As a born-again Buddhist, I’ve always struggled with rebirth. Buddhism is by far the most scientific of religions, with the exception of that one idea. The idea that your soul or something would bounce around from animal to human. It doesn’t quite make sense.
But, if you look at it less literally, it does. We are born again and again in the sense that our genetic material is recycled generation upon generation, through humans, animals, plants, etc.
What the Buddha preached was a release from suffering and an escape from the wheel of life — endless cycles of rebirth. What if he was preaching not something theoretical, but an actual relief from the pressures of evolution and natural selection?
An interesting thought, spurred in me by Professor Robert Wright of Princeton. My wife is following his course on Coursera. In it he posits natural selection as the cause of what the Buddha called impermanence of all we hold dear. The first lecture is really worth listening to, I’m only paraprahsing here.
Natural selection is not a conscious designer, still it does create animals that look as if they were designed by a pretty smart designer with one thing in mind, to get them to get their genes into the next generation.
Wright points to studies where monkeys release dopamine when they get a treat, but how that pleasure is impermanent. He asks why, and posits that it’s by evolutionary ‘design’.
So it is a fair thing to do, as a kind of thought experiment, to put ourselves in the shoes of natural selection and ask, if we were designing organisms, how would we design their brains? You know, if we wanted them to get their genes to their next generation.
Now, granted that eating helps them do that by keeping them alive. Sex obviously helps them do that. And even with humans and non-human primates, things like elevating their social status helps them do that because it seems to be the case that in primates and some some other parts of the animal kingdom, social status is correlated with getting genes into the next generation.
Essentially, well, here:
The Buddha talked about escaping rebirth, but it’s really escaping the pressures of natural selection that has evolved us to carry genes forward, not necessarily be happy.
From natural selection’s point of view, happiness is just a tool. If making us happy at one moment will keep us motivated, fine. If making us unhappy, if making us unsatisfied, if making us suffer will get us to do the work that’s on natural selections agenda, then fine.
I said earlier that Buddhism is in a sense a kind of rebellion against natural selection. And now you can see one sense in which that’s true.
What if rebirth is a clumsy ancient formulation of a biological fact, that we pass on our genes and are evolved from countless generations that came before us? Darwin gave us words to communicate that fact and Mendel gave us data, but in Buddhist and Hindu days they didn’t have the language. All they had was parables and stories to communicate with. So perhaps rebirth was just a metaphor.
To which I say wow, because it’s a whole new way of thinking about rebirth, even though I’m not sure Professor Wright meant it that way.
In the Buddha’s days and in the Hindu tradition he came (and rebelled) from, they meditated and had great insight and powers of observation, but they didn’t yet have the tools of hard science. Everything had to be recorded and transmitted in the form of parables or stories, which is where I think rebirth came in.
Rebirth is simply how the ancients understood the feeling of evolution and it’s how they communicated and passed that observation around. In truth we are reborn when we reproduce, at least half of our genes, and we emerge from a process that ties us directly to our ancestors — human, animal and plant on down.
In that sense, which is definitely not canonical, rebirth does make sense, as a parable for evolution and natural selection, the nature of which was not yet understood.
