Also referred to as The Greater Craving-Destruction Discourse, the Mahā Taṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta primarily describes the relationship between consciousness and rebirth. Elaborating on the latter, it explains rebirth as being made up of processes in a causal chain that can be isolated and described. Included in this is the point at which an individual “life”, understood in this context as consciousness residing in a prenatal human form, actually begins. To clarify, the consciousness that resides in the human body is explicitly not described as a self-arising entity entirely separate from any other part of the causal chain. It is not a soul-like object at some point being transplanted into the human body, at which point it is now unskillful to terminate a pregnancy. This is the view of Sāti, the ignorant fisherman’s son, who is corrected by the Buddha in the sutta. Instead, it is described like all things, as a result of dependent arising whereby “consciousness” in this context refers to the sixth sense-media of “mind”

The “mind” referred to here only resembles our common understanding of consciousness once it has come into contact with a sense-object, completing the trio of intellect (the ability to think), ideas (the thought process), and the sense-object to form the complete consciousness of the mind, then called contact. But the mind consciousness alone is not enough to constitute a person without the accompanying physical sense-media of the eyes/visible objects, ears/sound, nose/smell, tongue/taste, and body/touch which the mind consciousness interprets in a wider context. However, the mind consciousness comes last in the progression of sense conditions. This means that the earlier stage of eye/visible object might allow us to see our surroundings, the mind consciousness allows us to determine how those objects interplay in those surroundings. From this we can glean how the process of consciousness comes to be in a systematic way.

We start with the 5th link of dependent origination, saḷāyatana. This is a specific sense media, the object of that sense media, and the coming together of the two to make phassa, or contact, the 6th link of dependent origination that is all of the sense-media and their objects combined. Contact is the “cognitive event” that is triggered by the media, the object, and the coming together. The arising of contact then leads to the 7th link, vedanā or “feeling” which is then cognized by the conglomeration of sense-media. This “feeling” is “the affective mode in which the object is experienced” prior to any notion of pleasure or displeasure. This allows us to understand “consciousness” in Buddhist terms, as a thinking and feeling being in prenatal form conditioned by this process. This is therefore the earliest point at which it may be reasonably argued that is unskillful to terminate a pregnancy using our contemporary understanding, with the exception of arguments relying solely on the existence of a heartbeat. In this case, material form is covered by the first of the five skandhas, being a necessary prerequisite for the development of the consciousness we just discussed. However, to determine if this argument has any weight in Buddhist contexts, we must now find out just when the consciousness we have discussed actually resides within the human fetus. We can do this by first returning to the suttas discussed earlier, which elaborate on the necessary conditions for a conscious being to be present in the prenatal form.

We return again to the Mahā Taṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta in the section titled “The Birth & Growth of a Being” In this section, the conglomeration of all of requisite the sense-media and other twelve links of dependent origination are part of what makes up the gandhabba, in this context likely meaning the viññāṇa or the rebirth consciousness that makes up the 3rd aggregate and that is elsewhere described as “animation” or “regenerative force” that gives life to a body. According to this sutta, three things are necessary for rebirth in the human form to occur. These are “when there is a union of the mother & father, the mother is in her season, and a gandhabba is present, then with this union of three things the descent of the embryo occurs.” This passage seems to imply that at least the process of life begins at conception or shortly thereafter when this union of three takes place. This is similar to Tibetan interpretations, whereby a being in the bardo or transitory state between lives witnesses their parents having sex and gravitates towards that specific couple based on their karma, finally entering the embryo. Thus, while consciousness and rebirth as described in the Pāli suttas may be enough to designate abortion as unskillful shortly after copulation, it is known that not all Buddhists adhere strictly to the Pāli canon. To be assured of this stance, we must examine the works of two authors with fundamentally different views on the subject of consciousness and rebirth, representing later Theravādin and Mahāyāna views.

Starting with the Theravādin view, we can look to the Visuddhimagga or the The Path of Purification by the 5th century Indian commentator Buddhaghosa. Although it is a compilation of a vast array of topics, of particular interest is section three, which includes systematic descriptions of the five aggregates, the sense-media, and dependent origination. Under the heading “The Truth of Suffering”, birth is described as a form of suffering. Apparently quoting from the Vinaya Piṭaka, Buddhaghosa writes “His birth is due to the first consciousness arisen, the first cognition manifested, in the mother’s womb” and refers to this process as the “rebirth-linking” numerous times in the text. Rebirth-linking is the arising of the necessary conditions for consciousness as defined above to carry over from the moment of death in one life to birth in the next. This rebirth-linking is thought to explicitly deny the assertions made above regarding the existence of a being in an intermediary state waiting to be reborn, forming the basis for disagreement between Theravādin and Mahāyāna commentators. Buddhaghosa instead notes in his commentary on the Majjhima Nikaya that the gandhabba is simply another way of describing this process.

In Buddhaghosa’s model, there is no transition period or being that one manifests as, which implies that the process of rebirth is instantaneous after death in a previous life. This is further supported by two lines in the Milindapañha, which explains that the process of rebirth does not require transmigration, and that “…if someone passes away and is reborn in the Brahma world, and if another passes away and is reborn in Kashmir, they happen in the same time.” The logistics of this are beyond the scope of this paper. However, the conclusion suggests that because there is an unbroken continuity of the life-stream, it is thus never acceptable to have an abortion, for this process begins at the moment of conception. Buddhaghosa says as much in his further discussion of the idea of birth as suffering, where he writes “When the mother has an abortion, the pain that arises in him through the cutting and rending in the place where the pain arises that is not fit to be seen even by friends and intimates and companions—this is the suffering rooted in abortion.” As to the extent that Buddhaghosa represents the general Theravādin community’s view on this topic, both then and now, that much is unclear. However, given Buddhaghosa’s reputation within the wider Buddhist tradition, it would be reasonable to assume there were others with the same opinion regarding instantaneous rebirth and the troubles then caused by abortion. For others unconvinced by this position, there remains Vasubandhu, referenced here to represent the opposing Mahāyāna view.

Vasubandhu is a well-known Gandharan monk and philosopher from 4th century, best known for his commentary on Adhidhamma texts and helping to found the Buddhist Yogācāra school. In his commentary on one particular text, the Abhidharmakośakārikā, death is described as “the exhaustion of life without the exhaustion of merit” In this context, there are four modes of existence that can be ended, resulting in this type of death. One of these is “existences destroyed by others: beings in the womb and in eggs”, and Vasubandhu also refers to “beings in the intermediate state” and a “gardharva” throughout his commentary. In specific relation to the arising of consciousness, or the creation of a human being, Vasubandhu has been interpreted as supporting the idea of life beginning at conception through his explanation of the relationship between the moment of conception and the arising of the five skandhas, which happen simultaneously. Though they disagree with the exact process, it is quickly apparent then that abortion is not justifiable in the system described by Vasubandhu, just as it is not justifiable to Buddhaghosa. Since it has thus been thoroughly established that there is no Buddhist system in which abortion is not seen as equal to the killing of a human being, there now comes the question of how Buddhists have justified pro-choice stances on the topic of abortion, despite the stance of Buddhist scriptures and philosophers.