Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductions to Buddhism.

Last time I introduced rebirth. We may logically understand life as unlimited yet remain unable to confirm whether or how rebirth exists. Why has the idea remained so vital and rarely challenged within Buddhism? Perhaps unfamiliar religious or conscious experiences—near-death experiences and meditative states—support conviction. Such experiences kept rebirth central for over two millennia and made escape from it a major motive for practice.

A major reason Prince Siddhārtha renounced home was seeing aging, illness, and death at Kapilavastu’s gates and realizing that life is suffering. He sought an ultimate answer.

His answer was that nothing has fixed essence: impermanence or emptiness. Why did this remove fear? Ordinary fear comes from uncertainty about where death leads, making us cling to this life and prolong existence. Siddhārtha saw existence as an endless river, not movement from being to nothing, but karmic circulation called rebirth. Yet within this infinity life lacks autonomy; even knowing it continues, we cannot control it and suffer helplessly in adversity.Because of this lack of autonomy, the Buddha taught beings to master life through awakening rather than drift through rebirth.

He often began with rebirth’s suffering and urged Dharma practice toward nirvana. In the Dīrgha Āgama’s Sutra of the Heavenly Messengers, the Buddha sees beings enter hell through harmful karma. King Yama asks whether they saw the heavenly messengers.

The bewildered newcomers do not understand. Yama explains that newborn babies, decrepit elders, sick people, corpses, and punished criminals were five messengers revealing impermanence. Their present pain follows past harmful acts. Seeing this suffering, Yama forms an aspiration for his own future:After this life, may I be born human in an immensely rich and noble family. May I then have wisdom enough to trust Dharma, shave my head, renounce home, practice, and attain‘birth exhausted, the holy life established, the task completed, no further existence.’That means no more rebirth: nirvana.