Reincarnation

Origin

In Indian thought, reincarnation is first articulated in the Upanishads from the eighth century BCE. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad describes the soul leaving the body at death and passing into another according to the karma it has accumulated. The doctrine is presupposed by every major Indian school thereafter and forms the existential horizon against which liberation (moksha, nirvana) makes sense. Jainism, contemporary with early Buddhism, developed the most elaborate theory of how karma physically clings to and weighs down the soul through successive births.

In the Greek world, Pythagoras (c. 570 to 495 BCE) taught the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), reportedly claiming to remember his own past lives. Plato made the doctrine philosophical in the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and the Myth of Er in the Republic. Orphic mystery religion built ritual around the soul's release from "the wheel of birth." Western reception of Indian reincarnation came through the nineteenth century: Schopenhauer's engagement with the Upanishads, Theosophy from 1875 onward, and Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner, from 1900). Twentieth-century researchers such as Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia collected thousands of cases of young children who claimed memories of past lives.

What transmigrates

The schools differ sharply on what transmigrates. Hinduism teaches the rebirth of the atman, the eternal self that is ultimately identical with brahman. The atman is unchanging in itself, but takes on different bodies and minds across lives, like an actor donning successive costumes. Liberation is the recognition that the atman never truly was bound. Jainism teaches the rebirth of the jiva, the individual soul, which carries karmic matter that determines the form of the next body. Christian reincarnationist sects (Cathars, some Gnostics) generally followed similar models.

Buddhism rejects the doctrine of an enduring soul (anatman) but retains rebirth. What transmigrates is not a soul but a stream of mental and physical phenomena, conditioned by karma, that links one life to the next as one candle's flame might light another. The Buddha used the simile of a flame and its successor: not the same flame, but not entirely different either. The Tibetan tradition developed elaborate accounts of the intermediate state (bardo) between death and rebirth, codified in the Bardo Thodol (often translated as Tibetan Book of the Dead). Western Theosophy synthesised Indian sources with Greek and Christian elements, often introducing concepts (such as the higher and lower self) not found in any classical source.

In practice

Working with reincarnation begins with reflection on its consequences rather than speculation about its mechanics. If your present life is one of many, then current circumstances are neither random nor punitive but the working-through of long karmic threads. If consciousness continues after death, then the cultivation of mind in this life has weight beyond this life. The classical traditions counsel against fixation on past-life identification: who you were is far less important than who you are becoming. Meditation purifies the karmic seedbed and prepares the mind to navigate the transitions between states.

Past-life regression therapy, developed in the late twentieth century by figures such as Brian Weiss and Michael Newton, uses hypnotic induction to access alleged memories of prior lives. Whether the content is taken literally or symbolically, the method can surface unconscious material with therapeutic effect. More austere traditions (most Buddhist lineages, classical Vedanta) prefer to leave the question of past lives in the background and concentrate on present practice. Combine reflection on reincarnation with Saturn in astrology, traditionally associated with karmic structure, and with the life path number for a sense of this life's curriculum.

Symbolic depth

Reincarnation's deepest symbol is the cycle: the wheel of samsara, the river that flows out from and back to the sea, the seed that dies into the earth and rises as new grain. The same image appears in the Eleusinian mysteries, in the death-and-resurrection of Osiris, in the agricultural rituals of countless cultures. The doctrine answers the existential intolerability of finitude with a vision of recurrence, and asks in return what kind of being is worthy of so many lives. In the tarot, the Wheel of Fortune and the Death card together express the principle: transformation, not annihilation.

The doctrine of gilgul in Lurianic Kabbalah teaches that souls return until they have completed their tikkun, their unique task of repair in creation. The Druze, the Cathars, and certain Sufi orders preserved reincarnationist teachings within otherwise Abrahamic frameworks. In Christianity, the doctrine was held by Origen (c. 184 to 253) before being formally condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. Continue with karma, samsara, akasha, and moksha. The full glossary offers further routes.

Also known as

• rebirth
• metempsychosis
• transmigration
• gilgul
• palingenesis