Fact Check: Rebrith is true

The cases that have been described so far, isolated or combined, do not provide irrefutable proof of reincarnation, but they supply evidence that suggest its reality.

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What, to you, would constitute an important scientific development in this field? TUCKER: Well, I don't know that I'm necessarily trying to prove anything, but I'm trying to sort of find out for myself what seems to be going on here. And I think these cases contribute to the body of evidence that consciousness - at least, in certain circumstances - can survive the death of the body; that life after death isn't necessarily just a fantasy or something to be considered on faith, but it can also be approached in an analytic way, and the idea can be judged on its merits.

The Upanishads, states Harold Coward, ... and self-knowledge so as to end Saṃsāra—the endless cycle of rebirth and redeath. The aim of spiritual quest in the Upanishadic traditions is find the true self within and to know one's soul, a state that they assert leads to blissful ...

Still another reason some people say that they believe in rebirth is that they have faith in the Buddha and since he taught rebirth, it must be true.

Tucker, one of the only scientists in the world studying the phenomenon, says the strength of the cases he encounters varies. Some can be easily discounted, for instance, when it becomes clear that a child’s innocuous statements come within a family that desperately misses a loved one. But in a number of the cases, like Ryan’s, Tucker says the most logical, scientific explanation for a claim is as simple as it is astounding: Somehow, the child recalls memories from another life.

In their eyes, rebirth was simply a cultural presupposition of the Buddha's time and — because it no longer fits in with our cultural presuppositions and scientific beliefs — the time has come to discard it so as to help the Buddhist tradition advance. To support their argument, these teachers cite the works of historical scholars who state that everyone in India in the Buddha's time believed in the idea of rebirth and in the metaphysical assumptions about karma and personal identity on which the idea is based: that there's something within each of us that survives the death of the body, and that our actions shape where that "something" will be reborn.

A quick glance at the Pali suttas would show that none of these claims has much substance. The teaching of rebirth crops up almost everywhere in the Canon, and is so closely bound to a host of other doctrines that to remove it would virtually reduce the Dhamma to tatters.

A core tenet of Buddhism has always been the need to see things yathābhūtam, just as they are, and it seems to me that a rebirth doctrine does not do this; it is one more form of illusion, and, if my argument above is correct, an illusion that leads us to exactly that form of clinging which the Buddha is most concerned to reject.