Reincarnation

Source: Scholarship

Reincarnation in Buddhism

This idea of a soul returning in different bodies has ancient roots beyond the Greeks. It is a central tenet of the majority of Indian religions, which believe that in lifetime after lifetime, the soul clothes itself in beauty and perfection, dropping all negatives and biases and leaves the wheel of life with its constant repetitions, and merges with the Godhead. This happens in different forms in yoga, Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Jainism and Sikhism. The Buddhist concept of rebirth differs significantly from Hindu based traditions in that there is no unchanging “soul” or eternal self to reincarnate.

According to the Buddhist sutras, the Buddha taught a concept of rebirth that was distinct from that of any contemporary Indian teacher. The concept was consistent with the common notion of a sequence of related lives stretching over a very long time, but was constrained by two core Buddhist concepts:

Anatta, that there is no irreducible atman or self tying these lives together; and Anicca, that all compounded things are subject to dissolution, including all the components of the human person and personality At the death of one personality, a new one comes into being much as the flame of a dying candle can be used to light the flame of another.

According to Buddhism, there is no permanent and unchanging self (identity), so
there can be no transmigration in the strict sense. What is reborn is not the person. Instead one moment gives rise to another and this momentum continues even after death. Instead of a fixed entity, what is reborn is an “evolving consciousness” or “stream of consciousness”, whose quality has been conditioned by karma.

When Carl Sagan asked the Dalai Lama what he would do if reincarnation (a fundamental tenet) was disproved definitively by science, the Dalai Lama answered: “If science can disprove reincarnation, Tibetan Buddhism would abandon reincarnation…but it’s going to be mighty hard to disprove reincarnation”.

Ian Stevenson

The most detailed collections of personal reports in favour of reincarnation have been published by the late Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, in books such as Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and articles such as “Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects Volume I: “Birthmarks” and “Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects Volume 2: Birth Defects and Other Anomalies”.

Stevenson spent over forty years devoted to the study of children who have apparently spoken about a past life. In each case Professor Stevenson methodically documented the child’s statements. Then he identified the deceased person the child allegedly identified with, and verified the facts of the deceased person’s life that matched the child’s memory. He also matched birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars 95 on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs.

Stevenson believed that his strict methods ruled out all possible “normal” explanations for children’s memories. Braude would ask us to consider telepathy, and reasons for encouragement from the child’s family or the family of the deceased. Also, it should be observed that a majority of Professor Stevenson’s cases originate in Eastern societies, where the dominant religious institutions permit and accept the concept of reincarnation.

From my reading of many cases from Stevenson, I have come to think that many of the cases, such as Bishen Chand, which will be discussed in this chapter, show strong evidence for survival. But one must also remember that the culture of India lends itself to this type of thinking. If an American child came to its parents claiming to have had a past life in Pittsburg, the parents would probably write it off to imagination and nothing further would be said. But in India, the families honour this type of behaviour and will try to verify the details. Is PSI involved? In certain family situations, probably so. So many people are so poor that if a case like this comes up and they can achieve certain notoriety and earn some money with it, they pursue it. Not all cases are like this. Bishen Chand’s case was an early-bird case, where the child started talking about the past at an early age. Less suggestive of survival and more suggestive of super-psi or fantasy is the Antonia case which was discovered in a mature American woman during hypnotic treatment for weight loss. Hypnotism opens the mind to creative imagining and seems to encourage fantasizing. When we consider the Antonia case, we might feel that the psi hypothesis offers some answers.

Many people have investigated reincarnation and come to the conclusion that it is a legitimate phenomenon, such as Peter Ramstes, Dr. Brian Weiss, author of Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr. Walter Semkiv, and others. Dr. Stevenson is published in many peer reviewed journals (Wikipedia 12).

Some skeptics, like Paul Edwards, have studied these accounts and called them“anecdotal”. Philosophers like Robert Almeder have analyzed the criticisms of Edwards and others, and suggest that the gist of these arguments can be summarized as “we all know it can’t possibly be real, so therefore it isn’t real” – an argument from personal incredulity (Wikipedia 12).

The most obvious objection to reincarnations is that there is no evidence of a physical process by which someone could survive death and travel to another body. Researchers recognize this limitation. Some skeptics explain that evidence for reincarnation originates in selective thinking and the psychological phenomena of false memories, and thus cannot be counted as evidence. But some others, such as Dr. Carl Sagan, see need for more reincarnation research.

Before getting into some cases, let me set the stage by offering the late Dr. Ian Stevenson’s argument for reincarnation. Over the years, he has been one of the leading researchers in this field. Stevenson’s argument is that the belief in personal reincarnation offers the best available explanation for a large body of data that, until recently, has been generally ignored or rejected for various unacceptable reasons. This body of data exists in a number of case studies (which he describes in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation) which share the following core features:

• (A) A young person, ages 3-9, claims to remember having lived an earlier life as a different person, and provides the parents with a detailed description of the alleged earlier life. This includes details that could be known only by the person that is claimed to be in the earlier life, and specific details on how death occurred.
• (B) The memory claims are of two types: (1) those that can be simply verified by available information and (2) those that can be verified but not by available information.
• (C) The person claiming to remember having lived a past life and present family members are interviewed. (Looking for involuntary and spontaneous memories).
• (D) Investigators independently confirm both the spontaneous and solicited memory claims. Past life family members are also interviewed and confront the subject who reminds them of nonpublic details of the past life.
• (E) The person claiming to remember a past life manifests certain skills (such as language, dialect or playing an instrument) that the person in the alleged earlier life had, but the person claiming to have lived the earlier life could not have acquired or learned in this life.
• (F) Deception, hoax, or fraud on the part of the person claiming the past life cannot be substantiated.

Stevenson’s basic argument says that for cases with characteristics A through F the only available explanation that logically fits is belief in reincarnation (Almeder 2-5). Some of the most compelling evidence for reincarnation happens in cases that, as 98 described in Stevenson’s ideal-typical characteristics, offer detailed memory claims substantiated by extant past-life family members. I offer this list of characteristics of a reincarnation case so the reader can focus their own ideas of the cases to follow. There are many cases that could be considered. Some are the Bishen Chand case; the Antonia case; and the extremely intriguing case of Jenny Cockell, an Englishwoman remembering a life as an Irish woman in a small village. These cases seem to run the gamut from being very evidential for survival to super-psi-ESP to fantasy. Fantasy is not a part of my consideration, as I look at the competition between the survival and Super-psi hypotheses, but the Cockell case demonstrates a further relationship between hypnotism and fantasizing, so it had to be mentioned as such. Also included is a rebuttal to the Cockell case by Joe Nickell, senior fellow researcher for the Skeptical Inquirer.

The case of Bishen Chand is a classic reincarnation case, and has many of the elements that make the best cases so intriguing. Many of the subject’s statements were written down before they were verified; the subject’s behaviour was often inappropriate to his age and socioeconomic setting; and the subject reportedly displayed abilities which he had not been taught but which were characteristic of the previous personality. Like many of the better cases, Bishen Chand’s case comes from India (Braude 183), Bishen Chand was born in Bareilly in 1921. At the age of ten months, when he was barely able to speak, he would try to say something like “Pilvit” or “Pilivit”. When he was about one and a half years old, he began asking questions about the town of Pilibhit, about fifty miles from Bareilly. As his command of language got better, he began to speak of a previous life in Pilibhit. He said his name had been Laxmi Narain, and his uncle, a wealth landowner, was named Har Narain.

At about age four, Chand’s father took Bishen and his brother to a wedding in a town beyond Pilibhit. On the return trip, when Pilibhit was announced, Bishen demanded to get off the train. Bishen cried when his father refused.

Sometime later, word of Bishen’s behaviour reached a lawyer, K.K.N. Sahay, who was already investigating a reincarnation case involving his own son. After having interviewed Bishen, Sahay persuaded Bishen’s father to visit Pilibhit to verify the claims. This was done on August 1, 1926. Arriving there Bishen correctly identified places and people and made statements about his former life in Pilibhit. Those statements corresponded correctly to the life of Laxmi Narain, who had died in 1918, two years before Bishen was born.

Sahay’s report was published in 1927. From 1964-1971, Professor Ian Stevenson did several interviews with Bishen and surviving members of both families. All the additional interviews confirmed and supplemented the original material reported by Sahay.

Judging by Sahay’s report, Bishen Chand was impressively accurate in his initial (early bird) statements as well as those made on the August 1 visit to Pilibhit. His statements as to caste, education, languages, housing, habits (such as girls and wine), and when asked for the name of his favourite prostitute, Bishen reluctantly named her correctly.

When interviewed by Laxmi Narain’s mother, Bishen gave additional details that convinced her that he was Laxmi returned. The details involved some rotten food that he had refused to eat and the mother verified it.

When Bishen was given a pair of tablas (Indian drums) he immediately played them “with ease”. Tablas are very difficult to play well and Bishen had never seen them before. Two things to remember here: (1) we have no way of knowing how well “with ease” means or (2) if Laxmi Narain played drums with any degree of skill. More impressive are the reports of linguistic competence, corresponding to Laxmi Narain’s competence in Urdu. Chand’s father reported that Bishen used two Urdu words that he had not been taught: one was the word for women’s quarters “masurate” and the other, a word for lock, “kafal”.

Bishen demonstrated some very adult behaviour similar to Laxmi Narain, such as drinking. Between the ages of 4-6, when caught drinking brandy, Bishen reportedly said, “I am used to drinking.” At the age five and a half, Bishen turned to his father one day and said, “Papa, why don’t you keep a mistress? You will have great pleasure from her.” During their first visit to Pilibhit, Bishen said to a police superintendent when asked about wife and children, “I had none; I was steeped in wine and women and never thought of marrying.”

If these reports are accurate, this case is very challenging for anti-survivalists. Bishen produced a long string of verified statements (many of them early-bird) along with various behaviours appropriate to the previous personality, but unusual for a young child. If the reports can be trusted, Bishen’s emotions on certain occasions square with the super-psi hypothesis. For example, at one point he wept bitterly over a situation. Weeping bitterly is clearly distinguishable from childlike crying. Only one of these types of crying is appropriate to an adult (Braude 183-187).