The opening chapter expresses this continuity through the language of home and registration. The Heavenly Emperor says that all beings have their original registration in heaven; life in the human world and in hell belongs to a separate registration. He describes goodness, repentance and spiritual practice as the way home. His account also makes room for a different kind of descent: a small number of Buddhas and bodhisattvas come by vow to help others, rather than falling from heaven through their own decline. [2]
Later, the judge gives an account of the first human ancestors. Beings from Guangyin Tian, the Heaven of Radiance, flew down to an earth on which no humans yet lived. They found fragrant food growing from the ground and were drawn to its taste. After eating it, their radiance dimmed and their bodies became heavy. They could no longer fly back to heaven, so they settled on earth, cultivated the land and had descendants.
The judge distinguishes what they did from theft. The food had no human owner. Eating it broke no rule against taking another person's property, yet their desire and their contact with earthly substance changed their condition. He also says that their heavenly life had arisen from earlier disciplined practice. This is therefore an account of descent within a continuing succession of lives, rather than the creation of life from an absolute beginning. [3]
Rebirth is the passage into another form of existence. The book names six realms in which it can occur: gods, humans, asuras, animals, hungry ghosts and beings in hell. Asuras are powerful beings associated with conflict; hungry ghosts are troubled by desires they cannot satisfy. These are conditions into which a being may pass as different karma bears fruit. Human life is one such condition, with the particular opportunity to hear the teaching, understand one's conduct and practise change.
The six realms describe kinds of rebirth. A second classification, the Three Realms, distinguishes existence governed by desire, subtler existence with form, and formless existence. Heavenly life extends through these spheres in different degrees of refinement. Its happiness may be far greater than human happiness, but it too remains within repeated birth and death. Reaching a heaven and becoming free from the whole cycle are different outcomes.
Across these lives, appearance, name, family and social position may all change. The people who are relatives now may have stood in quite different relationships before. The City God's records connect successive identities with their actions, including things a person no longer remembers. Memory and continuity are therefore separate questions: forgetting an experience does not, in this account, end its consequences.
Mengpo's drink makes that distinction particularly clear. Beings passing through the underworld before rebirth drink it to forget the people and events of earlier lives. They then enter new family relationships as their karma unfolds. The judge confines the drink to this passage through the underworld. He says it is absent from heaven and from the Buddha lands, so it is not a universal rite performed wherever life continues.
Mengpo's own history explains the purpose of forgetting. During her human life she practised Buddhism and helped people in distress, especially women whose family circumstances left them little freedom. She wished for a harmless drink that would let people put painful memories behind them and begin again. After her death, her good deeds brought her to heaven. She was later appointed to the underworld to fulfil that wish. A former intention thus continues in a new responsibility. [4]
The Buddhist teaching of not-self addresses a further question: does continuity require an unchanging person to pass from body to body? In his explanation of early Buddhist thought, Bhikkhu Anālayo distinguishes the continuation of causes and conditions from a permanent inner agent. What happens later can depend on what happened before without an immutable self carrying the whole process. This helps explain why the Buddhist vocabulary of rebirth need not imply an eternal, unchanging soul. [5]
Nor does a painful rebirth make a being permanently beyond help. The judge says that those in hell possess the same original radiance as beings elsewhere. Harmful habits and karma obscure it; the possibility of recovering it remains, although the time required differs greatly. Dizang's teaching addresses that possibility. Punishment, an opportunity to learn, release into another life and final liberation have different meanings and conditions. [1]