Buddha teaches that there is no permanent soul (principle of "anatta"). Your consciousness is only ephemeral, constantly changes, ceases and newly re-emerges. But then how does reincarnation work? What exactly is there to be reincarnated? Not only do "I" cease to exist upon death, but -- according to Buddha -- even during my own life my "self" has no persistent existence. Shouldn't it follow that there is no part of me playing any role in the continuation of life? In my understanding the very idea of reincarnation implies a soul.
I don't get how it's hard for you to see that an impermanent soul can also become reincarnated.
If consciousness is ephemeral, constantly changing but ceases and re-emerges, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that exact thing happening in reincarnation.
>>1334867
But that's not "my" soul. It's not "me" being reincarnated. It's just nature doing its own thing and I have no influence on it at all. The word "reincarnation" implies that there is something persistent which gets a new body. Random and unrelated fluctuations are not reincarnation.
>>1334870
maybe your taking reincarnation too literally :P
>>1334844
That's because you have a very distorted understanding of "you". Ultimately, you only percieve most things that you asociate with your persona as yourself, when in reality, it's just your ego, not the real you. The real you, basicaly, is just an empty flute, witch plays the godly sound through it. Well, if you dare to get all the ego stuff out, witch a lot of it, if not all in general, you think of as you yourself.
>>1334844
You don't reincarnate, but the root force that is responsible for your life goes on to create more beings, who will have been influenced by the "karmic imprint"of your life
To understand the way that reincarnation works in light of anatman you've gotta understand Buddhist epistemology and the notion of dependent origination. It's a really fucking long thing to explain but essentially the skandhas, ayatanas, and datus that conglomerate to create sensory experience moment to moment are constantly being created and destroyed on an instantaneous level, so what we experience as temporal consciousness is more like the frames of a movie that go so fast it looks like motion. In reality, your sense-experience is being "born" and "dying" and constantly being "reborn" (ceasing and arising), but just in the same body. Reincarnation works on this exact same principle, but the transmigration is from one body to another. Read Dharmakirti's Proof of Rebirth friend.
Tl;dr - there is no self, conscious experience is a state of constant and perpetual "rebirth" unto itself, it's a hard concept to grasp without understand Buddhist notions of self and experience
