Journal of Cognition and Culture 17 (���7) 419–436
brill.com/jocc
Who Wants to Live Forever?
Explaining the Cross-Cultural Recurrence of Reincarnation Beliefs
Claire White
Department of Religious Studies, California State University Northridge
claire.white@csun.edu
Abstract
Around 30% of world cultures endorse reincarnation and 20% of contemporary
Americans think that reincarnation is plausible. This paper addresses the question of
why belief in reincarnation is so pervasive across geographically disparate contexts.
While social scientists have provided compelling explanations of the particularistic
aspects of reincarnation, less is known about the psychological foundations of such
beliefs. In this paper, I review research in the cognitive science of religion to propose
that selected panhuman cognitive tendencies contribute to the cross-cultural success
of basic ideas in reincarnation. Together, this research suggests that extraordinary convictions, including those associated with postmortem survival, are underpinned by
some of the same processes that govern mundane social cognition.
Keywords
reincarnation – cognitive science of religion – social cognition – the afterlife
Introduction
In many places around the globe, biological birth does not mark a person’s
entrance into the world, but rather, their return to it from a previous life in
another bodily form.1 Cross-cultural studies (that minimize the impact of close
historical connection or contact), have recorded the presence of reincarnation beliefs in around 30% of world cultures, including Melanesia, South Asia,
North America, Australia and Europe and their prominence in West Africa,
1 This paper deals only with ideas about humans reincarnating as humans.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/15685373-12340016
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India, and Northwestern North America (e.g., see Matlock, 1993; Obeyesekere,
2002; Somersan, 1981). In places where reincarnation is not the dominant
worldview, some people have deep-seated convictions that they existed before
their current lifetime (e.g. Bender, 2007; Gallup, 2005; Haraldsson, 2006). For instance, in Southern California people participate in groups to meditate to gain
glimpses of their past life. These insights typically take the form of detailed
recollections of traumatic life events, such as being separated from loved ones
or drowning. Such first-person material regularly features in mainstream news
outlets, high-profile television shows and bestselling books (e.g., Alexander,
2012; Burpo & Vincent, 2010; Leininger, Leininger & Gross, 2009; Miller, 2010;
Weiss, 1988; Winfrey, 2013). Commercial success reveals that past life narratives
routinely attracts considerable interest and media attention, and around 20
percent of Americans believe that reincarnation is plausible (see Haraldsson,
2006; Walter, 2001; White, Kelly, & Nichols, 2015).
This paper concerns the question of why the belief in reincarnation is crossculturally recurrent in geographically disparate regions, especially given the
seemingly endless alternative formations of postmortem survival that one can
imagine. At first, this seems like an impossible question to answer because
of the number of ideas and behaviors that can be subsumed under the category of reincarnation are seemingly endless. Indeed, it is difficult to underestimate the diversity of forms that reincarnation beliefs and practices take
around the globe. In Indic societies, for example, rebirth is inextricably linked
to a system that determines the nature and place of rebirth based on one’s
previous actions (i.e., Karma). In these contexts, laypeople are largely unconcerned with tracking their identity in previous lives but are concerned with
adherence to ethical standards to ensure upward social mobility in the next life
(Mahalingam, 2003). In addition, the ethically elite are concerned with escaping the seemingly endless cycle of rebirth; for them, rebirth in any form simply
means the endurance of continued suffering (Obeyesekere, 2002). In short, reincarnation is not something to be desired but to be escaped. Reincarnation
in small-scale indigenous societies, such as West Africa, provides a striking
contrast. Here, systems of morality are unrelated to ideas about reincarnation, and ordinary people are preoccupied with establishing the past-life
identity of others because their decisions have huge social consequences:
they determine the distribution of names, titles, property inheritance, wealth
distribution, and even child-rearing practices (see Gottlieb, 2004; Kaplan,
2000). In modern Western contexts, by contrast, people are not so much concerned with establishing the past life identity of others as they are for themselves, because of perceived insight that those lives provide to the current self
(Bender, 2007).
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Given the dazzling array of belief systems and practices surrounding reincarnation, one obvious approach to explain their transmissive success is by locating them in their historically situated socio-cultural contexts. For instance,
consider reincarnation beliefs in contemporary America. First, some may readily accept ideas about reincarnation because they occur within the background
of disenchantment with the conventional Judeo-Christian canon. Second,
particular ideas about reincarnation may well have a competitive advantage
over others in such contexts because they are tailored to suit a quintessentially modern, eclectic brand of New Age spirituality and religious individualism that has become immensely popular in the West (e.g., see Albanese 2006;
Bender, 2007; Dawson, 2006; Farias, Claridge, & Lalljee 2005; Fuller, 2001; White,
Kelly & Nichols, 2015). Against a background of social anomie and a decline in
traditional religious affiliation, these experiences provide people with a sense
of continued and extended identity, and provide their current life with a sense
of renewed purpose and meaning (Bender, 2007; Meyesburg & McNally, 2011;
Roof, 2001). Explanations that take into consideration the multitude of historical and contextual factors provide scholars with much needed insight into how
reincarnation beliefs operate within their particular socio-cultural-historical
contexts, but they say less about why ideas about reincarnation persist across
cultures more generally.
Another approach to the question of why the belief in reincarnation recurs across cultures is to explain its social function. Anthropologists have long
explained reincarnation beliefs as a product of maintaining the status quo
of the accepted social order. For example, in societies where every ancestor
is thought to reincarnate as a newborn child, reincarnation affords a way for
people to maintain equilibrium in social structure through the continuation
of rules regarding names, kinship systems and territory; although the people
who hold these aspects of identity changed at death, the system continued
and remained constant though the process of rebirth (e.g., see Mauss, 1985;
Obeyesekere, 2002). Social scientists continue to draw upon functionalist
explanations of reincarnation in contemporary contexts where the social
structure is also dependent, to some extent, upon reincarnation beliefs. For example, Mahalingam (2003) argues that in India, where the notion of karma is
very much at the core, reincarnation serves to legitimize the uneven distribution of resources. Yet while functionalist explanations of reincarnation beliefs
greatly enhance our understanding of their social consequences, they say little
about the psychological processes that help give rise to them and thus miss out
a crucial component of a convincing causal explanatory account.
In this paper, I adopt a cognitive approach to addressing the question of
why the belief in reincarnation is cross-culturally recurrent. There are two
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key components of this approach. First, by not discounting — but rather —
looking beyond the variation in local forms of reincarnation beliefs and practices, it is possible to determine similarities in basic ideas underpinning reincarnation. Indeed, based on cross-cultural comparisons, most scholars
concede that reincarnation includes the basic assumption that after biological
death the deceased person leaves his or her mortal body and returns to the
human world in another human bodily form through rebirth (e.g., see Matlock,
1993; Obeyesekere, 2002; Somersan, 1981; Swanson, 1964; Rosenblatt, Walsh, &
Jackson, 19762). In fact, based on a historical comparison between ideas about
reincarnation across cultures, Obeyesekere (2002) famously claimed that the
basic idea of developed more-or-less independently in different societies this
basic form. Holding claims about the origins of reincarnation beliefs aside, it
seems that ideas beyond the basic assumption that people can be reborn in
another human bodily form can be seen as elaborations and additions to this
basic concept.
The second key component of this cognitive approach is to draw upon what
is known about human cognition to understand what makes the fundamental
concept of reincarnation appealing to many humans. Over the past twentyfive years or so, the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) has mounted evidence
to suggest that recurrent features of ideas about the afterlife arise in large
part through default intuitions and cognitive biases about the natural world
(e.g., see Barrett, 2007; Boyer, 2001; Sperber, 1996; White, 2017). This approach
is grounded in a selectionist framework, which proposes that to explain the
spread of ideas about the afterlife, one must consider the role of human cognition in constraining and facilitating their transmission (e.g., Barrett, 2000;
Boyer, 2001; Sperber, 1996). While this account is complementary to culturally specific explanations of reincarnation, it differs crucially because of the
role attributed to human psychology in the spread and retention of ideas and
behaviors.
A cognitive approach also helps to explain why some ideas about reincarnation — including what form this survival takes, and what constitutes evidence
for this survival — enjoy widespread cultural success despite differences in
the details of the belief system and even despite propositional beliefs about
life after death. In what follows, I outline how research in the social cognitive
sciences — including the my own research — can shed light on the popularity
2 Reincarnation can be conceptualized more broadly, yet it is difficult to distinguish between
these and animism. Most anthropologists have not made their definition of reincarnation
explicit. Others have defined it broadly, and thus provide much higher rates of prevalence
(see Eliade 1964; Mills 1988).
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of reincarnation beliefs, which, although different in terms of the details, are
underpinned by similar assumptions about postmortem survival.
The Psychological Foundations of Reincarnation Beliefs
Personal Immortality
Reincarnation, like many other concepts of the afterlife, entails the idea that
the person survives his or her biological death. One potential cognitive mechanism proposed to facilitate the uptake of the idea that people survive death
is based upon a simulation constraint: the inability to readily conceive of our
own, and others’, death. This constraint refers to the inability to conceive of
ourselves as “being” dead and unconscious, because we use mental states to
simulate all experiences (e.g., see Bering, 2002; Bering, 20063). To be clear, this
does not mean that you cannot imagine what life would be like after you are
dead (e.g., your funeral, your children’s birthdays, etc.), but such a construal
requires a first-person perceptive lens through which you envision these future
events. This imaginative obstacle means that it is easier to represent your dead
self, and correspondingly, dead others, as continuing to exist.
There are additional cognitive biases that help to explain the readiness to
entertain reincarnation as a possibility for loved-ones. In everyday contexts,
out of sight does not mean out of mind. As Bering proposed (2006), our mental
roosters are ill equipped to update the list of social players in our world, and
for very good reasons — it would be cognitively taxing and evolutionarily maladaptive to do so. Our ability to represent others who are not physically present
(i.e., offline social reasoning) also enables us to represent the dead as though
they continue to exist. In addition, given the social investments that go into relationships, people do not easily represent absent others as removed from their
social world. In fact, research has shown that grieving individuals sometimes
represent the deceased as in the vicinity even when they have seen the corpse
(White, Fessler & Gomez, 2017). As Boyer (2001) has argued, even dead bodies represent a contradiction in our thinking about persons. On the one hand,
people understand that the physical body is inanimate, but on the other, they
continue to represent the person as psychologically active — because we habitually track unobservable mental states for persons throughout our lifetime.
There is also a motivational appeal to the idea that we are immortal. This,
of course, is the basic fear of death itself. Terror management theorists have
3 For other accounts of the cognitive mechanisms proposed, see Bloom (2004) and Roazzi,
Nyhof, and Johnson (2013).
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long proposed that humans try to mitigate the fear of death through the endorsement of beliefs in immortality (Becker, 1973; Jong & Halberstadt, 2016;
Pyszcynski & Solomon, 1986; Jonas & Fischer, 2006), and have provided evidence that mortality salience increases belief in the afterlife, largely independent of religious background (e.g., Jong, Halberstadt, & Bluemke, 2012). Some
versions of this theory have proposed that ideas about the afterlife were purposefully created to fulfill the need to relieve anxiety about death and are thus
just “wishful thinking” (Dawkins, 2006; Freud, 1961; see also Stephen Hawking’s
interview, Sample, 2011). A more moderate, and nuanced account is that when
coupled with cognitive biases that predispose humans to represent their continued existence, fear of annihilation drives the likelihood of endorsing ideas
about the afterlife (see Nichols, 2004). Even though some Indic representations
of reincarnation include the possibility of increased pain and suffering in the
next lifetime, it may be easier — and more psychologically appealing — to accept the possibility of the self as existing and suffering than not existing at all.
Such motivation also extends towards the ones we love. In fact, scholars have
proposed that the fear of annihilation of loved-ones also explains reincarnation beliefs. For instance, Obeyesekere (1994) claims that practices designed to
identify a reincarnated person by inspecting their appearance, personality etc.
really serve to fulfill a desire to be reunited with deceased loved-ones. Here,
again, while a simple Freudian wish fulfillment account seems too simplistic,
another possibility is that when coupled with human cognitive proclivities to
continue representing loved-ones as present and in the vicinity, reincarnation
beliefs appear plausible.
Psychological Immortality
Naturally following from the observation that in reincarnation people seem
to survive their own death is the question of what, exactly, survives. The short
response to this question is that like other afterlife beliefs, people are conceptualized as surviving mentally — just elsewhere, whether in a different
body or a different realm (see also De Cruz, 2013; Hodge, 2011; Nichols, 2007).
Conceptualizations of reincarnation reflect the widespread assumption that,
as developmental psychologist Paul Bloom states, “we do not feel as if we are
our bodies; we feel as if we occupy them” (2004: 191). Bloom’s claim is situated in a growing body of research in the social cognitive sciences, which suggests that ideas about past lives conform to intuitive assumptions about the
constitution of identity for persons, often referred to as folk-dualism. Research
indicates that humans are predisposed to represent persons as composed
of multiple “substances”: material bodies and immaterial properties such as
minds or “essences” (e.g., Bloom, 2004; Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl 1999). On the
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one hand, other organisms in our environment are tracked fundamentally as
physical, bodily objects; on the other hand, they are also represented as mindful, psychological beings, guided in their behavior by unobservable mental
states (e.g., beliefs, desires, intentions). There is a general scholarly consensus
that people everywhere represent themselves and others as being constituted
by non-physical properties, hereafter “minds” for convenience (e.g., Bloom,
2004; Corriveau, Pasquini, & Harris 2005; Richert & Harris, 2006; Roazzi, Nyhof,
& Johnson, 2013).
The cognitive science of religion has mounted evidence to suggest that
these intuitive tendencies concerning the representation of persons also explain some of the cross-culturally recurrent features of supernatural agents,
such as gods, ghosts, ancestors, and possessed spirits. Although we find many
diverse examples of minds without bodies or minds inhabiting other bodies,
one constant feature in popular portrayals of supernatural agents is that the
individual agent has a mind and, therefore, intentionality (e.g., Astuti & Harris,
2008; Barrett, 1999; Bering, 2002; Bloom, 2004; Boyer, 2001; Cohen & Barrett,
2008; Guthrie, 1995). Likewise, the same intuitions — that people’s minds are
represented as retaining their personal identity — may explain why reincarnation is so widely accepted. Returning to the simulation constraints theory
of afterlife beliefs, Bering (and scholars since) have found that not all states
are as difficult to represent as ceasing to exist after death. Specifically, even
children find it easier to represent some biological needs and related psychological states — such as to eat and feeling hungry, as ceasing to exist than nonphysically based states — such as remembering (Bering, 2002; Bering &
Björklund, 2004; Cohen, Burdett, Knight, & Barrett, 2011; Bek & Lock 2011).
Being in a hypothetical conscious state without memories appears especially difficult to imagine. Indeed, research suggests that people regard memories,
and certain kinds of memories in particular, as more likely to remain constant over physical transformations than any other psychological attributes.
For example, in a series of experiments by Blok, Newman, and Rips (2005),
participants reasoned that personal identity remains intact (e.g., the entity is
“still Jim”) so long as the target’s (Jim’s) memories are preserved. This memoryidentity effect panned out even when the individual was described as undergoing dramatic physical changes: from person to robot, robot to microchip,
and then microchip inserted into a new robot. Furthermore, when it comes to
reasoning about the perpetuity of the self, people tend to give special credence
to episodic (or autobiographical) memories, such as remembering having had
dinner the previous night (Tulving, 1972).
Research has shown that people in different traditions likewise assume that
episodic memories survive reincarnation. White (2015a, 2016) conducted a
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series of studies with Jains in Southern India, who believe in reincarnation, and
Americans who endorse stereotypical Judeo-Christian views of life after death.
Despite major differences in their explicitly stated beliefs, when presented
with a suite of memory-based cues, both sets of naive participants reasoned
similarly upon being given a hypothetical reincarnation challenge for “matching” fictional living people with their deceased counterparts. Specifically, individuals intuitively privileged a shared episodic memory (memory of a specific
biographical event) as evidence for reincarnation over various combinations of
other types of memory (e.g., procedural) and physical features (e.g., physique).
In fact, memories of having lived before serve as verification cues for people
around the world, often under very different circumstances. In places where
every ancestor is thought to return to the human world, such as some cultures in
West Africa, South Asia, and NorthWestern North America, newborn children
are often examined for distinguishing mental recollections that correspond
to characteristics of the deceased (e.g., Gottlieb, 2004; Matlock, 1993; Matlock
& Mills, 1994; Obeyesekere, 2002; White, 2016). Ideas about the continuity of
memory in reincarnation are also apparent in elaborate rituals in efforts to determine which Lamas have been reborn and who manifests these revered souls
presently (e.g., see Edelmann & Bernet, 2007; Haraldsson, 2006; Haraldsson &
Samararatne, 1999; Obeyesekere, 2002). The most well-known example of such
a tradition is the search for the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, a formalized ritual that depends crucially upon a candidate child’s ability to distinguish
amongst various objects those which belonged to the deceased Dalai Lama,
thus inferring that the child remembers the object from his previous life and is
the Dalai Lama reincarnated (e.g., White, Sousa, & Berniunas 2014).
Personal Survival
There is an additional facet of episodic memory that explains why it is represented as continuing in reincarnation. In contrast to semantic memory, which
involves general, factual knowledge that cannot be easily countenanced in
terms of its acquisition, episodic memory involves autobiographical events
that one can recall having personally experienced at a certain place and time
(e.g., “I remember celebrating my 16th birthday at my mother’s house.”) Similar
to aspects of the self that be derived from our own predictable behaviors (e.g.,
“I’m usually stubborn”), episodic memories also give shape to one’s core concept of the self. They feature a self-referential quality of retrieval (i.e., a sense
of “mineness”), or the ability to mentally re-experience the event from a firstperson perspective. This gives the individual a continued sense of ownership
over the memory. Together, these qualities lend themselves to a sort of intuitive model, or default stance, of psychological continuity after death (Conway,
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2005; Klein & Nichols, 2012). Recent research has shown that practitioners of
New Age spirituality find their own memories as evidence that they existed
at the time of encoding in a past life. White, Kelly & Nichols (2015) found that
New Age spiritual seekers in the U.S. regard the memory of a specific past life
event as constituting stronger evidence that the person has lived before than
any other potential cue, such as an inexplicable behavior, physical marks or
factual information. In short, in order for people to think that they survive —
where “they” denotes something that retains their personal identity, memories serve as closest approximation people have to the soul, essence, or other
unique identity marker, and so they continue in reincarnation.
It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to understand why people
represent the episodic memories of others as continuing in reincarnation. One
reason is that it is simply an extension of the tendency to represent memory as continuing for the self over time. Another reason is that it enables the
continuation of established relationships. One only has to glance at the literature in cases of memory impairment, such as Alzheimer’s disease, amnesia,
or traumatic brain injury, to see the ambivalence expressed over the identity
of the sufferer. People will often say that the sufferer both is, and is not, the
same person they used to be (Orona, 1990; Ronch, 1996). All agree that the relationship with the person has changed and is negatively impacted, and many
describe the heartbreak when they realize that a loved-one no-longer recalls
shared times spent with them or even remembers who they are. Given the time
invested in social relationships, it seems a natural default strategy to represent
another person as existing with the ability to remember people important to
them in previous lifetimes.
Embodied Survival
Both the difficulty to simulate the inexistence of mental states following death
and the association between one’s memories and their personal continuity
contribute towards an explanation of the ease with which people appear to
represent and believe in reincarnation. Yet reincarnation also entails that the
person occupies a new physical body after death, and this also deserves explanation. At a fundamental level, it builds on the assumptions of folk-dualism,
that minds and bodies are represented as separate and independent, by assuming that the same mind can inhabit different bodies at different periods
of time. This observation aligns with a major set of findings in the cognitive
sciences showing that we perceive others as having an immutable personal
identity that exists independently of their physical appearance. For example,
young children judge a caterpillar that has become a butterfly, or a dog that has
changed breed, as “the same individual” so long as their preferences are the
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same (e.g., Gutheil & Rosengren, 1996; Hall, Lee & Bélanger, 2001; Hickling &
Gelman, 1995; Rosengren, Gelman, Kalish, & McCormick, 1991). Yet these ideas
are also constrained by our everyday social experiences.
While the concept of reincarnation endorsed in popular survival narratives
includes the assumption that the person can be reborn into another, completely different, body, when physical similarities are present between the deceased
and the living, this is seen as constituting strong evidence for the phenomenon
(e.g., see Stevenson, 1997; Tucker, 2005). Most often, but not exclusively, these
marks correspond with wounds that would have been inflicted at the time of
death in a previous life. Congenital abnormalities such as missing fingers, rare
birthmarks, and skin irregularities such as discoloration, lesions, spots, or moles
are said to betray the cause of death or other misfortunes from the individual’s previous life. For example, Stevenson reports the case of a child who was
born with a pale, scar-like tissue approximately three centimeters wide and
extending around her entire skull. In conjunction with this unusual physical
defect, the girl claimed to recall the life of a man who had had major skull
surgery shortly before his death. Stevenson viewed such cases of combined
past-life memories and physical markings as the best objective evidence of
reincarnation. In fact, he devoted a major tome to these so-called “reincarnation and biology” subtypes in which he meticulously documented over 200
such cases (Stevenson, 1997). Just like comparing the details of personal recollections to historical events, physical marks that correspond to those on the
deceased (sometimes observable in autopsy photographs) are also taken as
verification that some essential aspect of the individual (i.e., the “soul”) has
returned to the human world through literal rebirth. Thus, when a person is
reborn they are represented as possessing a bounded corporeal existence that
shares some form of continuity with the person before death, and thus provides a convenient (and reliable) means of evidence that they are one and the
same person.
The appeal of using physical similarities as key indicators of a past life can
be partly understood in light of inherent cognitive biases concerning our folk
knowledge of persons. Such features are convenient, unique, and easy to detect. In the natural world, too, Likewise, by comparing physical marks between
the living and dead to ascertain the likelihood of reincarnation, whereby some
essential and immortal aspect of the individual is envisioned as remaining the
same from one life to the next, people are employing the same default empirical
devices as those used in the everyday social world, even though reincarnation
entails, in principle, transference of the soul to another form. Furthermore, as
Hodge (2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2016) has argued, to imagine loved-ones in an
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afterlife usually includes that they engage in social activities, and these activities requires that they have at least some body parts (for related evidence see
De Cruz, 2013 and Watson-Jones, Busch, Haris, & Legare, 2017). This is nowhere
more apparent when the afterlife is the here-and-now.
The Afterlife is a Place
As discussed previously, offline social reasoning enables humans to think
about people who are not present in their immediate vicinity. We can easily
imagine what a family member who we have not seen in many months, or
even years, are doing at a given moment. This ability is also likely to be partly
responsible for the tendency for people to think about a deceased loved-one
doing something in another sphere of existence (Hodge 2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2012,
2016). It is not by accident that widespread afterlife beliefs represent the afterlife as a physical place (Moreman, 2008; Obayashi, 1992; Robben, 2017; Rosen,
2008). In the classic novel The Great Divorce (1946) C. S. Lewis’ captures the
readers’ imaginations, and these expectations, perfectly. He describes the dead
as journeying on a bus ride through various places, deciding where to get off,
including a grey town (purgatory or hell) and a beautiful countryside (the foothills of heaven).
Of course, representations of the afterlife differ in the extent to which they
are similar to our earthly existence, but they are always constrained by human
imagination and cognitive processing abilities. For instance, consider posing
an afterlife that has three dimensions — or levels that we perceive to be reality, such as height, width and depth. We can imagine that this would be fairly
easy to imagine, since these dimensions surround our everyday experience of
the world. Yet consider entertaining the idea of an afterlife that consists of five,
six, or even seven dimensions, measured by abstract notions such as their position in the world since the beginning of time. These ideas would be more difficult to spread without additional support at the cultural level, because they
are almost impossible to imagine. To be clear, the ease with which these ideas
are represented and spread is unrelated to their truth value (consider string
theory or evolution). In short, our imagination is not unbounded, but rather,
constrained, and likewise, ideas about the afterlife that meet our intuitive expectations about the current world are more likely to be readily adopted (all
else being equal). There is something inherently simple about the idea that
people return to where they originated (this world) rather than leaving for another world. As one child innocently asked in a letter to God “instead of letting
people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you
got now?” (Hample & Marshall, 1991).
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In addition, having the afterlife as the here-and-now also enables the possibility for continued social relationships with the dead. As discussed, anthropologists have documented the desire of people in reincarnationist traditions
to find their deceased loved-ones by inspecting children for similarities as
signs of reincarnation. There is a strong desire to identify their loved-ones
and to ensure that they return amongst them, rather than to another clan or
lineage. This process is beautifully captured in the documentary Unmistaken
Child (2008), where a Tibetan monk spends years searching across disparate
landscapes for the reincarnation of his beloved teacher and world-renowed
lama Geshe Lama Konchog. Representing the afterlife as being on this planet,
in this world, and during the same time period as other people’s current lifetimes, coupled with the possibility of reunification, is surely the easiest and
attractive representation of the afterlife imaginable.
Conclusion
There is marked variation in reincarnation beliefs that may be explained by
cultural differences. Yet, while cultural factors are necessary to explain the
transmissive success of ideas about reincarnation in particular contexts, they
are not sufficient. Nor are they able to account for the basic question of why
reincarnation is such a pervasive idea across geographically disparate landscapes. These similarities must also be explained. In this paper, I have proposed
a psychological account of the cross-cultural recurrence of reincarnation concepts. Ideas about reincarnation entail basic assumptions: namely, that the essential identity and aspects of an individual exists apart from the body, survives
biological death, and is reborn in another human form in this world. These
ideas about reincarnation are readily generated, remembered and communicated in part, because they meet cognitively optimal assumptions about what
human survival entails and what constitutes evidence for it. Taking account of
basic human tendencies to think about people in death and the afterlife, in addition to cultural and historical factors, can provide scholars with an enriched
understanding of why reincarnation has become a widely endorsed concept,
and how and why it is used to determine the features of social systems of tribal
and world religions.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Paul Parrett and Andrea Velasco for proof reading an earlier version
of this manuscript.
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