From the Ashes: Reincarnation in Buddhism and Christianity
By April French

"Reincarnation? Well, I have seen stranger things in my time. Men who walk through fire, children born speaking long-dead languages... And Harry Houdini had a rather nifty trick with handcuffs and a tank full of water." -- "Francesca"

For human beings, there is an unutterable desire for existence to continue. As Pulitzer-prize winning author Ernest Becker explains, "At the bottom of all phobias and neuroses is the fear of death." Because there is no concrete evidence detailing what happens to our consciousness when we die, we are desperate to find some way of overcoming this commonplace fact of human existence.

It is the driving force behind procreation, the search for eternal life--the fear of death is one of the main factors in understanding the vampire as a part of both ancient and modern popular culture--and for the belief in life after death. Reincarnation, the birth of a soul into many different bodies, is another such belief. In one form or another, reincarnation appears throughout history, and from all around the world, in countless religions and systems of belief, from the great Asian religion known as Buddhism to the early days of Christianity.

Buddhism
In Theravada or Southern Buddhism, there is no permanent soul or self (Cranston 238). There is only ego, an illusion in constant change. The ego reincarnates because of its inherent desires and attachments. This illusion of ego keeps karma and samsara, the wheel of rebirth, moving:

"In Buddhist psychology the individual consists of five sections: the physical body; feelings and sensations; perceptions (awareness, recognitions); mental formations (impulses, emotions, moral law and its accumulated character dispositions); consciousness. At death these fall apart, leaving a 'germ of consciousness' to be reincarnated. The nature of the new individual depends on the quality of the potencies contained in the germ" (Christie-Murray 41).

This germ of consciousness is a set of character dispositions and latent memories that crave life, and will attach themselves to a new embryo to form a new 'empirical' self. The craving for life gives the germ a grasping force which draws it to the new embryo (Christie-Murray 42). The ultimate object of Buddhist reincarnation is to escape samsara and the repetition of reincarnation by dousing the three fires of craving, ill-will and ignorance (Christie-Murray 41). A common metaphor for rebirth in this tradition is the lighting of a new candle from an old one--nothing remains of the original candle but the flame.

Only a small fraction of births are into a human form. The best men meet together in heaven. Others are born again as men. The wicked become ghosts, the less wicked become animals, while the worst criminals go to hell. But none of these states are permanent, and the karma of the individual eventually ordains where the 'germ' will be reborn.

Karma is the belief that every act that a person commits brings an inevitable result. Right action results in right karma, and wrong action results in wrong karma, which provides opportunities for moral advancement. But even the generation of right karma keeps samsara moving, and the total extinction of karma is needed to attain nirvana, the freedom from all craving for individual satisfaction, suffering and sorrow that is the ultimate goal of Buddhism (Christie-Murray 42).

Theravada Buddhists do not believe in a soul; however, early Buddhist texts show these limiting views to be erroneous (Cranston 238). Mahayana or Northern Buddhism definitely holds with the theory of a reincarnating soul. They believe that Buddha taught of "an immortal reincarnating individuality that could move up and down for almost eternity until it was finally redeemed" (Christie-Murray 43). This doctrine unites all the incarnations of a single individual--which makes sense when one realizes the pointlessness of karma in the attainment of nirvana, unless the individual can learn from his past mistakes, as it were. Buddha himself used the metaphor of a pearl necklace, every life a pearl and the string the connecting link between each life (Christie-Murray 43). Even the Dalai Lama affirmed this belief. On his first visit to the United States in 1979, he said:

"'...by our own experience it is established that the self exists.... If we did assert total selflessness... then there would be no one who could cultivate compassion.' Even in Nirvana, he added, 'the continuum of consciousness goes on; one has not ceased the continuum of the mind and body.... if the continuum of mind and body did cease when one attained Nirvana, then there would not be anybody to attain Nirvana'" (Cranston 239).

And the leading exponent in the west of the form of Buddhism known as Zen, Dr. D. T. Suzuki, wrote many times of the need for an immortal reincarnating self in each of us:

"Without self there will be no individual; without an individual there will be no responsibility. Without the idea of responsibility morality ceases to exist... human community becomes impossible. We must in some way have a self" (Cranston 240).

Memories of past lives are denied to most ordinary men, although the re-attainment of such memories is a mark of Buddhist achievement. But as every man is destined to eventually reach nirvana, every man will, as a part of enlightenment, eventually regain the memories of all his countless lives.

"Better than the life of a hundred years of a person who does not perceive the deathless state, is the short life of a single day of the person who senses that deathless state" -- Buddha, The Dhammapada (Head #2 75).

Early Christianity
Reincarnation has been a part of Judaism, and by extension Christianity, for thousands of years. In the eyes of the Jews, "Moses was in their opinion Abel, the son of Adam; and their Messiah was to be the reincarnation of Adam himself, who had already come a second time as David" (Head #1 94). The idea is referred to obliquely throughout the New Testament, but never in plain words.

Therefore, for two thousand years, Christianity denied the concept of literal reincarnation, preaching the doctrine of 'life everlasting' and 'life after death' for the born-once-in-all-eternity soul. There is disagreement among theologians as to whether or not early Christianity tolerated or even taught the belief of reincarnation, but there is some evidence to support the affirmative:

"Justin Martyr (AD 100? - 165), in his Dialogue with Trypho, speaks of the soul inhabiting a human body more than once but being unable to remember previous existences. Souls who become unworthy to see God are joined to the bodies of wild beasts" (Christie-Murray 55).

But first century Christians were not interested in reincarnation, nor were they interested in any kind of future life. Christians in the years following Christ's death expected His return daily. Only when they realized that He was not coming as soon as they had anticipated did they turn to the Gospels for guidance on what would happen to them after they died. But the Gospels were conflicting and incomplete, having not been recorded immediately after Christ's death. The earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written perhaps thirty to forty years after the crucifixion. The other three Gospels, those of Matthew, Luke and John, were written anywhere from thirty to sixty years after. The delay is understandable; the general expectation being that the world was about to end (Cranston 204). But this was not helpful to early Christians! So they were forced to fill in the gaps for themselves, with assumptions and ideas which have been passed down through the centuries.

"Matthew... relates that when Jesus spoke in public, he spoke only in parables; when his disciples asked the reason, he replied: 'To you it has been given the secrets [mysteria; literally, 'mysteries'] of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.' According to the Gnostics, some of the disciples, following his instructions, kept secret Jesus' esoteric teaching: this they taught only in private, to certain persons who had proven themselves to be spiritually mature, and who therefore qualified for 'initiation into gnosis'--that is, into secret knowledge" (Pagels 14-15).

A growing number of writers today have out forth the idea that the Gnostics may have been the descendants of the original Christians and the inheritors of Christ's teachings (Head #1 109). In the Pistis Sophia (Knowledge Wisdom), a Gnostic gospel probably from the third century although supposed to be the esoteric teaching of Jesus to Mary Magdalene.

"So far from thinking that reincarnation is alien to gospel teaching, they [the Gnostic gospels] elaborately interpret certain of the striking sayings in this sense, and give graphic details of how Jesus, as the First Mystery, brought to rebirth the souls of John the Baptizer and of the disciples, and supervised the economy of his own incarnation" (Head #1 110).

In his 'Letter to Avitus,' St. Jerome (c. 347 - c. 420) is said to have supported reincarnation, and that the doctrine was common among the early Christians as an esoteric doctrine. St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) rides both sides of the argument, with texts both suggesting and denying its existence (Christie-Murray 58-59).

Oddly, the idea of remembering one's past life or lives was not debated nearly as often as the much larger concept of reincarnation itself. Perhaps early Christians felt that to debate the smaller problem before settling the issue of the larger one would be a waste of time.

Contrasting Views
Of necessity, doctrines dealing with reincarnation must have at least one thing in common: they must preach that the soul or essence of life can be housed in many different bodies, and be reborn from a dying body into a new one. But when a simple belief is part of a much larger belief system, there must arise some differences in doctrines and practices. The two greatest differences between the doctrines of reincarnation in Buddhism and early Christianity are the condemnation suffered by early Christian belief in pre-existence, and the way that reincarnation deals with the repercussions of one's actions in a particular life.

Condemnation
The doctrine on reincarnation was silenced in orthodox Christian circles for fourteen centuries, due to an important Church council held in the year 553. At an unofficial or extra-conciliary session of the Fifth Ecumenical Council--sometimes called the Second Council of Constantinople--the Roman emperor Justinian issued anathemas, or curses, against the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul. But there is some debate over whether these anathemas were 'legal,' that is, whether or not they were endorsed by the papacy:

With the exception of six Western Bishops from Africa, the council was attended entirely by Eastern bishops, no representatives from Rome being present. Although Pope Vigilius was in Constantinople at the time, he refused to attend. In fact, the Pope was Justinian's prisoner since 545, when he had been kidnapped from Rome. The president of the Council was Eutychius, Patriarch of Constantinople' (Head #1 113).

For many years, there had been intense conflict between Justinian and Vigilius. Justinian had issued an edict in 551 which contained the teachings of three supposed heretics. When the Pope protested, he suffered various personal indignities at the hands of the civil authorities and nearly lost his life. The Fifth Ecumenical Council was called to bring peace between the Western and Eastern branches of the Church, but when Justinian refused the Pope's request for equal representation of bishops from the East and West, Vigilius refused to attend. The final meeting, on June 2nd, was attended by 165 bishops, only six of whom were from the West. All voting was obviously controlled by the emperor (Head #1 113).

The reason for Justinian to declare reincarnation heretical is unclear, but according to Thomas Whittaker, in his book The Neo-Platonists, "...the philosophers in Athens had retained some freedom to oppose Christian positions of speculative questions.... Justinian, who was desirous of a reputation for strictness of orthodoxy, resolved that this freedom should cease;... henceforth no one should teach the ancient philosophy.... The philosophising was now every brought within the limits prescribed by the Christian Church" (Head #114).

There was never any persecution of this type for the Buddhists to endure, Buddhism was derived from Hinduism, which preached reincarnation, and also because reincarnation and past lives were commonly accepted throughout many Asian religions. Pagan beliefs in Europe before the advent of Christianity also frequently believed in the rebirth of the soul, but this belief was stamped out along with the rest of the pagan religions by Christian missionaries.

Repercussions
In a reincarnation-themed episode of the vampire television series "Forever Knight," the main character is confronted with a criminal who has the soul of a woman he killed three centuries before. When he goes to his master for guidance, the older vampire instead asks him a question: "Where does responsibility lie for what we do in our lives?" The theme of responsibility is an underlying one in the discussion of reincarnation.

In the Gnostic text called the Pistis Sophia, Christ:

"...teaches that souls are 'poured from one into another of different kinds of bodies of the world,' that sinful bodies are 'cast into a body which is suitable to the sins which it hath committed,' the curser into a body 'continually troubled in its heart,' the thief into 'a lame, halt and blind body' and the arrogant man into 'a lame and deformed body, so that all despise it persistently.' The ignorant doer of good is given a disposition to seek and find the truth, to discover 'the mysteries of the Light'" (Christie-Murray 56).

However, even those who have received the blessing of these mysteries may still transgress, die unrepentant and suffer eternal damnation as punishment. There is no evidence for any belief in transmigration, and more than one early Christian writer can be quoted as calling the very idea 'nonsense.' Buddhist reincarnation occurs for the sole purpose of 'educating' the soul in right action, and then in no action, so that it can eventually attain nirvana. The purpose in Christianity is somewhat more clouded. It does not follow that through many incarnations of 'good works,' one may enter heaven, and rebirth into the form of a beggar seems more like a punishment than an educational experience. (It is interesting to note that LaCroix, the master vampire, in addressing his creation, called reincarnation "a true judgment, a true life sentence." To be stuck in a cycle of rebirth, weary, without the possibility of rest or peace--in that sense, reincarnation can be a punishment.) Perhaps instead, the Christian 'heaven' is a mortal life devoid of trouble, and the Christian 'hell' a life of torment, and that to enter God's kingdom at the Judgment Day is the equivalent of the Buddhism nirvana, the enlightenment and the escape from samsara, the cycle of rebirth.

Bibliography

1. Cranston, Sylvia, and Carey Williams. Reincarnation: A New Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society. Julian Press: New York, 1984.

2. Head, Joseph, and S. L. Cranston, ed. Reincarnation in World Thought (A Living Study of Reincarnation in All Ages; Including Selections from the World's Religions, Philosophies and Sciences, and Great Thinkers of the Past and Present). Julian Press: New York, 1967. -- (Head #1)

3. Head, Joseph, and S. L. Cranston, ed. Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery (An East-West Dialogue on Death and Rebirth from the Worlds of Religion, Science, Psychology, Philosophy, Art, and Literature, and from Great Thinkers of the Past and Present). Julian Press: New York, 1977. -- (Head #2)

4. Murray-Christie, David. Reincarnation: Ancient Beliefs and Modern Evidence. David and Charles: London, 1981.

5. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Random House: New York, 1979.

6. "Francesca." Forever Knight. Parriot and Cohen. Tri-Star Entertainment. 1996.

~Written: December 2002~

Copyright April French, 2002, 2003. All Rights Reserved.