Stephen F. Teiser

The Wheel of Rebirth in Buddhist

Fig. 1. Wheel of Rebirth. Cotton painting. Tibet, nineteenth century. Collection of Rubin Museum of Art, item no. 65356. Photography: Bruce White.

Two forms of death

When Buddhists talk about what happens at the end of a person's life, one of the things they say is that until final deliverance is achieved, each death is followed by a rebirth. From this perspective, it is a mistake to conceive of death as a terminus. Instead, the end of any single lifetime leads inevitably to the beginning of another. One common Buddhist theory states that forty-nine days after death, after passing through a process of judgment roughly comparable to European notions of purgatory, the person again assumes bodily form. When unenlightened beings die, they will be subject to judgment in a series of courts in the underworld administered by stern magistrates and demonic guards. At the end of this transitional period, the person will be reborn again in one of six possible destinies: as a god in heaven, a demigod, or a human, or, less happily, as an animal, hungry ghost, or hell being.1

Buddhist traditions also hold out the prospect of a good death, in contrast to the bad death that most of us will suffer. Only fully enlightened beings are capable of escaping from the potentially unending and painful process of death and rebirth. As is well known, in Buddhist terms that ending is called nirvana, which literally means "extinction." Representations of the Buddha's passage into final nirvana typically show him exercising full control over his last transition, in contrast to his unenlightened disciples, who bemoan his passing and express their grief over impermanence.

Arts Asiatiques Tome 63 - 2008

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