By Dāmodara dāsa
By Damodara dasa
"I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was twenty-six." Henry Ford said that in the San Francisco Examiner on August 26, 1928. This surprising announcement put him in the ranks of a select group of Americans-Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and of course Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman-who believed that the soul goes on to a new body when the present body dies. We tend to think of reincarnation, or transmigration of the soul, as a recent import from India, but actually the concept of reincarnation plays an important role in the philosophical and theological tradition of the West. Plato, who lived in Greece during the fourth century B.C. and who helped lay the foundations of Western philosophy, held that "a soul is allied with different bodies at different times." (Laws, 10.903) And in the third century A.D., Origen, one of the fathers of the Christian Church, wrote in his book First Principles:
By some inclination towards evil [certain] souls lose their wings and come into bodies, first of men; then through their association with the irrational passions, after the allotted span of human life they are changed into beasts, from which they sink to the level…of plants. From this condition they rise again to the same stages and are restored to their heavenly place.
However, as Christian theology solidified over the centuries, this view became decidedly heretical, and in A.D. 553, Emperor Justinian issued his Anathemas Against Origen: "If anyone assert the fabulous pre-existence of souls and the monstrous restoration which follows from it, let him be anathema [cursed]." This edict snuffed out almost all talk of transmigration throughout Christendom.
Was Justinian right to condemn the idea of reincarnation as "fabulous" and "monstrous," or is the soul actually "allied with different bodies at different times," as Plato thought? The best way to settle the matter is to go directly to the source-the earliest mention of reincarnation. Fortunately, the earliest records of transmigration are also the most philosophically complete. They're found in the Vedic Sanskrit literature written around 3,000 B.C. In India.
The Vedic view of reincarnation is clearly explained in the Bhagavad-gita, which is universally accepted as the essence of Vedic spiritual knowledge. In the Gita, the Supreme Lord Krsna enlightens His student and friend Arjuna in the science of self-realization, beginning with a lucid presentation of the process of reincarnation.
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