For the purposes of this note, we take a broad definition of soteriology. While it often implies the final state, we wrap within the term the various notable waystations one might experience. We also include states that are often seen as non-soteriological conclusions of existence. To make it a little more explicit, let us take the case of a guy like the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. As per his system, he has attained the soteriological destination of “radio silence”. The constituents of his body have hopefully entered the biogeochemical cycles of nature, and his consciousness (which he pronounced to be an illusion) has ended with his death. Hence, there is no experience beyond his bodily existence. Whether that is what really happened is not in question here; this is merely his soteriological terminus as per his theory of existence.
To offer a completely contrasting vision, the old Śaiva-s presented a poly-focal soteriology for the votaries of deities other than Śiva:
prāsādaṃ kārayitvā tu viṣṇuṃ ye sthāpayanti hi ॥
viṣṇu-lokaṃ vrajanty ete modante viṣṇunā saha ।
brahmāṇaṃ skandaṃ rudrāṇīṃ gaṇeśaṃ mātaraṃ ravim ॥
vahniṃ śatakratuṃ yakṣaṃ vāyuṃ dharmañ jaleśvaram ।
yo yasya sthāpanaṃ kuryāt prāsāde tu suśobhane ॥
pūjaye parayā bhaktyā so ’mṛto hy asya lokatām ।
Those who indeed have a temple constructed for Viṣṇu and install him will go to the world of Viṣṇu and rejoice together with Viṣṇu. Those who perform the installation of Brahmā, Skanda, Rudrāṇī, Gaṇeśa, the Mātṛ-s, the Solar deity, Agni, Indra, the Yakṣa (Kubera), Vāyu, Dharma (Yama) or Jaleśvara (Varuṇa) in a beautiful temple and worship them with the highest devotion become immortal [in the] world of the [respective deity].
In founding his counter-religion, the historical Tathāgata redefined several well-understood terms of the Vedic religion (e.g., Trayividyā, ṛṣi, sūkta → all originally indicated by cognates in the vulgar Pāḷī), while crucially inverting ātman (≈ individual consciousness) to anātman (Pāḷī: anattā), thereby indicating the illusory nature of individual consciousness (sort of like Dennett). Yet, at the heart of his religious edifice was the claim that he remembered an enormous number of his previous reincarnations – about 547 of them – his narrations of which are collated into the Jātaka corpus.
This raises an apparent paradox. In the ancestral Hindu substratum from which the Tathāgata arose, there was a relatively simple theory of reincarnation: The consciousness, i.e., ātman, survived the death of the material body. In some formulations, it was borne in a sūkṣma-śarīra, a “psychophore”, that carried its memories and some other impressions from past incarnations. After physical death, the ātman or it complexed with the sūkṣma-śarīra journeyed about until it entered a new embryo, which it then imbued with consciousness and also the memories of the previous incarnation. Most ordinary souls forget these memories, but in some, they are believed to resurface in early childhood or adulthood. Given that the Tathāgata has declared the ātman to be an illusion (anātman), then what is actually reincarnating in his plethora of Jātaka-s?
The resolution of this paradox was the centerpiece of the Buddha’s philosophical edifice. However, his articulation of it still left room for questions that continued to puzzle both his Hindu rivals and his own successors. Briefly, his theory went thus:
First, he postulated that there is no undying, independent “ātman” underlying first-person experience (qualia in Occidental philosophical terminology). Instead, he proposed that the sense of this first-person experiencer is just a composite process of pañca-skandha-s (five aggregates) – (1) rūpa: can be mapped onto what we would call matter; (2) vedanā: feeling or sensation, which today we would map onto biological sensory processes; (3) saṃjñā: recognition and discrimination. Again, we would consider this the biological process of “reading” of the input signal; (4) saṃskāra: volitions, habits, and what old Indians saw as the imprints of karman; (5) vijñāna: awareness of the other four skandha-s, which would effectively be the equivalent of conscious experience.
If one thought that he was still bringing in the ātman through the back door via the 5th skandha, he clarifies that each of these is anitya (impermanent, unlike the undying ātman) and conditioned (pratītya-samutpāda: the doctrine that all phenomena arise in dependence upon other factors). Thus, these skandha-s are not permanent entities, but constantly arise and cease like a pulsation through a chain of dependent causality. Thus, he posited that what Hindus saw as an unchanging ātman was essentially a causal stream (vijñāna-santāna) conditioned by karma (part of the 4th skandha). This resulted in his famous flame analogy, wherein the illusory continuity of consciousness arises from an effect like one lamp lighting another, resulting in a continuous flame. However, it is not the same flame – there is only causal continuity but no identity.
Given this theory, the Buddha explains reincarnation thus: (1) Actions (karman-s) rooted in good or bad intentions leave saṃskāras (imprints: the 4th skandha). (2) Through the postulate of dependent causality, these imprints determine the nature of the next existence. (3) The rebirth itself is not the ātman (+sūkṣma-śarīra) acquiring a new material body, but the last moment of vijñāna in a dying life, conditioned by its accumulated karman-s, "ignites" the first moment of consciousness in the new life. Thus, when the Buddha claimed to remember his former lives (pūrva-nivāsānusmṛti-jñāṇa: one of his redefined Trayividyā-s), he was asserting that his awakened awareness could perceive the entire causal chain of the prior psychophysical streams which led to his current one. Similarly, under this framework, once karman-s no longer condition the causal stream (vijñāna-santāna), it runs out of the metaphorical fuel to ignite a new existence – this results in nirvāṇa – the blowing out of the flame. Thus, a Buddha (a self-discoverer of the means of nirvāṇa) or an Arahant (one attaining nirvāṇa by following a Buddha) is believed to defy the excluded middle: he neither exists nor does he not exist – both predicates fail, for they presuppose conditioned being. Hence, in the early Bauddha tradition, they depicted the Buddha aniconically (e.g., as an empty throne). This was the original ultimate soteriology of the Bauddha-s. The later Mahāyāna stream added a cosmological element, wherein it envisioned innumerable lokadhātu-s (world-systems), each presided over by a cosmic Buddha. Once awakening has bloomed, these lokadhātu-s are perceived as Buddha-kṣetra-s or Buddha-fields, where one rapidly progresses towards nirvāṇa. Such an awakened birth wherein one begins perceiving a lokadhātu as a Buddha-kṣetra can be seen as an intermediate soteriology.
We will now consider the intersection of this theoretical backdrop with an empirical report of a case of supposed reincarnation. To this day, reincarnation cases are reported across the Buddhosphere. In places where the original strain of the historical Tathāgata’s teachings (Sthaviravāda) dominates (e.g., Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand), we have numerous documented reports of reincarnation. While they are interpreted within the usual Bauddha framework, no special religious status is accorded to them – they are just seen as a matter of fact, even if somewhat interesting and unusual. In contrast, in the Vajrayāṇa world dominated by the Tibetans in exile, the formal recognition of reincarnation cases through specific tests plays a more institutionalized role in the succession of lamas. Here, its recognition can be said to be way more integrated into the religious framework than among the Sthaviravādin-s.
In Japan, the position of the Bauddha-mata has been historically more complex. From relatively early in Japan’s recorded history, there has been a coexistence of the old endogenous Shinto tradition alongside the exogenous Bauddha one. There have been periods of “nationalist” fervor, where intellectuals have tried to privilege the native Shinto tradition over the external Bauddha tradition, which was seen as being corrupting. Despite this, in modern surveys, we have roughly 30-40% Japanese self-identifying as Bauddha, whereas only 5% or less self-identify as votaries of Shinto. Some believe that this skew is because the respondents did not consider Shinto an “organized religion” but a “way of life.” Several flavors of Mahāyāna and one dominant one of Vajrayāṇa are practiced in Japan. Of the Mahāyāna flavors, the one centered on a birth in Sukhāvatī, the Buddha-kṣetra of the cosmic Buddha Amitābha (Jōdo), is the most popular. On the other hand, the Japanese Vajrayāṇa (Mikkyō) is dominated by the Shingon school.
There is no evidence that Shinto originally recognized reincarnation, let alone having a soteriological theory based on it. Instead, it posited the possibility of the deceased lingering on as ghosts or ancestor spirits (ancestor Kami) who their descendants invoke. This Shinto influence appears to have persisted through the rise of the Bauddha-mata, as evidenced by the fact that, unlike in the core Indosphere, there is no indication that the Japanese viewed metempsychosis as a significant factor outside of scholarly Buddhist circles, beyond possibly a birth in Sukhāvatī. Given this background, Japan presents an interesting case for examining how the exogenous soteriology, particularly the concept of reincarnation, transmitted from the Indosphere, was received. This came to the fore in the 1800s with the remarkable case of Katsugorō, which was recorded by several observers. We will not narrate the story in detail, as complete versions are freely available on the internet. It has been covered at some length in the English language by the writer Lafcadio Hearn, the Japanologist Harold Bolitho (who takes a skeptical view), and the Japanese researcher Ohkado Masayuki (who takes a sympathetic view). Briefly, it goes thus (account drawn from the above three):
1. In the first half of the 1800s in Tokugawa Japan, there lived a peasant who was the son of a maid who was employed in a samurai household. Interestingly, his wife was the daughter of a samurai who had evidently tumbled down in status for her to be married to a peasant.
2. In 1822 CE, the third child of this peasant family, Katsugorō by name, started recalling his previous incarnation at the age of 7. While initially reluctant to tell his family, they eventually got him to speak about it. He reported that he was formerly born as a boy in a village that was about 6 kilometers away, with a mountain separating it from his. He recalled his biological father, his stepfather and his mother, the house they lived in and his death at the age of 6 (which was later confirmed as due to smallpox). Subsequent inquiries confirmed that the named individuals had indeed lived in the specified village.
3. He eventually felt a deep urge to see that family of his previous birth and pestered his grandmother to take him to that village. When she finally yielded and took him there, upon nearing the village, Katsugorō led his grandmother correctly to the house of his former birth. There, his mother and stepfather repeatedly remarked that he physically resembled their deceased son. A relative of his biological father remarked with much emotion that he looked like him. Further, Katsugorō noticed changes that had happened around his former house after his death.
4. Katsugorō also gave a detailed account of his journey between his death and current incarnation, involving particular beings and entities that came to greatly interest the scholars investigating his case (see below).
5. His case sparked much interest not just among the villagers from the two hamlets but also among notable officials, making Katsugorō some kind of a celebrity. As a result, there were several contemporaneous accounts of his case, including three that are considered reliable: (i) Ikeda Kanzan (Matsudaira Kanzan according to Bolitho), a retired daimyo (lord), visited Katsugorō in his village in 1823 CE and recorded his grandmother’s account of the boy’s memories. (ii) Okado Denhachiro, a high-ranking samurai who was in charge of the region that the boy lived in, made a detailed record of the incident along with the information about the two families of the boy’s present and past life. (iii) Hirata Atsutane, a noted pro-Shinto scholar, invited Katsugorō and his father to his school in 1823 and interviewed them to record the case independently.
Thus, in many ways, this case resembles comparable cases that have happened in India, where the belief in reincarnation is well entrenched. Indeed, for comparison, we could present an equivalent Indian case that drew the attention of MK Gandhi:
In the early 1930s, a young girl named Shanti Devi began to astonish those around her by claiming to remember a past incarnation – that of Lugdi Devi, a woman who had lived in Mathura, about 133 km from Shanti’s home in Delhi. Shanti spoke of Lugdi’s life with striking specificity, recounting numerous details that soon drew public attention. When several of her statements were verified, the case drew the attention of MK Gandhi, who appointed an official committee to investigate her claims. At that time, Shanti had never been to Mathura, so the committee decided to take her there and observe her reactions firsthand. Once in the city, Shanti immediately recognized several people who had known Lugdi, found her way unerringly to Lugdi’s former home, and described the interior with remarkable accuracy—including how it had looked years earlier. She even revealed the location of money that Lugdi had once hidden, a secret known only to Lugdi herself and her widowed husband, who accompanied the committee. The husband, no less than the investigators, was surprised by Shanti’s behavior and intimate knowledge of his late wife’s life.
What is striking about Katsugorō’s case is that, despite its similarity to Shanti Devi’s, it happened at a time when there was little direct cultural contact between India and Japan, especially for people from a remote village. Second, both Katsugorō and his father had a dim view of Bauddha ritualists. In fact, in his narrative, Katsugorō stated the following to Hirata Atsutane: “The monks were reading a sūtra, but it got me nowhere. I thought they were only thinking about how to steal money, detestable fellows (translated by Ohkado).” Further, when the Bauddha officiants heard of Katsugorō’s story, they came over to his father and asked that he become their disciple. They even threatened that his father would face the Buddha’s punishment if he let such a special boy become a mere farmer. However, his father shooed them away, saying that they had a low opinion of the Bauddha-s. Based on this, we can conclude that it was unlikely that (1) a farmer in Japan or his son concocted this story based on a template directly acquired from the Indosphere; (2) it was inspired by their adherence to the Bauddha teaching; (3) it arose from a sustained local belief in the possibility of such phenomena.
Hence, while the Japanologist Bolitho still thinks that there might be some mischief or fraud, we are sufficiently credulous to accept that we are facing an empirical phenomenon in these cases, whatever its ultimate explanation might be. Given that, the point of interest is how it was incorporated into the soteriology of the different witnesses. The distinctive element of Katsugorō’s narrative was the phase after his death. We quote this in full based on Ohkado’s translation of Hirata Atsutane’s record of Katsugorō’s story:
“When I died, I felt no pain. A little while later, there was some discomfort, but soon even that was gone. When my body was pressed into the coffin, I – my soul – rose up and stood aside. When the people carried the coffin to a hill for burial, I rested on the white cloth that covered it. When they lowered it into the grave, it made a loud sound that echoed in my mind; I can still hear it clearly. The monks were chanting a sūtra, but it did nothing for me. I thought they were only wondering how to steal money – detestable fellows.
So I went back home and stayed on a desk. I spoke to the people there, but no one answered. Then an old man appeared – he had long white hair and wore a black kimono – and said, “Come here.” I followed him, and before I knew it, we had reached a place I didn’t recognize. It was a beautiful field in full bloom. I played among the flowers, but when I tried to break off a twig, a small crow appeared and threatened me greatly. Even now, when I remember it, I feel afraid.
As I played, I could hear my parents and others talking in our house. I also heard the monks reciting sutra-s again, but, as before, I found them detestable. I couldn’t eat the hot, steaming food they offered, but I enjoyed its fragrance. During the ceremony for the dead in July, I returned home and saw dumplings laid out as offerings. I lingered like that for some time.
One day, as we walked along the street in front of a house (his present life father Genzo’s house). The old man pointed to it and said, “Be born into that house.” At his words, I parted from him and stayed beneath a persimmon tree in the yard. I watched the house for three days, then entered through a window and remained near the wood-burning stove for another three. I heard my mother talking with my father about leaving alone and going to a faraway place.”
That last incident related to his parents’ conversation was established as veridical by his father. Katsugorō’s mother was to try to alleviate their poverty by going with his siblings to the capital city of Edo to work as a servant at a samurai’s household. However, she returned once she realized she was pregnant with him.
The early Japanese investigators and students of this case paid close attention to this period between his incarnations (termed “intermission” by Ohkado and other reincarnation believers). The retired daimyo Matsudaira Kanzan (Ikeda Kanzan) was a Bauddha. He and other narrators of the incident with a Bauddha bent saw Katsugorō’s case as clear evidence for metempsychosis, which was so central to Bauddha thought and empirically refuted those who claimed the contrary. They took the old man figure who guided the departed spirit to be an agent of a cosmic Buddha. They imagined him as taking the form of an upāsaka. Another retired daimyo, Matsura Seizan took the old man figure to be none other than the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha (Jap: Jizō Bosatsu). The eastern tradition states his Great Vow to be: “If the Hells are not empty, I will not attain Buddhahood; only when all sentient beings have been saved, will I attain Bodhi.” Hence, he is seen as the guide of the spirit after physical death. Notably, in the Japanese tradition, Kṣitigarbha is venerated as the protector of children, especially those who died before their parents, and as the deity guiding travelers and pilgrims on their journeys both in physical life and beyond. Thus, it is quite understandable that the Bauddha-s among the Japanese saw this tale as a vindication of their visualizations of the soteriological journey, including the appearance of a specific bodhisattva in his specified role. Thus, it appears that despite the long presence of the Bauddha-mata among the Japanese, the idea of metempsychosis had not permeated the society deeply enough to be seen as commonplace or expected. Rather, the observed phenomenon was treated as extraordinary, and its congruence with the Bauddha tradition was recognized only by its scholarly followers rather than by the peasant family.
In contrast, Katsugorō’s father interpreted his son’s intermission from a local Shinto lens rather than anything Bauddha. He focused on the appearance of the crow in it. The tutelary deity of their village was a local manifestation of one of the deities enshrined at the Kumano Sanzan shrines. The chief among them was Kumano Gongen, whose symbol was the three-legged crow Yatagarasu, believed to act as a divine guide. Thus, he took the crow seen by his son to be none other than this symbol of Kumano Gongen. The pro-Shinto scholar Hirata Atsutane, too, gravitated towards this line of reasoning. Based on the details of Katsugorō’s account of the old man figure, he ruled out that it was an upāsaka or Kṣitigarbha (on iconographic grounds). Instead, he argued that it must be a Shinto Kami. Indeed, Hirata’s more general view was that the Shinto Kami-s have “authority over everything and everybody” (Bolitho), but each of them has their own local sphere of influence. Hence, he reasoned that the figure was indeed the Kami whose specific sphere of influence was the village where Katsugorō was born. Indeed, Katsugorō’s sister claimed that the same old man figure also appeared in her dream and helped her find a lost knife after she worshipped the deity at the local shrine. He further postulated that the reincarnation was not a norm in a soteriological journey as the Bauddha-s postulated, but something the mighty Shinto Kami occasionally cause to happen for reasons which might not be known to the mortals.
Thus, we have the same extraordinary empirically reported phenomenon, which was incorporated into the soteriological pathways of the two religions by their respective votaries. It is notable that this type of phenomenon is widely reported from different parts of the world with unrelated religions and soteriologies. Indeed, as noted by several investigators of this class of arcana, several elements of these reincarnation-type experiences match those found in certain psychedelic experiences, various out-of-body experiences and certain vivid dreams. Ohkado has gathered several striking cases from modern Japan, but again, the involved parties do not have strong ties to this concept within a Bauddha framework. This has led to the question of whether such experiences led to the construction of soteriological frameworks or whether they occurred independently of them and were incorporated into such frameworks. Of course, these two need not be mutually exclusive, and there could be a feedback loop with each feeding into the other. However, the Japanese experience suggests that soteriological frameworks have evolved quite independently of these phenomena, which have been retroactively interpreted to fit a chosen framework.
We take this to be a mundane reason for the falsity of perennialism. The “saṃskāra” of your framework guides the soteriological destination; hence, even though there might be a common empirical experience behind them, they are different for different percipients and hearers/recipients of the experience. This would align well with the multifocal Śaiva soteriology cited at the beginning of this note – one achieves the loka of the deity one focuses on. Thus, even if there is a common empirical substratum, the soteriology of your system acts as a lens that interprets it for you. Interestingly, this could also be said of divergence within the Indian traditions regarding the theoretical framework for such phenomena. Given how widespread the reports of claimed reincarnations are, we believe the Hindu stumbled upon it empirically rather than due to preconditioning by a soteriology. They then incorporated it in the most obvious way into their ontology and soteriology, that there was an ātman or undying consciousness independent of the material body that repeatedly associated with such material bodies before reaching its final non-associated soteriological destination. The historical Buddha evidently saw his Hindu compatriots as some kind of “flat-earthers” or “geostationary geocentrists” who thought that what they saw was what really happened. Instead, he posited that they were falling for an illusion, while what really happened was the theory based on the five skandha-s.
Finally, we have Śaṃkarācārya’s Advaita branch of Uttaramīmāṃsā that interpreted the situation akin to what in modern psychiatry would be called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), with Māyā as the cause of the dissociation resulting in independent alter egos (alters). This condition is also invoked in the idealist/consciousness-first theory of modern philosopher Bernardo Kastrup to explain the apparent multiplicity of conscious entities. In this disorder, the unitary consciousness of the afflicted individual is split into various independent alters, each with its own (often simultaneous) sense of “I” (Skt: Ahaṃkāra), independently of the others, despite being experienced by the same background consciousness. Notably, some alters might share memories of other alters even after they vanish. Advaita postulates that Māyā causes the unitary consciousness present as Brahman to undergo dissociation into multiple alters, each with their own sense of “I” that is perceived differently from that of the other alters. Just as in DID, the memories after the dissolution of an alter could remerge in another alter (the reincarnation-type phenomenon). Here, the soteriological destination occurs via the dissolution of the dissociation caused by Māyā, resulting in the unified experience that is Brahman.
In conclusion, we believe that even in our age, this interplay between empirical records of arcane phenomena and soteriological theories will continue to test the latter.
