About This Answer
How can Buddhist parents explain rebirth to children who are educated in a different religious environment and naturally ask for evidence? Venerable Ajahn Dtun answers by starting with kamma rather than demanding blind belief.
He recalls the Buddha’s teaching that beings are owners and heirs of their actions: actions are the causes from which future results arise. A person who repeatedly lives through harmful, immoral conduct creates suffering in the present as well as unfavourable causes for the future. A person who lives honestly, keeps precepts, and cultivates goodness already experiences a different quality of life here and now.
Ajahn Dtun presents a practical way of thinking about uncertainty. Suppose someone is not yet convinced that rebirth is real. Living wholesomely is still not wasted. A good person benefits from peace of mind, trustworthy relationships, and freedom from many consequences of harmful conduct. If rebirth is also true, those wholesome causes continue to be beneficial. By contrast, someone who assumes there is nothing after death and uses that belief to justify harmful behaviour may suffer both now and later.
He also points to the Buddha’s life and the Triple Gem as sources for reflection. The Buddha had access to the kinds of worldly happiness people normally seek—wealth, status, comfort, praise—yet renounced them in search of a freedom not dependent on those conditions. His awakening and the awakening of his disciples form the basis of Buddhist confidence.
The advice is therefore not to force children into belief, but to help them reason about cause and effect, examine the results of conduct, and choose a life that remains wholesome even while questions are still being explored.
The practical emphasis is not on trying to map every detail of past and future lives. Ajahn Dtun uses the subject of rebirth to bring attention back to kamma: what we repeatedly think, say and do conditions the heart. This makes the teaching relevant to Buddhist rebirth, kamma, moral responsibility, the Five Precepts, mindfulness and the Thai Forest approach of creating wholesome causes now instead of relying on speculation about what will happen later.
The value of the answer is its simplicity: do not turn the teaching into another object of speculation. Apply it, observe the result in the heart, and continue strengthening whatever qualities are still weak. Over time, repeated practice makes the difference between a principle we merely agree with and a Dhamma that actually changes how we respond to experience.