantikas, even this is to say too much:  one should not say more than that nirvana is the absence of the defilements."³²

Nāgārjuna took the refusal to its end.  Nirvana is "Unrelinquished, unattained, / Unannihilated, not permanent, / Unarisen, unceased."  "Nirvana is not existent," since whatever exists ages and dies;  nor is it non-existent;  "Nirvana is neither existent nor nonexistent."²³  And, most famously:  "There is not the slightest difference / Between cyclic existence and nirvana."²³  For Madhyamaka, nirvana is not a place reached by leaving the world.  It is the world seen without grasping.

Weighing the readings

The extinction reading has the fire images and the plain fact that the aggregates, all there is of a person, stop.  But the texts deny it in so many words, twice.  The positive reading has the "unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned" and the "consciousness where no form appears."  But the same texts refuse to say that the freed person exists, and the clearest "consciousness" verse ends with consciousness ceasing.  What the early texts actually do is decline every description.  A skeptic may call that evasive.  A Buddhist calls it the only honest speech about something outside every category.  Either way it is a refusal, not a doctrine, and a reader who wants to know what nirvana is will not find the answer in the early texts.  That is a finding about the texts, and it marks the deepest contrast with the Christian hope, which describes its goal in personal terms:  to see and to be known.

Part 5: The Christian hope, and the same tests applied to it

Conclusion first.  The Christian hope is for the same persons, raised in changed bodies, living in the presence of God.  Christian thinkers do not agree on what makes the raised person the same one, and every answer meets some version of the puzzles in Part 3.  Christianity keeps a subject, which helps with desert, forgiveness and love.  It pays for that subject with things no one can observe:  a soul, or a hidden act of God.  On the tests of Part 3 the two accounts come out close to even.  They differ most in the kind of evidence each offers for its founding claim.

What Christianity hopes for

Paul answers the question "How are the dead raised?" with a seed:  "That which you sow, you don't sow the body that will be, but a bare grain, maybe of wheat, or of some other kind.  But God gives it a body even as it pleased him, and to each seed a body of its own."³  "The body is sown perishable; it is raised imperishable. ... It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."³  Christ "will change the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory."³

The goal is a relationship, not only an existence.  "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known."³  "They will see his face."³  "This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God."³  Between death and the resurrection Paul expects to be "with Christ, which is far better," "absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord."³³

John Hick, a Christian philosopher of religion who wrote at length on Buddhist and Hindu views of death, saw how near the two views come and where they part.  On the Christian view the self "is not a self-existent substance but is dependent for existence from moment to moment on the active will of the Creator.  He is wholly immersed in time, wholly a process sustained from beyond himself.  Thus both religions affirm the radically temporal and inherently transitory nature of the human person.  But beyond this similarity there is a difference.  For theravada Buddhism, the perfecting of the empirical ego, its attainment of arhatship, leads to its cessation.  For Christianity, on the other hand, the perfecting of the empirical self takes it beyond mortality into an eternal life lived in relation to God."⁴³

Each side counts the other's goal as a mistake.  In the Buddhist texts, "craving for existence" is part of the "taking up of the burden" that causes rebirth,¹ and the hope "I shall endure as long as eternity" is "an utterly and completely foolish teaching."⁴  In the Gospels, God "is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to him."³  To a Christian, the end of persons is a loss, however peaceful.  Neither destination can be observed from here.

Three Christian accounts of identity

1. The soul carries the person. On the simplest Christian view, a person is or has a soul that survives the body: "Don't be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul."³ The Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne defends it: persons consist "of two parts, body and soul—the soul being the essential part, whose continuing alone makes for the continuing of the person."⁴⁴ This makes the gap between death and resurrection easy, since the soul spans it.
2. The soul is part of the person, not the whole. Thomas Aquinas held that the soul is the form of the body, and said bluntly that "anima mea non est ego," "my soul is not I," so that the soul's survival alone is not the person's salvation.⁴⁵ On this view the soul alone, between death and resurrection, is not the whole person, and the resurrection of the body is needed to restore him.
3. There is no soul, and God raises the body. Some Christian philosophers hold that a human being is wholly physical. Peter van Inwagen showed how hard this is. If God simply reassembled a man's atoms, then God could also reassemble the atoms that made up the ten-year-old van Inwagen, "and he and I could stand facing one another and each say truly to the other, 'I am you.' But this is conceptually impossible." His proposal: "Perhaps at the moment of each man's death, God removes his corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or rots."⁴⁶ He later withdrew his claim that this was "the only way."⁴⁶ Lynne Rudder Baker, another Christian materialist, answers differently: what makes the raised person the same is the same "first-person perspective," and in the resurrection God "freely decrees a certain body to constitute that person."⁴⁷

The same tests

Test 1, consistency.  All three Christian accounts are consistent.  None contains a contradiction.

Test 2, memory.  The Christian accounts do not face Śaṅkara's objection, since each keeps a subject.  But the same standard applies to the evidence.  David Hume looked for his self and reported:  "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception."⁴⁸  A soul is no easier to find by looking inward than a Buddhist link across death is to find by looking outward.  The sibling article Near-Death & End-of-Life Experiences finds that those experiences support only a minimal case against strict materialism.

Test 3, desert.  Here Christianity does better.  It keeps the one who acted as the one who answers:  "we must all be revealed before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may receive the things in the body according to what he has done."³  The same subject can also be forgiven and loved, which a convention cannot.  But the same standard cuts here too.  A central Christian claim is that the penalty for guilt passed from the guilty to someone else:  "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree."³  Christianity answers that this transfer is a free act of a willing person and joins the believer to Christ, rather than an impersonal law that charges a stranger.  That is a real difference.  A skeptic will still note that Christianity, too, separates the one who did wrong from the one who bears the cost.

Test 4, branching.  Hick's "replica" account has the same problem as Buddhist rebirth.  In his thought experiment a man vanishes in London and "an exact 'replica' of him" appears in New York, and Hick argues that the New York man is the same person.⁴³  But whatever God can make once he can make twice, and two replicas cannot both be the one man.  This is van Inwagen's "I am you" problem.  The soul view avoids branching, because a soul cannot be copied.  Van Inwagen's preserved corpse avoids it at the price of a miracle no one has seen.  The editor of the anthology that reprints his essay, most likely the skeptic Paul Edwards, put it sharply:  "to the best of my knowledge, no undertaker or anybody else has ever observed such a removal."⁴⁹

Natural fission meets Christians as it meets Buddhists.  The Catholic priest and philosopher Norman Ford concluded from identical twinning that "The continuity of the same ontological individual ceases when the zygote forms twins."⁵⁰  He placed the start of the individual at about fourteen days after fertilisation, when "the matter of the epiblastic cells become one living body, informed or actuated by a human form, life-principle or soul that arises through the creative power of God."⁵⁰  Christians who hold that the soul begins at conception must say, as Keown does for Buddhism, that a second soul begins at twinning.  The two traditions make the same added assumption.

Test 5, shared matter.  This test applies only to bodies, so Buddhism escapes it.  The objection is old.  Second-century critics argued that bodies "become food for fishes" and pass into other bodies, so they cannot be restored to their owners.⁵¹  It can be priced.  A 70-kilogram body holds about 16 kilograms of carbon.⁵²  Spread the carbon of everyone who has died, about 117 billion people,⁵³ through the carbon that cycles between air, sea and living things,⁵⁴ and every body alive today holds about 10^22 to 10^23 carbon atoms that were once in earlier human bodies at death:  0.4 to 9 grams, or 0.003% to 0.06% of its carbon.¹²  So a resurrection that gave every atom back to its first owner is impossible for everyone at once.  But the classical Christian answers never required that.  Augustine ruled that eaten flesh "shall be restored to the man in whom it first became human flesh," and that the eater's own lost flesh "shall be restored to him by Him who can recover even what has evaporated."⁵⁵  Aquinas went further:  "it is not necessary ... that whatever has been in man materially rise in him; further, if something is lacking, it can be supplied by the power of God."⁵⁶  Paul's seed image already said that the raised body is not the body that was sown.  The objection refutes a view the main tradition did not hold, as the memory objection refutes a view Buddhism did not hold.

Test 6, evidence.  Neither tradition can show its mechanism of identity at work.  The Buddhist link across death is unobserved.  The soul, or God's preservation of the person, is unobserved.  The difference lies in what each hope is built on.  The Buddhist account of rebirth rests on the Buddha's own testimony, that on the night of his awakening "I recollected my many kinds of past lives, with features and details,"¹¹ and on the children's cases.  The Christian hope rests on a claim about one man in one place and time:  "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins."³  That claim is open to historical inquiry, which the site weighs in The Resurrection Belief:  Event or Process?.

The scorecard

Objections and responses

1.  "Anattā is a method for letting go, not a claim that no self exists.  The coherence problem is invented."  Part of this is right.  The Buddha would not say "there is no self" to Vacchagotta, and Steven Collins reads not-self as a "soteriological strategy," a teaching aimed at freedom more than at metaphysics.¹⁷  But the problem is not invented.  The canon raises it itself, in the monk's question about "deeds done by what is nonself,"¹ and the Kathāvatthu, Buddhaghosa and Vasubandhu all treat no-self as a claim about what exists.  Gethin, reading the Vacchagotta passage, concludes that "the Buddha's silence here is not about leaving the door open for some mysterious, ungraspable absolute self."³²

2.  "No Buddhist says the reborn person is the same person.  This article attacks a straw man."  The article does not claim they do.  It tests the Buddhist formula on its own terms, "neither the same nor another," and finds that it is consistent but leaves desert and branching unsettled.  Those are the gaps the Personalists and the Yogācāra tried to fill.

3.  "Parfit showed that identity is not what matters.  So the Christian wish to survive as the same person is a mistake."  Parfit argued for that view;  he did not prove it, and many philosophers reject it.  It is also not neutral between the two religions:  it is a premise that favours the Buddhist goal.  And Parfit, who thought the Buddha right about persons, rejected rebirth itself for lack of evidence.²

4.  "Secular Buddhism drops rebirth, so the problem disappears."  For that version it does.  Siderits points out that if Buddhists stop believing in rebirth, "it is not because that belief is inconsistent with their central tenet that there is no self."⁷  But the early texts place the recollection of past lives in the night of the Buddha's awakening,¹¹ and they define the goal as the point where "Rebirth is ended."⁹  A Buddhism without rebirth must say anew what nirvana frees a person from.  The sibling article Buddhism and Science takes up the modern versions.

5.  "Nirvana is obviously annihilation;  Buddhists just won't say so."  The early texts say the opposite in plain words.  The view that the freed monk "is annihilated and perishes with the breakup of the body" is called "pernicious,"¹ and the Buddha calls the charge that he teaches "the annihilation, the destruction, the extermination of an existing being" a misrepresentation.⁴  The skeptic may think the denial hides an annihilation in practice, since all the aggregates stop.  That is a fair inference, but it is the skeptic's, not the texts'.

6.  "Nirvana is really a transcendent reality, like God.  The two religions point to the same goal."  Some readers, Christian and Buddhist, have said so, and the "unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned" invites it.  But the early texts quoted here do not call nirvana personal or a creator, and do not describe the freed person as known or loved by it.  Hick, who hoped for a convergence, still names the difference:  for Theravāda the perfected self ceases, for Christianity it goes on "into an eternal life lived in relation to God."⁴³

7.  "The Christian soul is as unscientific as rebirth."  On observability the article agrees, and scores the two even (Part 5, tests 2 and 6).  Neither a soul nor a causal link across death can be seen.  The difference lies elsewhere:  in whether a subject remains to deserve and be loved, and in what kind of evidence each hope rests on.

8.  "The atonement transfers guilt from one person to another.  Christianity has no right to complain about karma."  The point has force, and Part 5 grants it.  Christianity's answer is that the transfer is a free act of a willing person, not an impersonal law.  That answer separates the two cases morally.  It does not remove the fact that in both, the one who did wrong is not the one who bears the whole cost.

9.  "The shared-matter figures are made up."  The inputs are published:  16 kilograms of carbon in a 70-kilogram body,⁵² 117 billion humans ever born,⁵³ and the sizes of the carbon pools.⁵⁴  Two assumptions are the article's own:  that the carbon of the dead has mixed into those pools, and the average carbon per body at death.  The calculation is labelled as an order-of-magnitude estimate, and no Christian source claims an atom count.  It is for scale.

10.  "Twinning is no problem.  A soul or a consciousness simply enters the second twin."  That is the answer both Keown and Ford give, and it is coherent.⁵⁰³¹  The point is that the texts of neither tradition say it.  Both had to add it once embryology showed that one conception can become two people.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The Personalists are known mostly through their opponents. Their one surviving treatise exists only in a Chinese translation, read here in K. Venkataramanan's 1953 English version through archive.org search-inside. Their strongest arguments may be lost.
2. Stcherbatsky's Vasubandhu was read in a 1970 reprint, with an OCR made for this article. On one page the reprint prints the speakers' names in the wrong order. The 1920 original was not checked.
3. Van Inwagen's words were read in an anthology reprint, not in the 1978 journal, and the date of his note withdrawing "the only way" was not established. Dean Zimmerman's "falling elevator" model, the best-known materialist alternative, could not be obtained.
4. The translation of Udāna 8.3 is disputed. Whether the Pali ajātaṃ names "an unborn" or "freedom from rebirth" bears on the positive reading of nirvana. This article reports the two renderings and does not settle the Pali.
5. The shared-matter estimate assumes full mixing. A tracer model of the carbon cycle would narrow the range.
6. The Christian intermediate state is unsettled. Whether the dead exist consciously before the resurrection, and in what way, divides Christian thinkers, and the punctuation of Luke 23:43 is itself disputed.
7. Collins's 1998 book and several modern authors were read only in part. Miri Albahari's book was read only in search extracts, and Evan Thompson's Why I Am Not a Buddhist (2020) and Jay Garfield's Losing Ourselves (2022) were not read in full. The article quotes them only where their words were read.
8. Later Mahāyāna language about nirvana is not covered. The Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra is known for describing the Buddha's nirvana in positive terms, including the word "self." No translation or study of it was obtained in a citable form, so the article does not discuss it.

Verdict

Buddhism's early texts deny that any part of a person is a self, decline to say whether a self exists, and explain rebirth as a chain of causes in which the next being is "neither the same nor another."  That account is coherent, and its old memory objection is answered.  But it leaves desert without a full subject, it cannot rule out branching, and the evidence that the chain crosses death is weak.  The texts describe nirvana by what it ends and refuse to say what remains.  The Christian hope of the same persons raised and seeing God "face to face" faces matching puzzles of gaps, copies and reused matter, and answers them with a soul or an act of God that no one can observe.  On those puzzles the two accounts finish close to even.  Christianity keeps a subject who can be judged, forgiven and loved, and rests its hope on a historical claim that can be examined.

Sources