Dear Mary,
Thank you for the wonderful articles. Here are some of my opinions.
“When you look with iron sight you find that all humankind is suffering in this
earthly world.” You are right. Buddhists believe that we keep coming back to this world because we are not perfect. We come to this world to learn and amend our wrong behaviors. When you are a perfect man as Buddha, you will be live in heaven. Buddhism believes that everybody can be Buddha.
Somehow, reincarnation explains why life is unfair. Why some people are rich and
lucky while the others are poor and unlucky? Why you are smart while I am stupid? Why you are beautiful while I am ugly? Why some people treat me good while some people mistreat me? … Maybe they all have something to do with your former life. Yet you can change your life by doing good things. It might change your next life as well.
Buddhism believes that deep meditation can lead to deep enlightening, might be invisible world as well. About meditation, the monks from Tibet might have better
knowledge to explain it.
Once I asked my husband who is a Catholic if he believed reincarnation, he said
he does. I asked him why? He said: “Sometimes you visit a place in your first time, but you feel it is so familiar to you. You might feel familiar with somebody you first time meet.” Sometimes, you have different life in your dream. Those
dreams are so vivid and totally unexplainable. I don’t know if these can be proof of reincarnation.
The Buddhist understanding of reincarnation is that you come back with different
appearance and you totally forget what happened in your past lives. You are a new man again and you are going to build up new memory.
The Buddhist reincarnation is not for the physical perfection but the spiritual
perfection. We believe that Buddha can be any form of creature. We believe that
all creatures have spirit. But human being is on the top. Only human being can become Buddha. Buddha doesn’t have physical appearance and Buddha can have any physical appearance.
I believe there are differences between western and eastern reincarnation.
