Constance Kassor’s review for Buddhadharma:
Early Buddhist literature from across Asia is full of descriptions of paranormal activity. Mind reading, encounters with nonhuman beings, and experiences of other worlds are common in nearly every Buddhist literary tradition. Within contemporary Buddhist convert communities, however, similar accounts of the paranormal have received comparatively little serious attention. D.E. Osto’s Paranormal States: Psychic Abilities in Buddhist Convert Communities (Columbia) explores accounts of the paranormal in contemporary Buddhist communities around the world, in a manner “akin to living folklore and oral history.” The aim of this book is not to prove the reality of the paranormal, or to establish the veracity of supernatural experiences. Instead, Osto considers stories collected through surveys and interviews with contemporary Buddhist practitioners, teachers, and scholars as a kind of “modern Buddhist folklore.”
Excerpts from interviews are quoted at length throughout the book, allowing the stories and experiences of the interviewees to come through in their own words as much as possible. In taking such an approach, Osto subtly challenges the racist and orientalist assumptions often present in discussions of the paranormal in Buddhism. While many readers might approach these contemporary accounts of the paranormal with skepticism, they may accept similar accounts of other realms, transcendent states, or mind reading from early Buddhist literature without question. By focusing their study on living practitioners and scholars, Osto shows that “the paranormal is deeply embedded in our collective imaginations” and that “this is no less true for contemporary convert Buddhists today as it was for their Buddhist ancestors from centuries ago.”
[Please note that the text from which this excerpt derives makes use of footnotes and diacriticals; these are not represented in this excerpt.]
Excerpt: Retrocognition and Rebirth
The OED defines retrocognition as “knowing the past by supernatural or paranormal abilities” and once again cites F. W. H. Meyers with the first attestation in 1892. Here I use it to refer specifically to people’s memories of past-life experiences. In the Buddhist canonical sources, retrocognition corresponds to the fourth higher knowledge, “recollection of past lives” (Pali: (pubbenivasanussatinana), and as we have seen in chapter 1, it plays a central role in both the Buddha’s enlightenment and Buddhist thought as the experiential basis for the doctrine of karma. In our interview, Ajahn Chandako gave me an example of a modern-day monk possessing this higher knowledge: “Ajahn Piak did have clear memories of his past lives including previous births within the Thai royal family.” As discussed in chapter 2, the most extensive empirical investigations of past-life memories in children have been carried out in contemporary times by Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS). Related to this research is a recently published book, Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research, by Bhikkhu Anālayo, a German-born Theravadin monk and highly regarded scholar of early Buddhism. Part 4 of Analayo’s book is a fascinating case study of Dhammaruwan, who as a young child exhibited xenoglossia (speaking a language without any known prior knowledge of it), which is particularly relevant for our current discussion on retrocognition in contemporary Buddhism.
Dhammaruwan was born in Matale, Sri Lanka, in 1968. At about two years old, he spontaneously began to sit in meditation and recite Pāli texts, which he had not learned or heard recited by anyone. People realized when Dhammaruwan was about three that he was reciting Pali, and a number of recordings were made. His recitations were also witnessed by numerous people, including eminent Buddhist monks, two Sri Lankan presidents, and Ian Stevenson. As an adult, Dhammaruwan lost this ability. According to his past-life recollections, he had learned to chant these texts as an Indian Buddhist monk 1,500 years ago during the lifetime of Buddhaghosa, the famed Theravādin commentator and author of the Visuddhimagga. About this Analayo writes:
According to Dhammaruwan’s memories, he learned the Pali chants in a former lifetime in India, where he had been born as the son of a Brahmin and trained in memorization of the Vedas. He had gone forth as a Buddhist monk and become a student of the eminent monk Buddhaghosa at Nalanda. After being trained as a bhanaka, a reciter, together with other monks who had similarly been trained, he was chosen to accompany Buddhaghosa from India to Sri Lanka. Having come to Sri Lanka, he stayed with Buddhaghosa at the Mahavihara in Anuradhapura, of which he remembers various details.
I first learned of Dhammaruwan about five years ago from websites mentioning his story and providing links to audio recordings made of him chanting. What struck me as most unusual was that his style of reciting Pāli was very different from the contemporary method employed by Sri Lankan monks. Anālayo, who personally knows Dhammaruwan from his time in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, describes his chanting in this way: “What was of considerable interest to me was his rather unusual way of chanting Pali texts. Traditional Sri Lankan Pali chanting tends to be quite swift; in fact often several monks chant together so that, when one of them has to take a breath, the others can continue. Dhammaruwan’s chanting is in contrast very measured and slow. It is also much more melodious than standard Sri Lankan recitations.”
In his study, Anālayo first consulted a professional audio-recording and mastering engineer about the authenticity of the audio files. The engineer’s conclusion was that the digital audio files were authentic copies of tape recordings made between 1970 and 1985 and that it would be extremely difficult and expensive to make convincing forgeries. Following this discussion of the recordings’ authenticity, Anālayo enters into an exhaustive comparison of the language and content of the recordings based on his expert knowledge of the canonical texts and manuscripts surviving in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. By investigating Dhammaruwan’s errors, omissions, and additions, Anālayo concludes that the recordings are not based on any currently known editions of the Pali texts. Moreover, the differences found in Dhammaruwan’s recordings are consistent with what we know of the oral transmission of these texts in South Asia. Anālayo concludes: “In sum, the evidence surveyed above suggests that Dhammaruwan’s chanting of these texts as a child is a genuine case of xenoglossy, in the sense of involving a recitation of material in Pali that he did not learn and was not made to recite in this way in his present life in Sri Lanka.” Based on this case and others he has reviewed involving children with past-life memories, Anālayo concludes that the collected evidence has “significantly contributed to changing the notion of rebirth from a religious creed to a reasonable belief.” In my survey were two questions related to rebirth and retrocognition.
In answer to question 57, “Have you had any other kind of experience that you think suggests life after death?,” a number of respondents mentioned people they had met or heard about who seemed to recall one or more previous lives. For example, one person wrote, “I’ve had a handful of interactions with Tibetan tülkus that clearly suggest they remember something from their previous lives.” Another wrote, “I have a friend who is a young Tulku at Tashi Lhunpo in India. I feel strongly that I met his former incarnation at Likir monastery several years earlier.” This respondent recounts a specific incident with a child: “A three-year-old child spontaneously described to me her previous life when I was showing her pictures of travel to a Buddhist monastery. She later gifted me with a picture she had drawn of ‘the world’ resembling the Buddhist cosmology of Mt. Meru surrounded by islands, etc.”
This respondent makes several observations concerning behaviors of children they knew of that appear to suggest knowledge of a previous life:
It is uncanny how some children I knew are able to memorize texts as if they are simply recalling knowledge from a previous life. Their mannerisms also suggest connections, for example, the subdued monastic behavior of young monks and nuns, the way they instinctively know how to wear the robes, sit, use ritual instruments, etc. I know of substantiated cases of children born in Buddhist families (especially in countries where Buddhists are typically vegetarian) who have an aversion to eating meat from the time they are babies. If they are given meat, they spit it up. I know of several cases where young children are taken for a visit to a temple or monastery at a very young age and refuse to leave, until their parents finally let them become monks or nuns.
These accounts, though not particularly compelling in and of themselves, suggest that popular stories of reincarnated lamas and children with preternatural abilities or habits continue to keep the belief in rebirth alive and well for contemporary Buddhists.
To inquire about the possible past-life memories of participants in my survey, question 48 asked, “Have you ever had a memory that you thought might be from a previous life?” Of those that responded (61), 64 percent replied “Yes.” When asked about the number of times this has happened, of the 38 people who responded 42 percent said one to five times, 21 percent said five to ten times, and 21 percent said more than twenty times. When asked about the context, 71 percent of these respondents said that the memories had arisen spontaneously, 43 percent said while dreaming, 32 percent indicated during meditation or spiritual practice, and 26 percent indicated that they occurred during an altered state of consciousness. Thus, like the other psi phenomena discussed so far, we see a strong connection between retrocognition and dreaming.
When asked to describe their experiences, as usual, participants’ responses were mixed, ranging from the brief to the elaborate. Some of the shorter responses were: “Places, faces, and objects were familiar and known”; “I dreamt I was me but not anywhere I had ever been”; “Powerful experiences of times, people and settings that I know of but yet have never lived in this life”; “I did a past life regression once and for the time those memories felt very real to me”; “Vivid dreams of times and places not my own. Or being in meditative states with similar qualities of reliving and déjà vu”; “Very vivid memory of two past lifetimes—one as a boy on a fishing boat in East Asia, one as a Buddhist monk”; “Recognizing landscape in Thailand that I dreamt while a child”; “Dreams of being a tailor in Italy, in the 19th century”; and “I have had multiple experiences of previous lives in Australia and Canada.” Though intriguing, these accounts lack details and therefore are not particularly compelling.
When reading or listening to stories about psi, accounts of acquiring detailed knowledge of people, events, or places that could not have been known about through ordinary means (such as Dhammaruwan’s xenoglossia) have always been the gold standard of researchers. So, are these brief descriptions examples of retrocognition? For those who experienced these phenomena, they were certainly compelling enough to leave an impression and suggest to them that they might have been. But the mind is a trickster, so who really is to say? Retrocognition is a difficult phenomenon to verify because even vivid and detailed memories often lack any specifics that could be checked.
Some respondents provided more details. Jane, a twenty-nine-year-old woman living in the United Kingdom, wrote: “I dreamed [of] my grandmother’s house how it was in the 18th century, comparing it to images, [and] it looked exactly like that. [There was] no way for me to have known before the dream.” Likewise, Rick, a sixty-three-year-old American man, had dreams suggestive of retrocognition: “As a child I recalled feeling very strongly that I’d lived in ancient times. As a teen, many dreams of another life with its own memories, continuous with themselves but separate from this life.” In addition to these dreams, Rick wrote that “in meditation I once saw a series of my former lives.”
For Jason, a forty-nine-year-old Australian man, retrocognitive-like phenomena came in the form of an uncanny familiarity with certain places, people, and experiences:
I’m not really sure I’d describe them as vivid memories, rather some places I have travelled and certainly people and lamas I have met seem very familiar. I also feel strongly connected to certain places, cultures and religious/spiritual teachers that don’t seem easily explainable from the context of my current life. When I was a small child, around 7 years old, another child taught me to meditate and I spontaneously immediately experienced a blissful state, that I can still recall now. It was a powerful and familiar experience. I also had the typical experience of feeling like I had come home when I entered my first dharma centre. Many such experiences . . .
A much more dramatic experience of recognition is described by Kimberly, a fifty-two-year-old American woman: “Once I recognized someone from a past lifetime in a vastly different cultural context on a busy city street. In fact, we recognized each other simultaneously. As we spontaneously ran to embrace one another, we suddenly recognized the absurdity of the situation (our reunion under such totally different circumstances) and began laughing hilariously.” This account is particularly noteworthy because it involves the simultaneous and intersubjective recognition of two people who by conventional standards should not have known each other.
In her survey responses, Ayyā Mettikā wrote about several retrocognitive experiences involving specifically Buddhist themes. The first three occurred as childhood dreams: “As a child, I dreamed repeatedly of being in a dark meditative transitional realm (. . . now I recognize it as a meditation state); living as a large water snake nearby some old underwater ruins, which I had some unknown attachment to be in that location from the past; . . . [and] living on a baking red sun-dried old world at an outpost, watching out for and waiting for the next rare ship/portal . . . (past or future?).”
The first appears to be the dream recollection of having attained a previous jhanic state of meditation. Note that the second dream is of being an animal—a snake attached to underwater ruins. Both rebirth as an animal and rebirth based on a previous attachment are commonly occurring themes in Buddhist narrative literature. Note that for the third dream Mettika is unsure if it is a memory of the past or the future. Dreaming of a future life may seem odd, but recall Clough’s mention of a reference in a Pali text to a monk with this higher knowledge, who was able to remember future lives (chapter 1).
The next experience of retrocognition mentioned by Ayya Mettika occurred as a spontaneous vision while visiting a sacred Buddhist site: “At the ancient great stupa in Korea . . . [I saw] the opening of a past life vision on site and the re-arising of my old great vows at that place, appearing in kaleidoscopic parallel vision with the real time present image of the site, and present intentions and dedications—like a colliding of the worlds, their jarring and opening, and then their reintegrating.” Stupas are Buddhist reliquaries containing the remains of buddhas, saints, or holy beings and are common pilgrimage sites for Buddhists to pay homage and acquire merit. In this psychedelic vision, the Ayya experiences her “old great vows,” which is suggestive of the bodhisattva’s vows for supreme enlightenment found in Mahayana Buddhism. Since Mahayana has always been the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea, this suggestion gains further credence. However, as mentioned, Mettika is a Theravadin nun now. Since she does not mention any tension between her old vows and new intentions and dedication, it seems as if this vision caused an integration of her Mahayana Buddhist path from the previous lifetime with the present Theravadin one. In Ayya Mettika’s final account of retrocognition, she describes recollecting past lives from her traditional practice of the jhanas:
During a three-year retreat: one day, determined to try to practice the jhana meditation methods I read about in the early Buddhist suttas; doing so, and then seeing a number of past lives. Seeing each one there was a lesson that tied to now (back then); some habit tendency or small fault in my moral conduct. Seeing the linking of karma from life to life related to these various small moral faults, habits or attachments. Feeling so much samvega seeing this and making an emotional and strong determination not to keep repeating the same!
Here we see three significant Buddhist themes. First, the Ayya mentions attaining a recollection of past lives in the manner outlined in the canonical Pali sources. Next, through this, she is able to witness the karmic links resulting from her moral faults, habits, and attachments. Third, from seeing these karmic consequences, she experiences samvega. This is an important Pāli term from early Buddhism, which we can translate as “aesthetic shock.” In early Buddhist sources there are accounts of samvega occurring in people as the result of an unexpected, shocking, or horrifying experience, often of death, decay, or impermanence. This feeling of samvega then motivates them to practice the Buddhist path and escape from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. Thus, Mettikā’s strong determination not to repeat her unskillful past actions is also a traditional response to the feeling of samvega.
Excerpted from Paranormal States: Psychic Abilities in Buddhist Convert Communities by D.E. Osto. Copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
OTHER NEW & NOTEWORTHY DHARMA BOOKS THIS MONTH:
Storehouse of Treasures: Recovering the Riches of Chan and Zen by Nelson Foster. (Shambhala) — Read Constance Kassor’s review and an excerpt from the publisher now.
A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism: The Path of Awareness, Compassion, and Wisdom by Cortland Dahl (Shambhala)— Read an excerpt
See also the latest reviews from Lion’s Roar magazine.
Visit Buddhadharma for more on the latest dharma books and to read more excerpts.
