In everyday language the two are often used as synonyms: “believing in reincarnation”, “believing in rebirth”. But in the traditions they come from, they point to two different ideas, and the difference touches the deepest question of all: who am I, and what remains of me when I die?
Reincarnation: a soul that changes bodies
Reincarnation literally means “coming back into the flesh”. The idea assumes that something permanent exists, a soul or a self, which leaves one body at death and takes on another. This is the view of classical Hinduism: the ātman, the self, is eternal and is neither born nor dies; it passes from one life to the next, carried along by karma, until it is set free. The Bhagavad Gītā puts it in a famous image: just as a man casts off worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so the embodied self casts off worn-out bodies and takes on new ones (2:22).
We find the same idea, under different names, in ancient Greece: Pythagoras and his followers spoke of metempsychosis, the passage of the soul (psyché) from one body to another, even an animal one. Plato tells it in the myth of Er, at the end of the Republic: after a period of rewards or punishments, the souls choose their next life and drink the water of the river Lethe in order to forget.
Rebirth: a continuity without a soul
Buddhism arose in India from the same world of ideas, but it introduced a radical turn: it denies that a permanent self exists (anattā, “non-self”). What we call “I” is a set of processes in constant change: the body, sensations, perceptions, inclinations, consciousness. None of these stays the same even from one day to the next.
And yet the Buddha teaches that there is rebirth. How is that possible, if there is no one who passes from one life to another? The answer is that what continues is not a thing but a process: a stream of causes and effects, driven by desire and by intentions (for Buddhism, karma is above all intention). This is why the texts speak of rebirth (punabbhava, “renewed becoming”), not of reincarnation.
The Questions of Milinda, a Buddhist text written as a dialogue between an Indo-Greek king and the monk Nāgasena, explains the idea with the example of a lamp. Is the flame burning at dawn the same one that was burning at midnight? Not exactly, but not a different one either: it is a continuity. In the same way, the one who is reborn “is neither the same nor another”.
In Tibetan Buddhism the passage is described in detail: between death and the new birth there is an intermediate state, the bardo, which can last up to forty-nine days. The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thödol) is a text to be read to the dying to guide them through that passage.
The two ideas compared
- What passes from one life to the next? For Hinduism, the self, the ātman, eternal and unchanging. For Buddhism, no self: a stream of states linked by causes and effects.
- What drives rebirth? For both, karma; Buddhism places particular stress on desire and attachment.
- What is the goal? For both, to step out of the cycle: Hindu mokṣa is the discovery of one's true self or union with God; Buddhist nirvāṇa is the extinguishing of desire and of the illusion of an ego.
- Is it good news? For neither of them. Being reborn is not a reward: it is a sign that one is not yet free.
An idea that changed its meaning in the West
In the nineteenth century reincarnation reached Europe and America through the spiritism of Allan Kardec and the Theosophical Society. There it changed character: it became a path of progress for the soul, a kind of school in which one learns from one life to the next. It is an optimistic idea, very different from the Indian one, for which the cycle of births is something to escape from. Many people in Italy today who say they believe in reincarnation mean, without realising it, this modern version.
Other traditions
Biblical Judaism does not speak of successive lives. But in the Middle Ages the Kabbalah developed the idea of gilgul neshamot, the “rolling of souls”: it appears in the Sefer ha-Bahir (12th century) and becomes central in the school of Isaac Luria in Safed in the sixteenth century, where the soul returns to repair what it left unfinished. Other masters, such as Saadia Gaon in the tenth century, rejected it.
Christianity speaks of “rebirth” in a completely different sense. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must be “born from above”, or “born again” (3:3-8): this is spiritual rebirth, linked to baptism, in this life. After death Christianity awaits the resurrection, not another body; the Catechism of the Catholic Church says so explicitly: “There is no reincarnation after death” (no. 1013).
Islam, too, rejects the transmigration of souls (tanāsukh): after death the soul waits in an intermediate condition, the barzakh (Qur'an 23:100), until the resurrection and the judgement. The exception is the Druze, a community that grew out of Shia Islam, who believe the soul passes immediately into a new human body.
The Yoruba religion has yet another idea: àtúnwá, the “return”. Ancestors can be reborn into their own family, as a grandchild or great-grandchild. The names say so: Babátúndé means “father has returned”, Yétúndé “mother has returned”. Here rebirth is not a sentence to flee from, but a way in which the family continues and the dead stay close to the living.
What can we take from this
Placing the ideas side by side helps, first of all, to use the right words: those who speak of reincarnation have in mind a soul that changes bodies; those who speak of rebirth in the Buddhist sense have in mind a continuity without a fixed self. But the comparison tells us something more.
From Buddhism we can learn to look at our own self more lightly, as something that changes all the time and need not be defended at any cost. From Hinduism, that there is something deep in each of us that time does not wear away. From Christianity and Judaism, that this one life has a value that will not come again. From the Yoruba tradition, that the bonds with those who came before us are not broken. On one point almost all of them agree: what we do now matters, and leaves a trace.
Further reading
- The Bhagavad Gita, 2:22, English verse translation by Edwin Arnold, 1885 (public domain), on sacred-texts.com
- T. W. Rhys Davids (trans.), The Questions of King Milinda, Sacred Books of the East 35, 1890 (public domain)
- Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism, Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2013.
- Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Plato's Myths, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on the myth of Er)
- Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Keter, 1974, entry “Gilgul”.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1013.
- Jacob K. Olupona, African Religions: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2014.