Thinking About Reincarnation

“Pop reincarnation” versus Buddhism versus Christianity

There’s a popular “spiritual-but-not-religious” concept of reincarnation out there which sometimes vaguely purports to be descended from the Buddhist notion of reincarnation, but is actually a bit of a watered-down version. It professes a type of reincarnation in which individuals might be induced to “remember” their past lives, and in which they are supposedly given the opportunity, in the “between” phase after death, to “choose” their next incarnation. People who are able to recall their past lives report a certain inner transformation, in which they feel that they have come in touch with their true self, their immortal self, the self that perdures through myriad physical incarnations.

I think that this is a watered down concept of reincarnation that actually has very little to do with the Buddhist concept which it pretends to emulate. One of the marks that famously separates Buddhism from Christianity is that it does not profess any strong belief in human immortality, just as it does not profess an “afterlife” in the sense of eternal life. Indeed, this is largely the point of the Buddhist notion of reincarnation: life is impermanent, nothing lasts forever, and reality is constantly cycling through endless flux. This is the classical Buddhist notion of saṃsāra. I am not who I think I am, if I reflect upon myself from the standpoint of a fixed ego-identity; I am no more than a passing phenomenon, one wave in a endless series of waves of change. My “next incarnation” is no more than the next phase of change. It is not “me,” for there is no fixed “I” identity. All is impermanent.

The caricatured version of reincarnation which I summarized above is motivated by a desire to cling on to the very idea of immortality which Buddhism rejects. It’s a good example of attempting to have your cake and eat it too. If, beneath all the change, there is an unchanging “true Me” that lasts forever, then I can claim to be immortal, permanent, changeless, in just the way that Buddhism denies. It is rooted in the desire for permanence and the attachment to ego that Buddhism identifies as the root of all suffering. It almost seems to profess that a multitude of experiences must be accumulated over many lives in order for a soul to have “lived” meaningfully. This also stands in stark contrast to the emphasis which Buddhism gives to the practice of mindfulness. A single, minuscule moment lived mindfully and without attachment to desire is more meaningful than a thousand lifetimes of craving and seeking. The caricatured version of reincarnation rests fundamentally on a refusal to be satisfied with the present moment; its claim to immortality serves no more than to uphold the possibility of endless craving. It is the polar opposite of Buddhism.

Christianity has its own concept of immortality and eternal life. But Christianity does not profess reincarnation in either the Buddhist form or the more popular watered-down form. What Christianity does share with Buddhism, however, is an emphasis on the virtue of detachment, and this does play directly into the Christian idea of immortality as well. For Christianity, properly understood — there are caricatures of Christianity too) — the desire for immortality or eternal life is in no way a desire for more of this life, just improved and infinitely extended. Rather, it is a desire for something unidentifiable in earthly terms, something unknown, something that cannot be described. It might as well be a non-desire. The various caricatures of both reincarnation and the afterlife make the fatal mistake of conceiving immortality or the afterlife as really just a continuation of this earthly existence in a new and improved form, and indefinitely. Buddhism and Christianity, by contrast, invite us to purge all of these concrete and sensational forms of life from our desire, fully embracing instead the impermanence of this life.

Where Buddhism and Christianity differ is how they imagine the end of human life, though here there are even more commonalities than might appear at the outset. Whereas Buddhism imagines that human life is dissolved in its separateness from the broader flow of ceaseless change, such that “I” am dissolved into the other elements of the world around me (a part of me will be a flower, another part of me a tree, and so forth), Christianity professes that human life will be dissolved in its separateness from God, so that “I” will be dissolved into the universal consciousness, the universal “I,” of Christ. As I have written before, Christianity professes not my reincarnation, but the reincarnation of Christ in me. “I” will live again, yet not as I, but as Christ. “I” am nothing in myself, nothing apart from Christ, transient and impermanent in my illusory separateness from the sea of Christ’s Godly consciousness. The dissolution of my illusory separateness, the illusion that I by myself am something apart from God — this is what constitutes Christian Enlightenment.