Bob Schwartz

Our religious traditions often ask us to act on faith, believing that which can’t be absolutely demonstrated or proven to our satisfaction. For theistic religions, God is at the top of that list, with many other beliefs following.

In Buddhism there is a belief in rebirth:

rebirth. The belief that one is reborn after death. Belief in rebirth is a corollary of the doctrine of karma, which holds that a person experiences the good or bad fruits of moral action at a later date. Rebirth is one of the ‘givens’ of Buddhist thought and since its truth is universally assumed it is rarely asserted or defended as a dogma. Some contemporary Buddhists have suggested that belief in rebirth is not an essential part of Buddhist teachings, but the notion is deeply ingrained in the tradition and the ancient texts.

Roger Jackson in his masterful study Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World (2022) points to modern Buddhist masters and followers who suggest that rebirth is theory, not fact. Nevertheless, it remains a core belief.

In closing, Jackson points to a familiar Western resolution. The argument of 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal—sometimes called Pascal’s wager—is that by believing in God you risk nothing significant but could gain everything.

This leads Jackson to this:

I myself would argue without ambivalence for what I call “As-If Agnosticism.” My stance is agnostic because, like Hayes and Batchelor (and many others), I do not find traditional descriptions of karma and rebirth literally credible, nor am I fully persuaded by arguments in their favor, whether rational, empirical, or faith-based; on the other hand, I cannot rule out the possibility that such descriptions (or something akin to them) may in fact be true. The universe, after all, is surpassingly strange. In the spirit of Wallace Stevens’s famous statement that “we believe without belief, beyond belief,” I propose that we live as if such descriptions were true. I am not suggesting we simply take up wishful thinking: if only there were past and future lives, if only karma works the ways tradition says it does, if only glorious and perfect buddhahood awaited us all at the end of the rainbow. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But as Buddhists have argued for millennia, Western humanists have claimed for centuries, and scientists have recently begun to recognize, the world is actually built far more on our ideas, aspirations, and speculations—the As-If—than we suppose, and the solid foundations we presume to lie beneath us—the “As-Is”—are much more difficult to find than we assume. It’s not, therefore, that by living as if certain doctrines were true we really are in flight from some bedrock, objective reality, because that reality—though it certainly imposes limitations on us, most notably at the time of death—turns out to be far more a matter of convention and far less “just the way things are” than we had thought. Freed from the illusion of perfect objectivity, therefore, why not think and live as if Buddhism were true? In doing so, we empower ourselves to enter, as fully as is possible in a skeptical age, into the ongoing, ever-changing life of the Dharma, adopting Buddhist ideals, telling Buddhist stories, articulating Buddhist doctrines, performing Buddhist rituals, and embodying Buddhist ethics in ways that make meaning for ourselves, provide a measure of comfort to others, and perhaps contribute in some small way to the betterment of the imperfect and imperiled world in which we all live.

Let the final word belong not to me, however, but to the Buddha, who in the Rohitassa Sutta (Discourse about Rohitassa) recounts a previous life as a seer named Rohatissa, “possessing magical potency, able to travel through the sky…[with] speed like that of a light arrow easily shot by a firm-bowed archer.” Conceiving the wish to find the ends of the earth, he traveled for a hundred years as fast as the wind, yet “died along the way without having reached the end of the world.” There is no “end” to the geographic world, explains the Buddha, but that is not, in any case, the end-of-the-world we should be seeking. Rather, we must seek the place “where one is not born, does not grow old and die, does not pass away and get reborn.” And where is the end of the world in this deeper sense—nirvāṇa—to be found? “It is,” he says, “in this fathom-long body endowed with perception and mind that I proclaim (1) the world, (2) the origin of the world, (3) the cessation of the world, and (4) the way leading to the cessation of the world.” As a result, “…the wise one, the world-knower, who has reached the world’s end and lived the spiritual life, having known the world’s end, at peace, does not desire this world or another.”

“As if” is powerful. There is also a powerful caveat. If you believe “as if” something is true, though you may still doubt it, it is essential that the belief do good for others—not just for yoursel. While Pascal says believing in the unprovable you “could gain everything”, it is others who should ultimately gain everything from your belief, not just you. If the belief brings other harm, better to not believe and act “as if.”