Is there an Antarabhava: Missing link in rebirth?

By Dr Upul Wijayawardhana

As a generalisation, most who are Buddhist by birth believe in rebirth whereas most who embrace Buddhism by conviction have a healthy scepticism about this, being more enamoured by the science and philosophy of Buddhism. As a Buddhist, not only by birth but also by conviction, where do I stand? Fortunately, or unfortunately, as a professional who was engaged in a discipline that demanded proof for practice, sentiment being subjugated to science, I am forced to keep an open mind on rebirth which, in a way, is no bad thing as it keeps my mind and thought processes even more active in my retirement than when I was at work!

Although I have no desire to be reborn, the fulfilling and fruitful life I have been fortunate enough to have on earth being unlikely to be bettered even in heaven, still I cannot totally disregard the possibility that I may have to face that reality, if there is rebirth. Therefore, it is futile to be a rebirth denier, more so because there is emerging evidence pointing to the possibility of rebirth. I am not talking about the purely speculative arguments put forward by the believers but the scientific data accumulated by some scientists who were bold enough to cross the lines of traditional thinking. The pioneer in this field, without a doubt, is the late Professor Ian Stevenson, whose work was initially met with scepticism by the scientific community though the tide seems to be turning since.

Concluding an interesting article in ‘The Scientific American’ titled ‘Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics?’, Dr Jesse Bering, the American psychologist who is Associate Professor in Science Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand and author of ‘The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life’ states:

“The mind is what the brain does,” I wrote in The Belief Instinct. “It’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead too?” Perhaps it’s not so obvious at all. I’m not quite ready to say that I’ve changed my mind about the afterlife. But I can say that a fair assessment and a careful reading of Stevenson’s work has, rather miraculously, managed to pry it open. Well, a tad, anyway.”

This is yet another confirmation that Ian Stevenson’s research work, continued by his successors at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has opened the eyes of many a scientist. It is worth reproducing two more paragraphs from Dr Bering’s article:

“Stevenson, who died in 2007, was a psychiatrist by training—and a prominent one at that. In 1957, at the still academically tender age of 38, he’d been named Chair of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After arriving in Charlottesville, however, his hobbyhorse in the paranormal began turning into a full-grown steed. As you can imagine, investigating apparitions and reincarnation is not something the college administrators were expecting of the head of their mental health programme. But in 1968, Chester Carlson, the wealthy inventor of the Xerox copying process who’d been introduced to Stevenson’s interests in reincarnation by his spiritualist wife, dropped dead of a heart attack in a Manhattan movie theatre, leaving a million dollars to UVA on the condition it be used to fund Stevenson’s paranormal investigations. That money enabled Stevenson to devote himself full-time to studying the minds of the dead, and over the next four decades, Stevenson’s discoveries as a parapsychologist served to sway more than a few skeptics and to lead his blushing acolytes to compare him to the likes of Darwin and Galileo.”

“Stevenson’s main claim to fame was his meticulous studies of children’s memories of previous lives. Here’s one of thousands of cases. In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground. Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbours threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, co-workers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way.”

This is one of the thousands of cases studied by Prof Stevenson and his colleagues but their work raises two important issues; the first, perhaps the most important, being that the phenomena they describe is more akin to reincarnation than rebirth. Rebirth, according to Buddhism, is the transference of thought proceses and it is unlikely that such a process can provide a mechanistic explanation to the corresponding physical deformities found in subsequent births. Stevenson, in fact, referred to reincarnation than rebirth and his magnum opus, published in 1997, was a 2,268-page, two-volume work called Reincarnation and Biology which contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and some also had physical anomalies that matched trauma in previous lives. Details of these, in some cases, could be confirmed by the dead person’s post-mortem record and photos. Corresponding to trauma suffered in the previous birth, many of the subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without fingers or a lower leg.

The other issue of concern is the time interval that occurred between rebirth and the time of death in the recollected birth, which seems to vary from a few days to years. Of course, this can be explained easily if we accept the concept of Antarabhavaya, an ‘in-between existence’ well recognised in Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism but denied in Theravada Buddhism. Authorities of Theravada argue that this concept of an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state, between death and rebirth, was incorporated soon after Gautama Buddha’s death and was brought into Buddhism from the Vedic-Upanishadic philosophical tradition. Kathavattu of the Tripitaka states that at the Third Buddhist Council, in a debate with the Mahayanists, Arahant Moggaliputta Tissa Thera proved that there was no antarābhava.

In Tibetan Buddhism, Antarabhavaya is referred to as ‘Bardo’ and is the central theme of the ‘Bardo Thodol’, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text intended to guide the recently deceased person through the death bardo to gain a better rebirth as well as to help their loved ones with the grieving process. Translations of this book have gained increasing popularity in the West.

Tibetan Buddhism lays great emphasis on the Bardo and teaches that there are six Bardo states. The first Bardo begins when we are born and lasts as long as we live. The second is the Bardo of dreams. The third is the Bardo of concentration or meditation. The fourth occurs at the moment of death. The fifth is known as the Bardo of the luminosity of the true nature. The sixth is called the Bardo of transmigration or karmic becoming which leads to rebirth.

The fifth Bardo is interesting as, in addition to visions, there is a welling of profound peace and pristine awareness. Interestingly, this was the experience of most patients who had near death experiences as shown by the seminal work of Prof Bruce Greyson, who took over from Prof Ian Stevenson the Chair of Psychiatry, allowing Professor to concentrate his research on rebirth/reincarnation.

Some Theravada scholars attempt to explain the delay on the basis of Gandabba, a state that remains through many successive human births within a given human bhava (which can last many hundreds of years). When a given physical body dies, the gandhabba can get into another womb, when a matching one becomes available. However, in this explanation a difference is made between human/human rebirths versus human/animal rebirths which complicates matters further.

By denying the concept of Antarabhava, has Theravada Buddhism unnecessarily disregarded a vital link that may explain rebirth?