Help again!?

Question

I need to know how is reincarnation used in Buddhism and i need 2 compare its use to its use in another religion! please help please!

Answer 1

http://www.tharpa.com/background/reincarnation-and-buddhism.htm

good Luck!!

Answer 2

Reincarnation & Buddhism

In Buddhism, we meditate on death and impermanence so as to encourage ourselves to make the most of every moment of our precious human life.

Rather than wasting our energies on meaningless things that we cannot take with us when we die, awareness of death and impermanence encourages us to use our life to practice spiritual teachings, so that we have a wealth of mental good qualities, such as wisdom and compassion, that we can draw upon both now and in the future.

Buddhists also contemplate reincarnation in order to gain a deep understanding of how best we can use our present precious human life.

Whether an awareness of death actually does give our life, a spiritual orientation depends on our view of what happens after death.

If we believe that death is simply the end and that, when our body stops functioning, our mind just ceases, it is uncertain what effect an awareness of our mortality will have. An awareness of death is only sure to turn our mind in a spiritual direction if we believe in some kind of afterlife.

The question, "Is there life after death?", is too important to ignore. We cannot afford just to "wait and see what happens" any more than we can afford to just wait and see whether we have enough money to live on in our old age. Our view of what happens after death strongly influences the way we live our life now.

If we believe we simply stop existing, or if we just ignore the question, it is likely that we will fail to make adequate preparations for our life beyond death. Even if we feel we cannot be sure what happens after death we still need to consider the matter seriously and make preparations, just as people prepare for their retirement even though they realize they cannot be sure to live to retirement age.

There are some powerful meditations on how to make our life meaningful in The New Meditation Handbook.

2. Reincarnation in Hinduism in General

2.1 Karma: the Cause of Reincarnation

According to the Hindu religious and philosophical concepts, man is composed of two fundamental principles opposed to each other per nature: one spiritual, the soul (atman), and the other material, the body (sarira). The atman is eternal, immutable, not born, not created, indestructible; instead, the body is temporal, created, mutable, destructible. The union between atman and body is not essential, but is accidental It is a type of imprisonment or a penalty which the atman has to undergo due to avidya and karma, to which it is associated from all eternity. Avidya and karma are two basic presuppositions of Hinduism. They have no beginning because they did not have a beginning. It is therefore a truth that transcends every intellectual explanation.

Avidya signifies ignorance, ignorance of the true nature of atman or of the distorted vision in which the atman identifies itself or confounds itself with the psycho-physical organism. Due to avirlya, the atman which is eternal and non-temporal, is caught up in time; gets joined to physical body. Birth is the union of the eternal and spiritual atman with the material and temporal body.5

2.2 Karma-Samsara

The nature of birth, that is, the condition of the body to which the atman gets united, depends on karma. Karma (Pali, Kamma, Tib., las; Chin., yeh or yin-k1lo; Jpn., go or inga), based on the Sanskrit verbal root he, signifies action, every sort of action, whether good or bad, meritorious or non-meritorious, religious or worldly; here, however, karma signifies the moral debit of the actions which one has done. Every action inevitably produces its own fruit (phala), and the subject (actor) has necessarily to experience all the consequences of his own actions. A person's behavior leads irrevocably to an appropriate reward or punishment commensurate with that behavior.6 It is the inevitable law of retribution or the law of karma. It is the law of cause and effect applied to the life of every individual, law according to which every one gathers the fruit of what one has sowed or undergoes the effect of his own actions.

The effects of all the actions which a person does cannot be experienced (lived) during one single existence, because while the subject (actor) experiences the fruit of some act, does other actions in the meantime, and therefore gains new fruits which have to be exper~enced. From this fact is deduced that the atman (soul) has to be reborn repeatedly. So it is believed that the soul from all eternity is undergoing birth and rebirth due to this inviolable law of karma. Thus is born the doctrine of the transfiguration of the soul. It is a corollary of the doctrine of karma.

The entire process of reincarnation of the soul according to the law of karma is called Karma-samsara. Samsara means "to wander or pass through a series of states or conditions." Samsara is the beginning-less cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, a process impelled by karma.8 Life, therefore, is not determined or limited to one birth and one death, but is instead a samsara, a current, a course, a migration in circle, which however is always determined by the law of karma. In short, human life is a karma-samsara, a transmigration of the soul according to the inevitable law of retribution.