Translated By Andrew Yang
Someone said, “Regarding reincarnation, most of the information available in Buddhist literature concerns events that happened before the birth of the modern Republic of China in 1911, and most of them occurred in China. Are there more contemporary cases that better prove the existence of reincarnation?”
Many theosophists and other scholars in the West have studied reincarnation and afterlife, among them Jerome Anderson (1847-1903) and Robert Monroe (1915-1995) of the United Kingdom, Annie Besant (1847-1933), Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) and Ian Stevenson (1918-2007) of the United States, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) and Guenther Wachsmuth (1893-1963) of Sweden, and more recently, Brian Weiss (1944-) of the United States. There are about sixty to seventy of them in all, whose writings have documented many individual cases of reincarnation. A few of these cases are summarized below for your reference.
An Egyptian reborn as a British girl
In 1910, there lived a 15-year-old English girl, who one day suddenly became fluent in ancient Egyptian, a language that had been extinct. She claimed to be a Syrian who lived around 1400 BC, when she was taken to Egypt as a slave and performed dances in shrines. Nobody took her story seriously, but her family physician recorded it and gave it to an Egyptian linguist for analysis. As a result, the scholar confirmed that the words she had spoken were indeed ancient Egyptian. In her previous life, the girl may have been what she called an Egyptian slave.
A Japanese soldier reincarnated as a Burmese
According to Dr Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia School of Medicine and author of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, a Burmese girl could have been reincarnated from a Japanese soldier who had died in war. The girl was born on December 26, 1953, at a village in central Burma. At the age of four, she began to tell people about her previous life. She said she had been a Japanese soldier who died during the war in Burma, and she missed Japan so much that she often begged her parents to take her there. A four-year-old Burmese girl may not have likely been aware of the existence of Japan, but she often recalled to her family the death of the Japanese soldier in her former life. She told them that one day when he was cooking with firewood in the mountains, an enemy plane suddenly appeared in the air. He was fleeing to a cave nearby when the pilot shot him with a machine gun, hitting him in the back and he died on the spot. So now whenever she heard a plane flying over in the air, she felt scared.
A British waiter returning to his former home
According to Joseph Head and S.L. Cranston’s Reincarnation: An East-West Anthology (Theosophical Publishing House, August 1968), a waiter working on a British ship was born in London and had never been to South America. He followed the ship to every big port in the world, and spent quite a few years at sea. When he landed in South America in January 1928 for the first time, he had a strange feeling that he was returning home and that he had lived there a long time ago. He knew every street well, and was able to tell their names in advance. When people checked them out, he was always right. Besides, he knew the local customs well. And most bewildering, very abruptly, he was somehow able to speak the local dialect fluently.
A five-year-old pianist prodigy
Around August 1971, while resting in the garden of their Los Angeles home, a couple suddenly heard a beautiful jazz piano recital being played from their house. Surprised, the husband and wife rushed back in to check. It turned out that their five-year-old son Raymond was at the piano, but how could he know how to play the instrument so well when he had never learned to do it? And from then on, Raymond played the piano no less than five hours a day every day, and his music, analyzed by professional musicians, proved to have come from the unique jazz repertoire of a pianist who had died in 1945. The child may have been his reincarnation.
Plato (427-347 BC), the ancient Greek philosopher, once said that if someone very easily learns a skill, it means he had this skill in his previous life. And the philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) posits that everyone has memories of their past life. A five-year-old able to play the jazz music of a late professional pianist is a miracle that has aroused the interest of many Western scholars in reincarnation. They increasingly believe that the probability of reincarnation after death is rather high.
Friends, where does one’s life come from? And where does it go when he dies? Over thousands of years, this mystery has rarely been examined in depth, except for Buddhist scriptures that already contain clear illumination. In recent decades, however, interest in reincarnation and afterlife has been going quite strong among scientists who try to actively uncover evidence and document it for research.
As a matter of fact, Buddhist literature gives clear and detailed explanations of karma, causality and transmigration. Yet alas, ordinary people tend to take a lengthy detour by seeking proof from scientific phenomena while ignoring proofs directly available from the innate consciousness within their own mind. In this way, they mistake Buddhism for a system of religious beliefs based purely on sentiments and refuse to dig into the treasure of wisdom of the Dharma. That is why they would prefer to hear studies and testimonies of transmigration by Western academics who have only just begun in their research on the topic of reincarnation.
