Nicolas wrote: ↑Thu Sep 12, 2019 6:04 pm
AN 4.131 One extinguished between one life and the next. One extinguished between one life and the next. [...]
“And, Master Gotama, when a being has laid down this body but has not yet been reborn in another body
“‘Do you know how there is the descent of an embryo?
These (regardless of the questionable translations) do not appear to explicitly support the view of
immediate rebirth; particularly the Brahmin belief in gandhabba spoken by the Brahmins in MN 93.
For example, let us imagine the gandhabba is as you claim or imagine it is. The would mean a soul would have to die and a newish embryo must exist at exactly the same time for that old relinking soul to enter.
For example, World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion). These deaths would have mostly occurred over a period of 4 years. This would mean an estimated total of 50–65 million new embryos would be required for immediate human rebirth; particularly for the homosexual martyrs, Jews, Yanks, Brits, Commies and other "good guys" that would have attained rehuman birth (while those 15,000,000 or so Nazi & other fascist collaborators were reborn in hell and say 5,000,000 starved to death from British famines, such as in Bengal, would be reborn in heaven with Brahma).
It seems it cannot be guaranteed an embyro will be immediately ready for each soul that dies. When the Dhamma says it is "akaliko" or "immediately effective", my impression is this does not apply to reincarnation or to the sexual intercourse between men & women or IVF machines. What I am saying is a soul may have to wait for some time until a new suitable embyro is ready.
Also, we must account for kamma. A gandhabba that did good kamma will seek an embryo from parents who are good people because the good gandhabba (unless it is a Mahayana Bodhisattva wishing to save all sentient beings) generally wants to be reborn into a good family. This also reduces the amount of immediate suitable embryos available.