Will someone explain rebirth and the differences between reincarnation? Can someone explain the difference between reincarnation and rebirth? I've read the tags and am a little confused. Is the goal of buddhism to cease to exist? If people aren't reincarnated, then how does the cycle of suffering continue.
The problem with Buddhism, there is no single accepted interpretation of just about anything. On the other hand, that's what makes it fun. Buddhism today is like mirror shattered in a thousand pieces. I have spent more than two decades trying to get to truth and I think I'm 99% clear about it now.

Most people thinking about past and future lives assume that something (some very important part of them, may be consciousness) stays alive after death and goes on to "other worlds" and maybe spends some time in an intermediate state to eventually obtain a new body. This is what's usually called "reincarnation".

The Buddhist view (of course I will say the only right Buddhist view - but you don't have to believe) is to view life as a continuous and not discrete phenomenon, both space- and time-wise. In this view everything is interconnected and made from millions of causal/conditional influences contributing to a particular configuration in a particular timespace locality. There are no individual "objects" let alone "people" or "souls" - that would seem to exist in a static world. Instead, the world is a dynamic system of constantly flowing influences, deterministically unfolding from their interactions.

The most important aspect of all these causes/conditions/influences that interact to compose everything, is information. Natural world with its variety of species is first and foremost an informational process, shaped by the principle of natural selection. As Richard Dawkins correctly explained the main subject of evolution is gene - essentially a sequence of information - with body being a physical manifestation of gene's tendency to replicate itself and pass itself on.

Likewise, the human culture can be seen as evolution of informational forms - memes (which was a term coined by Dawkins to expand the idea of gene as informational subject of natural selection beyond its one type known as the DNA). In this view, primates are media for memetic evolution, with our culture being a manifestation of memes' tendencies to replicate and pass themselves on, just like a body of biological organism is a manifestation of gene. Makes sense so far?

Our mind (what we call "our" "minds" - but which in fact should probably be called "The Mind" - because it's not "many") is an informational phenomenon made possible by a flow and interaction of information, an evolved kind of the same information that manifested the natural world, passing between different kinds of media. These media include primates' brains as well as various artifacts of human culture - primarily books and these days the digital medium of computers-and-the-internet. In this view the subjective experience or consciousness is no longer a mystery but rather a very natural property of information to re-present (to reflect, to model, to remember) other stuff. Any possible object or configuration or system of relationships found in the natural world can be re-presented with information. When this re-presentation gets robust enough it is called "experience" or "consciousness" or "sentience".

So now to get back to Buddhism. Because our lives and our minds are understood to be manifestations of, and 100% shaped by, informational processes (both at the material as well as the subjective levels), these processes operating contiguously &amp; non-descrete-ly across the utterly complex combinations of various media capable of re-presentation; because in Buddhism we (supposedly) have a very clear understanding of all of the above -- we no longer see humans as separate blobs of matter (with or without "soul") getting born and dying. In this view, there is no birth and death, there is continuous trans-form-ation. The mind of a person does not start with death, but comes together gradually over time from various sources. All of those sources trace back to something that existed (events that happened) long before this particular human was born. In this sense there is no new person having been born. The person is an assembly or a manifestation of multiple threads of information transformation. The birds-eye perspective on this that looks at the entire human civilization (as well as the pre-human evolution) will see a graph of interconnected causation/information/transformation rolling forward like a stream. The entire thing is contiguous and highly interconnected, with no discrete entities to be found.

Then as the human child grows up, he or she develops ability to delineate and differentiate "objects". I don't have room to go over this here in much detail, but this ability is something Mahayana Buddhists call "objectification" or "reification". In this ability to designate discrete entities lies the biggest power and the biggest vulnerability of sentient mind. Since mind is nothing but dynamically interacting system of re-presentations, there is no way for it to know that its models (the discrete objects it delineates) are not the reality but only a rough (simplified) re-presentation of reality. This results in mind absolutizing and clinging to its models as all-correct and all-important, and developing attachment to some configurations and aversion to others, based on its simplistic re-presentation of the world. This attachment, aversion and confusion lead to conflict and suffering when our models mismatch other similar but incompatible models (harbored by other people) and also when our simplistic models inevitably mismatch reality.

When Buddhism talks about Enlightenment it talks about clearly understanding all of the above (this is my claim anyway). When Buddhism talks about liberation from suffering, it talks about the above. When Buddhism talks about no-self and no-rebirth, it talks about the above.


  Is the goal of buddhism to cease to exist? If people aren't reincarnated, then how does the cycle of suffering continue.


Now we have all the tools we need to answer your question, aren't we? The goal of Buddhism is to transcend the naive model we have that "to exists" means "to exist as a separate object". Transcending this model leads to the notion of death (as well as re-incarnation of an individual soul) becoming utterly naive and irrelevant.

The cycle of suffering continues with each generation passing the objectification/reification on to the next generation. Each new child is born and learns to see the world as a collection of separate objects, him- or herself one such object among others. (The exact process of how this separation unfolds is explained in Buddhist teaching of Twelve Nidanas aka Paticcasamuppada aka Pratitya-samutpada). This naive reification/objectification in turn leads to suffering, because of the conflict between the model and reality or one model and another model. Growing in the civilization shaped by the incorrect understanding, we humans internalize the reified world as the only possible cognitive framework and pass it on to the next generation, continuing the cycle of suffering.

This answer getting too long I have to stop here - but this should give you the big picture. All of the Buddhism's teaching and practice with its various schools can be explained nicely in terms of the above.