Buddhism has always been concerned with the great matter of avoiding rebirth which, I should add, was not foreign to the Greeks. Their rebirth was metempsychosis in which the soul at death passed into another body. In Buddhism, it is consciousness or in Sanskrit, vijñāna, which passes into another body or form.
Buddhism, perhaps more than any religion dwells on the recognition that conditioned existence is finite. It can never be, in the final analysis, other than impermanent, suffering, and insubstantial. And this is where rebirth always takes us, i.e., back into the conditioned world.
The biography that most Buddhists are familiar with is the one where Gautama Siddhartha was born and raised as a prince by an overprotective king for a father who tried to shelter his son from the ills of the conditioned world so that he might never have to experience suffering. When Siddhartha finally managed to sneak out of his father’s palace, he was deeply shocked by the sight of the aged, the sick, a corpse and an ascetic (sramana) who had devoted himself to finding the cause of human suffering.
After seeing these four sights, Siddhartha then realized that his very own life was subject to the same fate. So troubling was this that he renounced his parents, wife, child, and possessions, to seek the solution to the problem of suffering, becoming an ascetic.
Eventually, Siddhartha awakened, becoming a Buddha (one who is awakened). He realized that rebirth is due to the fact that in our sleep of ignorance we cling to conditioned reality which is never other than impermanent, suffering and insubstantial, mistaking it for what is permanent, blissful and substantial (ātman). Because of this sleep, we are never free from the cycles of rebirth (samsara).
Most people find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe in rebirth or that there is such as thing as the unconditioned and that this conditioned body of ours is not our true self or ātman. Nevertheless, this is what the Buddha taught. The sleep of ignorance makes people deluded, angry and greedy—but mostly deluded.
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