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human
The self in Buddhism

Apologies if this is not the right forum for this question, but could anyone explain how in Buddhism there is a belief of no-self, yet also a belief in reincarnation? What is being reincarnated if there is no self?
gpt
What Buddhism is rejecting is that anything can be regarded as a self.

How is this specifically understood? Most clearly, the problematic conception of selfhood has these qualities: temporal extension (hence the argument from change in the *Anātmalakṣanasūtra*), agency over the different mental and physical components of a person (hence the argument from control in the *Anātmalakṣanasūtra*), self-sufficiency (i.e., part of our mental world which *has* our other mental states but isn't itself *had* by anything), and lacking parts (because Buddhists in general are reductionists when it comes to mereological dependence, hence the famous chariot analogy).

But rebirth does not require something of this sort. It merely requires that some aspect of the basis onto which this mistaken concept of self is imputed be continuous between one life and another.

In Buddhism, this aspect is held to be what Bhikkhu Anālayo, in his book *Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research*, calls "the process of being conscious." Basically, what rebirth actually means is that a given continuum of mental events, or "process of being conscious," remains continuous even though the physicality appropriated by it is discontinuous. But this continuum of mental events doesn't have the properties of the problematic conception of selfhood. So there is rebirth without a self.

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This is why, when Buddhists historically argued with opponents who argued that Buddhism must be false because there is no rebirth (such as followers of the Lokāyata school), those opponents didn't say "you're right about selflessness but thus you must reject rebirth." Instead, understanding that Buddhists believe it is *mental continuity* that underlies rebirth, Lokāyata thinkers tried to argue that rebirth is impossible because mental properties are caused by arrangements of certain material objects. They argued for this, and then pointed out this means physical discontinuity entails mental discontinuity, since the mental causally depends on the physical, and hence one's continuum of mental events is cut off with the breakup of one's body.