I have an absolutely wonderful two year old daughter. In her more focused moments she likes to play with lego. However, she doesn't call it lego, she instead calls it 'Abat'.
This comes from the first time she was playing with lego, and we'd show her how to make a robot from the lego. We'd add a head, some eyes, stiff looking arms and feet and voilla - we have a robot. Her eyes and face lit up. She would fondly refer to it as "abat". She would hug it and kiss it, and moments layer completely destroy it and start the process again.
Each time she would put together a few bits of lego and, with the help of her imagination, she would enthusiastically run with the construction over to her Daddy and exclaim "abat! abat!".
She has been doing this for months now, and every time 'abat' looked completely different. No matter what form it takes, even when it's just the components of lego spread out all over the floor, it was still her beloved "abat". If she happens to find a bit of lego under the sofa, she would still say "abat!".
My little Buddha Baby is clearly quite elightened: Our dear Abat is empty of self. She knows that she would never lose Abat, no matter what hardship he experiences, what mutilation he suffers, even faced with total anihilation. In any form of even formlessness therein lies the Buddha Nature of Abat.
When discussing emptiness in the previous post, it's sometimes easy to underestimate its importance. I think you have to understand emptiness before you can have a true understanding of any of the other concepts in Buddhism.
Rebirth is no exception. Yet, again the name can be quite misleading. Thich Nhat Hanh explains this very well, and coins the term 'continuation' rather than rebirth. I think it's fair to say that it is more a matter of transformation or re-manifestation than it is rebirth.
If you truly understand emptiness then you realize that there is no birth. There is no death. The essence of the self that you know cannot be pinpointed to one location, to one entity. Interbeing means that the true essence, the Buddha Nature of an entity is connected to every form in the cosmos. While one leaf may wither and fall to the ground, it feeds the roots of a tree and so the forest, which is the true self, continues.
Our dear Abat cannot die. He is reborn, or continued, in each of his manifestations - each time he is rebuilt in different forms. In the same manner, the broomstick in the previous post will also never die: the brush is replaced, the handle is replaced, and eventually it will take on another form - perhaps as ash, forming compost from which grass grows, feeding a cow and producing a glass of milk. With mindfulness you can drink a broomstick the next time you are drinking a glass of milk.
There is a certain comfort in understanding rebirth. Our fear of death drives us in so many deep ways. We need to have kids before it's "too late", we need to accomplish this because "life is too short". Yet when you remove the constraints of birth and death,you are liberated. When you understand your interbeing, your arms stretch out over all of humanity, all of nature, and you touch everything in the world. You do not see things die but merely transform, and support and love, the true self.
As wonderful as this seems, you may be thinking that it's easy to pinpoint things that are seemingly lost between lives. Transformation seems fine when applied to the physical, but when personalities and knowledge are concerned, it becomes more difficult to accept.
These traits are typically known as the dharma. The dharma of an individual is extended through teaching. What we learn from a personality or from the wisdom of a beloved, we are accepting into our own selves. A part of them is being immortalized in us.
Buddhism helps us, through meditation and practice, to enjoin the mind and the body. And in this our thoughts become actions - whether physical actions, speech, writings... the dharma can be transmitted and extended in so many ways, just like giving someone a gift except that the gift never depletes. Instead it just grows further. And with this growth comes its immortality, its new life.
Christ was ressurrected after dying on the cross. Yet, in Buddhist fashion, he actually never died. His dharma was instilled in his following, the body of Christ was already present in his disciples. The rebirth of Jesus happened in every sermon, every healing, every time he touched the life of another. And still today is Jesus reborn in every moment.
Christ truly is immortal because Christ is empty of self, yet like Abat, manifested in so many ways. And that is the true understanding of rebirth and resurrection in Buddhism.
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