Past lives and karma

The teaching

As the doctrine of karma and rebirth from the Upanishads to the karmic astrologers teaches it.

The round

The art begins with a picture of life as a round. A being is born, dies and is born again, and the Indian traditions call that round samsara, the wandering on. The Bhagavad Gita gives it its best-known image: as a person casts off worn clothes and puts on new ones, so the embodied self casts off worn bodies and enters others that are new.

The first thing to grasp is the one the West most often hears the other way round. In the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain teaching the round is no reward and no second chance. It is a predicament, bound up with suffering, and the goal of every path is to be free of it: moksha, release, for the Hindus and the Jains, and nirvana, the blowing out, for the Buddhists. The Western schools of Spiritism and Theosophy turned the round into a school in which the soul always advances, and a student keeps the two pictures apart.

Action and its fruit

What turns the round is karma, the Sanskrit word for action. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad states the law: as a person acts, so they become, good by good action and bad by bad. It traces the chain inward, from desire to resolve, from resolve to deed, and from deed to what a person becomes. The Buddha set the weight at the start of that chain: it is intention, he taught, that he calls karma, for having intended, one acts by body, speech and mind.

An act bears fruit as a seed bears a plant: not as a sentence handed down by a judge, but as a tendency that grows out of the act itself, in this life or a later one. Karma, rightly told, teaches the doctrine in full, its kinds and its measure, and why it is no ledger of punishments.

What goes on

The three oldest traditions agree on the round and differ on what goes round it, and a student learns the three answers side by side. For most Hindu schools an enduring self, the atman, passes from body to body, carried by a subtle body that bears its past; the self itself is never born and never dies. The Buddha denies any lasting self: what goes on is a stream of causes, as one flame is lit from another, neither the same flame nor a different one. The Jains teach that the soul, the jiva, is real and eternal, and that karma is a fine matter that clings to it and weighs it down.

Among the Greeks, Plato teaches an immortal soul that has been born many times, and in his tale of Er the souls choose their next lives and drink of the river of forgetting before they are born. Whose teaching it is gives each of these in its own words, with the West's later school of souls.

The places of birth

Birth may fall in many places. The oldest Buddhist discourses count five destinations, among the gods, among humans, among animals, among the hungry ghosts and in the hells, and later teaching adds the jealous gods for six. The Jains count four: gods, humans, the animals and plants, and the beings of hell. None of these lasts, not even the heavens. The human birth is counted the rarest and the most precious, because it is there that the path can be walked.

The way out

The path out is the heart of each tradition, and in every one it is walked in this life. The Gita gives three roads: knowledge of the self, devotion to God and action done without clinging to its fruit. The Buddha teaches the ending of craving by the eightfold path, so that the twelve links of the round come undone from the first of them, ignorance. The Jains teach three jewels held together, right faith, right knowledge and right conduct, which stop new karma flowing in and wear away the old. Sikh teaching, which also holds to rebirth, sets the remembrance of God's name and God's grace at the centre.

None of these paths begins by recalling a former life. The Gita has Krishna tell Arjuna that both of them have passed through many births, which Krishna knows and Arjuna does not, and the Buddhist discourses count the memory of former lives among the fruits of long meditation, never among its first steps. For the ordinary person forgetting is the rule, as it is for Plato's souls at the river.

Memory and its tests

Where someone today has a vivid scene of another life, the art turns to what is known of memory itself. A memory is rebuilt each time it is recalled, the mind keeps what was seen far better than where it was seen, and hypnosis makes imagined scenes more vivid and more certain without making them more true. Regression and memory teaches this in full, with the way to test such a story and what it can still say about the one who tells it.

The chart's three places

Astrologers who read for karma look at three places in the birth chart, and the house reads all three as themes of this life, never as a story of who someone was. The lunar nodes are the two points where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's, always opposite each other: the South Node is read as what comes easily and has become a rut, the North Node as the unfamiliar direction of growth. Saturn, the slowest of the planets seen by eye, is read as the teacher of slow and necessary lessons, where life asks for patience and its rewards come late. The twelfth house, just above the eastern horizon, is read as what is hidden, private or hard to see in oneself.

India reads the nodes as Rahu and Ketu, the head and tail of a demon who stole a sip of the gods' nectar, and Saturn as Shani, the strict judge who gives each person the fruit of their own deeds. The lunar nodes, and Saturn and the twelfth house, each teach their reading in full.

No debt

One teaching the house holds firmly, and the sources stand behind it: no illness, loss or harm done to a person is to be read as a debt they earned. The Buddha named many causes of what a person feels beside past action, among them the body's own disorders, the change of the seasons, carelessness and injury, and he counted the exact working of karma among the things not to be speculated on, since the speculation leads only to vexation. Every tradition teaches that the karma being made now lies in a person's own hands, and reformers inside India have long refused the use of karma to blame the poor, the sick or the low-born.

How a student begins

The traditions' own first practices are about the present act. The Buddha taught his son Rahula to look at his own conduct as one looks in a mirror: before an act of body, speech or mind, while doing it and after it, to ask whether it leads to harm for himself, for others or for both, and to hold back from it, or to confess it and do better, if it does. The Jain householder takes small vows: not to harm, not to lie, not to steal, to keep faith in love and to set a limit on possessions. The Gita asks for the work to be done well and its fruit let go.

A reader can begin with the mirror for a single day, or with one situation that keeps coming back in their life, asking what in it is theirs to change, without taking on the blame for what others did. That is the whole teaching put to work: what am I setting in motion now, and what does it tend toward?

The branches and how they stand

Whose teaching it is maps the traditions of rebirth, each in its own scriptures, and is the place to begin. Karma, rightly told, teaches the doctrine of action and its fruit. The lunar nodes, and Saturn and the twelfth house, give the chart's reading of the themes a person came in with. Regression and memory explains why a vivid scene of another life is not a memory of one, and what such a scene can still say.