With Dependent Co-Arising, Buddha explores all the 12 links, Buddha reasoned: “Thus, Ananda, from name-and-form as a requisite condition comes consciousness. From consciousness as a requisite condition comes name-and-form. From name-and-form as a requisite condition comes contact. From contact as a requisite condition comes feeling. From feeling as a requisite condition comes craving. From craving as a requisite condition comes clinging. From clinging as a requisite condition comes becoming. From becoming as a requisite condition comes birth. From birth as a requisite condition, aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair come into play. Such is the origination of this entire mass of stress.” Thus, without ignorance, there was no more name, grasping, clinging, birth, aging, and death. Buddha, the Enlightened One, in his teachings pointed us to the same path to freedom — a path that requires daily practice.
One concept in Buddhism is Shunyata, variously described as Emptiness or Oneness. When the ego is removed, there is oneness. When the ego is introduced, phenomenon arise from the observer (with the ego). So Physicist John Wheeler put it this way: “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.” In Albert Einstein’s view: “Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.” Cognitive Scientist Professor Hoffman look at the issue in this way: “I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view.” This video shows how the true reality deludes man from the quantum physics point of view.
So from the Twelve Links of Dependent Co-Arising, Buddha deducted The four noble truths from the cycle of samsara. He taught the path as the “eight-fold path” as the remedy for “Dukkha” or suffering. Buddha clearly taught in the context of belief in multiple lives.
In the west, we tend to accept concepts such as karma more as a “moral imperative” rather than a metaphysical concept, since often westerners have trouble with the concept of karmic seeds. Thus, stories such as the Jataka Tales: The Previous Lives of the Buddha—believed to be “pearls of wisdom” from the mouth of the Buddha himself —tend to be soft-pedaled as “children’s fables” to illustrate morality, rather than literal stories of Buddha’s previous lives. Whether the stories were meant to be fables or literal stories is irrelevant; what’s clear is that the Buddha Himself clearly believed in rebirth.