Death and Rebirth

As to what specific meditation practices you should engage with, take the topic of impermanence as an example. The significance on impermanence and death is not just to terrify yourself, there is no point in simply making yourself afraid of death. The purpose of meditating on impermanence and death is to remind us of the preciousness of the opportunities that exist for us in life as a human being.

Reminding ourselves that death is inevitable, it is time unpredictable and when it happens only spiritual practice is of benefit gives us a sense of urgency and enable us to truly appreciate the value of our human existence and our potential to fulfill the highest of spiritual aspirations. If we can develop this profound appreciation, we will treat every single day as extremely precious.

As spiritual practitioners, it is very important for us to constantly familiarize our thoughts and emotions with the idea of death so that it does not arrive as something unexpected. We need to accept death as a part of our lives. This kind of attitude is much healthier than simply trying to think or talk about death. When we examine the teachings of the Buddha himself, we find that during his first public sermon, he enumerated sixteen characteristics of the Four Noble Truths of which four are characteristics of suffering. Of the four characteristics of suffering, the first is impermanence.

Then, when the Buddha passed away at the threshold of his final nirvana, the last teaching he gave was on the importance of contemplating impermanence. In other words, the very first and last teachings of the Buddha were on impermanence.

A discussion of death naturally bring up the question of what happens next, bringing up the issue of rebirth. From the Buddhist point of view, rebirth is understood in terms of continuity of consciousness. One of the premises of the Buddha's teaching on rebirth therefore is the continuity of consciousness. In his Pramanavarttika, Dharmakirti states that something that is not in the nature of consciousness cannot be turned into consciousness.

His point is that in accounting for the nature and existence of consciousness, we have two choices. Either we posit that the continuum of consciousness has no beginning or that it does. If we posit a beginning to the continuum of consciousness, the question arises, when did the first instance of consciousness come into being and from where did it was originated? Then our choices are that the first moment of consciousness came from nowhere, from no cause or that it was created by a cause that is permanent and eternal.

From a Buddhist point of view, either answer gives rise to many inconsistencies. If something comes from no cause, it should exist either all the time or not at all. Both options are untenable. If, on the other hand, something comes from a cause that is itself permanent, eternal, unchanging and unitary, this negates the fundamental Buddhist view of universal causation.

Therefore, from the Buddhist point of view, the idea of divine creation is completely unacceptable. If one accepts that some divine force created the entire universe, then the nature of this divine force has to be independent, unitary, un-caused and original, all of which are untenable within a philosophical outlook in which universal causation is the fundamental principle.

It is on this ground that Buddhists do not posit a beginning to the continuum of consciousness and explain its nature and existence purely in terms of principle of causes and conditions. From the Buddhist point of view, even the existence of galaxies and the universal itself has to be explained from the point of view of causes and conditions. In the case of the universe, there has to be a relationship between the sentient beings that inhabit the physical plane and the existence and evolution of the physical world.

Buddhists explain it in the following way. As we had mentioned before, at the subtlest level of the physical world, there is an ever present physical continuum of space particles. When this subtle physical continuum interacts with the karma of sentient beings, the karma acts as a condition that give rise to various permutations of physical reality.

Eventually, there comes into being a macroscopic world that can actually have a direct effect upon sentient beings' experience of pain, pleasure, suffering and happiness. It is along these lines that Buddhists explain the entire evolution and dissolution of the universe. This made very clear in the traditional Buddhist teachings on the twelve links of dependent origination.