Reincarnation reincarnated

When Buddha lived, 2500 years ago more or less, there was so little science that any kind of idea could be promulgated. Just like now, except that it’s possible to unravel weird ideas now.

Reincarnation was the common belief in India at Buddha’s time. He continued to use it as expedient teaching. As we know, expedient teaching is using the cultural context of the time and place of the teaching to make new ideas understandable. Speaking about scientific concepts to uneducated people just leaves them unhappy and uninformed. Buddha was a superb teacher, and knew exactly how to convey his theories to different groups. His legacy is proof of his genius.

Nowadays it is very easy to analyze concepts like reincarnation. The elementary concept fails at the very definition stage, but advanced concepts do not. What is reincarnation? It was the ancient Hindu belief that there is something about a person that persists beyond their death. Clearly it is not material. Everything that belongs to a person’s body disperses at death. Let’s call the immaterial thing, soul or essence or identity. Hindu belief is that a person after death, depending on his position and behavior during this life (and past lives), transfers his identity into some other creature born soon after. If you followed the rules of Hindu theology, you could move up in status. There were human castes, and one could possibly rise. Falling could leave you as an animal or an insect, and supposedly being a good insect could get you to be a better one, or maybe an arthropod or a small mammal…

There are obvious problems with the transmission of the identity, but there's no need to quibble with the concept on these grounds. It fails even earlier that that.

Seriously, what could this identity be? Could it be like a bar code? Somewhere, something was recording the bar code of every living creature, and assigning used ones to new creatures at or before birth. Nobody knows the bar codes, and nobody can find them out. Guessing could happen, but so what? What difference could it make for anyone’s life? Maybe there is a piece of Hindu theology that says your bar code can make a difference in your life. That would mean it interacts with the world, and therefore it somehow becomes partially material. Some type of connection with the real world has to be made, and if it is made, it can be measured. However, there has never been the slightest claim by anyone that your identity, transferred through multiple creatures, could be detected and tracked. We understand how material things interact in great detail, and there isn’t any room in the theories of interaction for any supernatural bar codes. Everything measured to date has checked out.

What would the material piece of the identity hook on to? Is it a pattern in the brain? If you turn into a cockroach and later make it back to a human, all your pattern was encoded into the few cells that serves for a cockroach's brain. The cockroach's brain has so few cells that the barcode must be very low in information content. However, if one counts all the insects in the world presently living, there are trillions, maybe quadrillions. More data than can be encoded into the cockroach’s brain, or the ant’s either. To say nothing about protozoa, which might be the temporary resting place of the worst behaving individuals, which have no brains and therefore no bar code area. So brains are out.

What’s left that’s in common between the entire animal kingdom? Nothing but DNA. However, there is no way human DNA can be encoded into the simple DNA of a much lower creature. There is hardly any “junk genes” (ones which are never expressed in any fashion – just leftover from previous steps in the evolution process) in the simplest of creatures, which is where one could write some bar code information. Exactly what difference could it make anyway, even if there was a way to encode a bar code into some “junk genes” because they do not interact with the organism. They simply are carried forward in the replication and reproduction processes. So we must conclude that there is no bar code for individuals which is transferred after death to a new creature.

However, the modern terminology for reincarnation, as seen in SGI’s newspaper, for example, is that the “essence of life” goes on. This is a little vague, but in general it means that when you are dead you are dead, but you are part of the whole complex of DNA-based life-forms, and what you did while alive has had some effect on it, and that effect will go on and on, mixing and melding with what every other life-form does. Basically, becoming a cockroach is not an option, but making an improvement in the world is an option for humans. Improving the lives of others, who carry on that to improve the life of others, is the essence of “good life”. This, in my humble opinion, is what reincarnation would have meant to the Buddha, if he had any context to express it in, and anyone able to comprehend it.

We can affect both other human beings, through social change and individual interaction, and we can affect the rest of the life-forms, mostly by how we change their habitat. The scientific field working to comprehend how this works is ecology, and it is not a mature field, like physics or chemistry. Some norms are known, but there are no clear guidelines for what to do and what not to do; there are no metrics as to what is good and what is bad, and how to measure them in situations that have potentially multiple effects. So, how to be a good SGI member with respect to the rest of life remains to be determined. We are left with being good to other humans. That is certainly complicated enough as is.