Question: If There Is Non-Self, Then What Is Reborn?
Answer: According to the Buddha’s teaching, the cycle of rebirth continues until one becomes an arahant. Only an arahant is completely freed from the wheel of saṃsāra, the endless cycle of birth and death. The Buddha explained that this cycle continues because of craving arising dependent on ignorance.
At one time, I also struggled with the question: “If there is no self, how can rebirth happen?”
The body and mind are non-self because they are impermanent. As practice deepens, one directly experiences that the body and mind are constantly changing. They change so rapidly that even mindfulness struggles to keep up. They are also stressful and impossible to fully control. Through deep insight practice, one establishes the experiential understanding of impermanence, suffering, and non-self.
However, impermanence does not mean that the process is completely annihilated or disconnected. The body and mind continuously arise and pass away, while previous conditions become the causes for new conditions. Therefore, although there is no permanent and unchanging “self,” there is still a continuity of causes and conditions.
At death, this physical body ceases, but due to ignorance, craving, and kamma, a new nāma-rūpa (mind and body) arises again. In this way, continuity appears to continue without there being an eternal self.
This is why the Buddha could speak in detail about his past lives in the suttas. It is not because there is an eternal ātman moving from life to life, but because the flow of causes, conditions, and kamma continues.
Therefore, in Early Buddhism, it is not that some permanent entity is reborn. Rather, rebirth occurs through the continuing flow of conditioned processes, even without a permanent self. That continuing conditioned process is what is referred to as rebirth within saṃsāra.
From the outside, the rebirth taught in Buddhism may appear somewhat similar to the rebirth described in ātman-based traditions, since both speak about continuity across lifetimes. However, there is an important difference.
In ātman-based systems, an eternal and unchanging self transmigrates from one life to another. In the Buddha’s teaching, however, all conditioned phenomena — including body, mind, and kamma — are understood through the characteristics of impermanence, suffering, and non-self. Thus, Buddhist rebirth is understood not as “the migration of an eternal self,” but as the continuation of conditioned processes.