The fourth of the major perspectives on the afterlife in this country is offered by reincarnation. Most Western people associate belief in reincarnation with the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. However, its origin dates back thousands of years before these religions originated. It has existed in practically every human society and in almost all of the major religions, even including branches of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Plato in ancient Greece believed that the soul is immortal, that there are a fixed number of souls, and that they regularly reincarnated. There are references to reincarnation in classical Roman literature as well. In its earliest and most primitive forms reincarnation was not connected to any moral teachings. Many societies believed that we have a soul that can pass in and out of our bodies during sleep and, after death, it can be reborn in another person. The Druids who inhabited the British Isles before the invasion of the Romans who brought Christianity, believed that the soul is immortal and passes into other bodies at death.
Belief in reincarnation has deep roots in Judaism and occupied a fundamental and mainstream role for thousands of years, up to the nineteenth century. Around the time of Jesus, the Jewish philosopher Philo wrote that our soul comes from God, and that only those few on earth who keep themselves free from attachments to the world of the senses will return to God. All others must be reborn in another body. Belief in reincarnation continues to flourish today in Orthodox and Chasidic communities.
Several of the early Christian church fathers, including Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and St. Jerome, believed in reincarnation. Among some early Christian groups, including the Gnostics and Manicheans, belief in reincarnation was popular until it was declared to be unacceptable by the Council of Nice in 553. Nevertheless, it did not completely die out among Christians. Several sects in the Middle Ages, collectively called the Cathars, held a view of reincarnation that maintained that at death only those who had received the gift of the holy spirit would be reunited with God. Otherwise, the soul fled the dying body to take up whatever residence it could find, which might be either a human or an animal.
Reincarnation plays a central role in the various branches of Hinduism, where it is associated with the concept of karma, which states that the conditions of one’s life are determined by the religious and moral character of the previous life. Orthodox Hindu’s believe that the better one’s life is lived, the higher the caste he or she will be born into in the next life. This succession of lives continues until one achieves salvation and is released from the cycle of death and rebirth. While the various branches of Buddhism have different beliefs as to whether or not there is a soul, they all believe that some principle or essence does pass at death into another individual.
The Tibetans developed the belief that when the head of a monastery dies, his true successor will be an incarnation of him, and can be located by special signs displayed by the child so blessed. This is the case for both the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama in the Buddhist hierarchy. When the then Panchen Lama died in in 1989, the search for his successor began. The acting head of his monastery began collecting accounts from all over Tibet of unusual male children. Signs and dreams were analyzed, and the Dalai Lama, in exile, was sent a short list of the most promising. Six years later he made his selection, Gendun Choeyki Nyima, the young son of a doctor in a remote part of the country. He was recognized as the eleventh Panchen Lamai, the authentic incarnation of his predecessor. (Eleventh Panchen Lama Controversy, Wikipedia)