Questions around rebirth

Millions of people believe in rebirth but on what basis can we say this belief is valid? Is it better to discard rebirth so Buddhism makes sense to modern people?

In the first watch of the night, when Gautama sat under the bodhi tree in meditation, he saw with his mind’s eye all the previous lives he had had over thousands of years. This insight, based on meditation experience, was the basis for his teaching on rebirth, the idea that all beings are caught in a continuous cycle of life and death. Death is not the end, it is the gateway to a new beginning.

Indian religions – Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism – all hold that we have a series of lives, and that death marks the end of one life and the beginning of a new one. This continuous cycle of life and death is called samsara. It is characterized by suffering. Nobody wishes to die but the fact is that death spares no-one. Indian religions link together the principles of karma and rebirth, with the idea that every moral action must be acco…