One feature of Buddhism that seems odd when one first learns of it is this juxtaposition of ideas: (1) reincarnation is real; (2) the soul is not real. Your ordinary westerner learner this starts up a bit and says, "Waaaaiiitt a minute here. Without a soul, what is it that gets into the new body? What IS reincarnated?" And that is a good question. Not because it doesn't have a good answer but because it has a very revealing answer: what is re-born is a process, not a substance. Reincarnation is the continuance of a chain of causes and effects. It is rather like a flame that passes from a lit match to the wick of the candle. Something real did happen when, as we say, the candle "caught" the fire. But that doesn't make fire a substance. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to an airport to pass out pamphlets explaining this.
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I've heard that GE Moore once said that whenever he wrote anything down, he saw that it was either false or true but only if qualified. But then when he wrote the qualification down, he would see that the same was true of THAT. Much of PRINCIPIA ETHICA reads like what would eventually be produced by someone who has that sort of writer's block. A, but only when B, except that B is not strictly always necessary, in circumstances such as C, but there might be some ambiguity in that statement of C, so .... And I feel simpatico. As I've mentioned before, Moore is the great philosopher whose death comes closest to coinciding with my own birth. I was born at a moment when Moore only had six days to live. This story about his unquenchable self-qualifications rather strengthens the case that I am he, despite the brief overlap when we must have shared a soul, ebbing from one body and flowing into the other.
Buddhists believe in the following two propositions although, to non-Buddhists, they seem an odd fit. 1) I have no self or soul, no substantial thing that is "I" or "Me," and the idea that there is an I is an illusion. 2) I'll probably be reincarnated. The obvious response to this conjunction has to be: if there is no you, that what or who is to be reincarnated when "you" are? The Buddhist response, as I understand it, is that the illusion of me is a distinctive one, and this this illusion that there is a substantive me is what is reincarnated. A guest lecturer at a college course I took way back in the 1970s explained it this way. I may hold a lit match in my hand and transfer the flame from that match to something else -- another match, let us say. At SOME point both matches may be lit. Right after that, I may blow out the older match. It certainly appears that something substantial, a thing, the flame, moved from one match to the oth...