The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

SIXEvolution, Karma, and RebirthON THAT MOMENTOUS NIGHT when the Buddhaattained enlightenment, it is said that he went through severaldifferent stages of awakening. In the first, with his mind "collectedand purified, without blemish, free of defilements,grown soft, workable, fixed and immovable," he turned hisattention to the recollection of his previous lives. This is whathe tells us of that experience:/ remembered many, many former existences I had passed through:one, two births, three, four, five ... fifty, one hundred... a hundredthousand, in various world-periods. I knew everything aboutthese various births: where they had taken place, what my namehad been, which family I had been bom into, and what I haddone. I lived through again the good and bad fortune of each lifeand my death in each life, and came to life again and again. Inthis way I recalled innumerable previous existences with their exactcharacteristic features and circumstances. This knowledge I gainedin the first watch of the night}Since the dawn of history, reincarnation and a firm faith inlife after death have occupied an essential place in nearly all theworld's religions. Belief in rebirth existed amidst Christians inthe early history of Christianity, and persisted in various formswell into the Middle Ages. Origen, one of the most influentialof the church fathers, believed in the "pre-existence of souls"and wrote in the third century: "Each soul comes to this worldreinforced by the victories or enfeebled by the defeats of its previouslives." Although Christianity eventually rejected the beliefin reincarnation, traces of it can be found throughout Renaissancethought, in the writings of major romantic poets likeBlake and Shelley, and even in so unlikely a figure as the novelistBalzac. Since the advent of interest in Eastern religions that86