Yes. Anatta means no unchanging self, not no continuity; karma and rebirth work through causal processes without needing a permanent soul.
At first glance, anatta (non-self) and rebirth seem incompatible. If there is no self, what is reborn? Early Buddhist texts show the Buddha anticipated this question. The Milinda Panha (Questions of King Milinda) directly addresses it: if there is no self, how can karma follow you from life to life? This puzzle has challenged students of Buddhism for over two thousand years, but it rests on a misunderstanding of what anatta actually means.
Anatta does not deny continuity or causation. It denies the existence of an unchanging, independent, permanent essence—a soul or atman. The Buddha taught that what we call a "self" is actually a constantly changing collection of five aggregates: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. Each moment of consciousness conditions the next; each thought, action, and intention leaves an imprint on this stream of experience.
The Samyutta Nikaya compares this to a flame passing from one candle to another. The flame is not the same flame (the candles are different), yet there is continuity without a thing that passes over. Similarly, consciousness in one life conditions the arising of consciousness in the next without requiring a self to migrate.
Karma means action, and its mechanism is simple: intentional actions produce consequences. This happens naturally, not because someone is keeping score. When you act, you reshape your mental habits, dispositions, and the conditions that will shape your next moment of experience. In the Pali Canon, karma is described as volitional action—the intention behind the deed matters most.
This process continues across rebirths without requiring a permanent self. Your last conscious moment before death contains the imprint of your accumulated karma—your mental habits and tendencies. This conditions the arising of the first consciousness of the new life. No soul travels; rather, the causal chain continues unbroken, like a relay where each runner passes the baton to the next.
All major Buddhist schools accept both anatta and rebirth, though they explain the mechanism differently. Theravada Buddhism, which closely follows the Pali texts, uses the candle analogy and emphasizes that "rebirth" is better understood as "re-becoming"—a continuous process of becoming rather than a being being reborn. Mahayana Buddhism, particularly in schools like Pure Land, sometimes gives greater explanatory weight to karma as an impersonal cosmic force, though anatta remains foundational.
Tibetan Buddhism's Gelug school provides perhaps the clearest technical explanation: the continuity is the "mental continuum"—a sequence of moments of consciousness, each arising from a previous moment according to natural law. This stream has no beginning and no end in samsara (cyclic existence), yet no permanent occupant.
Understanding this requires shifting perspective. Stop asking "who gets reborn?" and instead ask "what continues?" The answer is: a causal process. Your actions condition the quality of your experience now and in future lives. There is responsibility without a responsible self—accountability arising purely from the impersonal laws of cause and effect.
This is not mere wordplay. It reflects a genuine insight: you feel like a unified self, but investigation reveals only processes. Accepting this does not make rebirth less serious or karma less binding. If anything, it sharpens their force, since there is nowhere to hide, no ultimate "I" that stands apart from the consequences of its actions.
The reconciliation of anatta and rebirth is not academic. It cuts through fatalism ("if there's no self, why act?") and through the spiritual trap of ego-based practice (clinging to a self that wants enlightenment). It reveals that both rebirth and liberation are possible precisely because there is no fixed essence to be trapped. You can change because you have never been fixed. Karma binds you precisely because you are a process, not a thing, and processes can transform.