Narrating Karma and Rebirth

Subtitled Buddhist and Jain multi-life stories, this interesting book explores how such stories of karma and rebirth are used to illustrate these foundational doctrines and their moral implications. Both these traditions share a common understanding of how the universe operates in terms of rebirth and ultimate liberation. The author sets the scene with a story about Princess Ruca trying to persuade her father the King that his current sexual conduct will have serious implications for the conditions of his future rebirths, which she illustrates ostensibly from her own experience; sociologically, it is interesting to observe that being born as a woman is considered less desirable than a male incarnation. However, this is a great deal better than being reborn as an animal or in one of the hellish realms. These revelations are an allegorical form of moral and religious instruction rather than a literal description of truth. They are designed to frighten, inspire, provoke and shock.

The underlying theme is human actions and their results - various implications are explored, including the consequences of taking life and sexual impropriety. On the positive side, there are implications for giving and renunciation and progress can be made towards a life of a jina or buddha as a staging post towards liberation. These lives, and those of the Buddha and Mahavira, are moral exemplars and also illustrate the different emphases of generosity on the one hand and preservation and pursuit of ascetic values on the other. The next chapter considers karma and community while the last discusses memory and omniscience. This is where it would have been useful to bring in as a point of comparison the work of Ian Stevenson on children who remember previous lives as empirical evidence for the kind of patterns analysed by the author. These other forms of recall suggest elements of continuity, but without the moral and religious context explored in this book.