Ahimsa, what is the difference between the Buddhist understanding of reincarnation vs. the Hindu understanding? They are not equivalent, though the former grew out from the latter. Buddhism holds a causal connection between lives produced by karma, but one is not the same person from one life to the next in Buddhism. Actions in a previous life may help to explain one’s current circumstances, but those earlier actions were not done by the same person in Buddhist belief. Buddhists reject the idea that we have individual souls, unlike Hinduism’s belief in individual continuity between past and future lives.
The Buddhist idea of a person may be likened to a running river – at different points along the journey, the river is ‘different’ (because the exactly configuration of the river is different) and yet the river is ‘not-different’ (because there is a certain continuity present that allows us to name the river ‘River Z’). The human person, in Buddhism, from one lifetime to the next, is similarly different (your lifetimes might be lived rich or poor, male or female, race B or race C, e.g.) and not-different (the lifetimes are linked by cause-and-effect, e.g.). Non-difference may particulary be experienced in the form of past-life memories.
Ahimsa, is there any difference in the Hindu’s “experience” of reincarnation from the Buddhist’s personal “experience” of rebirth. And by “experience”, what do you mean? Feelings of deja-vu. A holy man telling one what he/she was in a previous incarnation? How could one possibly know what they were before: for instance, a fly, or an animal, or even a being in another universe, in a past-life? How does one have a “personal experience” of this?
One major difference between a Hindu and a Buddhist experience of reincarnation or rebirth, is that a Hindu might tend to think that he or she is an unchanging self that simply leaves one body and enters another body, whereas the Buddhist would argue that one’s ‘self’ is in fact changing every second, like a river, or a flame.
In terms of past-life experiences, some people may claim to have memories of past lives. These claims of memories could easily be verified, if, for instance, the person claims that he or she lived 50 miles away at 102 Anderson Street, with persons X, Y, and Z, who did this, that, and the other thing.
Still, even in those cases of someone giving specific information about where he lived in a past-life, one could always argue that the person (1) got lucky; (2) received the information from the spirit world; or (3) the person is psychic, and is reading the mind of the person who lived that life.
However, for many of the people who have these memories, the memories present themselves as if the memories were one’s “own”, not someone else’s.
A past-life memory would feel something like a memory of this life in which the memory clearly feels to be ‘your’ memory. Someone might remember when he was 2 years old, in a swimming pool. Is that memory really ‘yours’, or did you read a story about a swimming pool in the past, and adopted the memory as your own? Well, maybe, maybe not, but since swimming babies is not an outlandish idea, no one will really question your memory.
With past-life memories, Western culture finds the idea a bit more outlandish, and the chances for empirical verification may be less than one would like.
In any event, for most Buddhists I would say, rebirth is not something they think about a whole lot, if only because (1) rebirth simply makes sense as a way in which the universe works; and/or (2) the present life is the only life that exists ‘right now’, and any Buddha who became a Buddha, became a Buddha in ‘this’ life, so take care of this life, and any other lives will take care of themselves.
