B SUFFERING IN SAMSARA X THAT IS WHAT THE EDDY IS , NOT SEPARATE FROM THE POND

I've struggled with this a lot, and still do sometimes.

In my understanding, Buddhism doesn't flatly deny the existence of self. More accurately, it doesn't support the notion of a self, nor does it support the notion of no-self. We don't have evidence enough either way, and it's all entirely beside the point anyway.

Rebirth is just a way of understanding how actions flow through space and time.

Think of a little eddy in a stream. There isn't anything in particular about the eddy that separates it from the rest of the stream. It is the rest of the stream. Nothing particularly distinct about it. If we take a close look, we can never identify a spot where the eddy ends and the rest of the stream begins. The eddy is just a concentration of energy in one particular spot (and even that spot is constantly moving!). Yet, somehow the eddy moves in the river- it appears to persist over time. That persistence, that movement, isn't attributable to any particular thing except the stream itself. When the eddy dissipates or "dies", where does it go? It doesn't "go" anywhere. It just returns to stream. (We can't even really say it "returns" to the stream, because it was never apart from the stream in the first place!) If another eddy forms, is it the same as the last eddy? Well, that's an interesting question, because it assumes there was something particular to the last eddy that we can say persists from moment to moment, when in fact there isn't anything like that.

We can say, in a way, that every eddy that forms in a fluid anywhere in the universe is all the same eddy. They all follow the same fluid dynamics, they all are of the same substance. They're all "eddy". At the very same time, we can say that the question is completely nonsense, because there is nothing at all unique to an eddy to say "this is what eddy is". We can't pick anything out of the stream that's just eddy!

As a side note, all of our suffering is based on the false impression that there is, in fact, something in the eddy that is not part of the stream, something "eddy" that's been there since before the stream existed. When we look at this analogy, we can see how absurd that is. When we apply this understanding to our lives, then all our suffering vanishes. How amazing!

This, in my understanding, is a good analogy for rebirth, karma, consciousness, existence, emptiness, much of Buddhist thought. This is how things exist- as eddies in the fabric of existence.

So....is there a self that is reborn? What does the eddy analogy tell you?