chat

When Goku killed Kissenger, he wished that he would be reborn as a good person so they could do karate together. That's how Regnessik was born.

Don't worry, that's for the poor souls born 40 days after you to worry about. You gotta factor in the commute.

In Buddhism, there are many other realms of existence like the hell realms, realms of the gods, the pure lands, the animal realm which physically exists in the same one as humans but is a distinct experience, etc. Insects also count in this.

Although similarly in the physical human and animal realm, aliens in an infinitely far away galaxy would fall under the same rules. So you've got a lot of pools to pull from that are all impermanent, but not bound by human population numbers.

Edit: there's also two distinct schools of thought as to whether rebirth is instantaneous after you die or if there's a sort of lag that may be intentionally affected by those who are sufficiently enlightened. So there could be a period of people sort of waiting in line, though its not actually that simple.

I'd imagine new souls can be born while older ones continue to be recycled.

In Buddhism, you can also break the cycle of reincarnation which means some of the old souls are gonna get cycled out, too.

You know how humans and livestock now make up like 80% of all mammal biomass and all other animal families are rapidly declining? That's how

We are taking people who were meant to have a few more cycles jumping between lives of exotic weasels and dung beetles and instead they're here inventing machine learning 'enchanced' 'AI powered fridges'

My own working interpretation, and note this is from what I've read and thought about, and I may have my blind spots, is that this specific question is likely another version of one of the unanswerable questions the Buddha warns against, being some variation of questions such as "what was I in the past?" or "who will I be in the future?" or, as may be more clear later, "what are the precise results of karma?".

These are unanswerable because they distract from the practice, and are sorta ill-posed. Though I do think there can be some benefit to revisiting these questions at higher and higher stages to further see how they may be ill posed.

For me, the idea that there must be a one to one matching of previous lives to future lives is still accepting a concept of identity between lives (and also identity within a life) and emphasizing identity over continuity - reincarnation instead of rebirth.

As there is no permanent residing self, there can be no permanent residing self that gets one-to-one placed in a new body at the time of death. There isn't a self, but the unborn, the Buddha-nature. We are this Buddha-nature, we are an instance of the universe's own awareness. And this Buddha-nature cannot be born, die, or even be reborn. My current, unenlightened, analogous concept for this is to think of it as "awareness", though any word couldn't actually describe it.

As bodies with organs to sense and think, there is a long continuous stream of ever changing sense impressions and mental concepts. This is the mind-stream. Here, from context with the world, from identification with thoughts, from the stories and self-talk we constantly engage in this illusion of self gets constructed. We don't realize ourselves as the unborn, as the Buddha-nature we all are, we conceptualize ourselves as something distinct, distant, and separate from it. And we falsely identify ourselves with an ever changing and ephemeral phenomenal known as self.

Why did I bother with this long tangent, because some confusions regarding rebirth can derive from a subtle acceptance of self as having permanent substance, a self-causing substance, or what can be called svabhava. If so, the one tends to imagine reincarnation instead of rebirth. And there is a difference between the two.

While we're unenlightened our actions produce effects, the chain of cause and effect continues, and this shapes the context and form of new life. This is karma. As long as there are unenlightened beings, the Buddha-nature of those beings will be occluded by their self-concept. Their self, and their mindstream, will be a result of previous actions. Many actions. In Buddhism, the idea of codependent origination is central. There is no one cause to phenomenon, the rebirth of self included. There are a host of causes that condition future self- formations on present and future beings.

Any continuity you can find, and you are bound to find a continuity due to codependent origination, between iterations of self (within and between beings) can be seen as rebirth. Rebirth is the continuous reconstitution of the false idea of self in ourselves and in others, tied together by karma. There isn't identity between self-formations, but there is continuity. And perhaps it's possible that any angle of viewing the continuity is equally valid.

Now I am taking this from my readings in Tiantai Buddhism. Others may be more strict on saying there is exactly one karmic line from one life to the next to the next. So I'm possibly being heterodox (Tiantai can be a little heterodox at times).

But I still hold that the confusion about "does one life segue into exactly one next life, how does that work if the previous number of lives doesn't equal the next" starts to meaningless and like the wrong phrasing of the question as my journey continues.

But also, as others said. There are no shortage of lives, realms, and beings that are in samsara. The Buddha-dharma is everywhere and in everything.

You can get reborn as other animals than human though and the Buddhists (at least the Tibetan ones AFAIK, my memory about this is kind of hazy) believe you can be reborn in other planes of existence like one of several heavens or hot or cold hellsb which ought to create enough wiggle room for a growing human population to be reincarnated.

i'm the reincarnation of bjork and she's still alive in iceland and #grandmothering