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Abstract
Reincarnation has not been entirely neglected in the philosophy of religion but it has not always been taken seriously or carefully discussed in relation to its role in believers’ lives. John Hick is exceptional insofar as he gave sustained attention to the belief, at least as it features in the philosophies of Vedānta and Buddhism. While acknowledging the value of Hick’s recognition of the variety of reincarnation beliefs, this article critically engages with certain aspects of his approach. It argues that Hick’s search for a ‘criterion’ of reincarnation is misguided, and that his distinction between ‘factual’ and ‘mythic’ forms of the doctrine is over-simplifying.
Notes
1. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 368.
2. Hick, Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, 12–13.
3. See especially: Hick, Philosophy of Religion, ch. 11; Death and Eternal Life, chs 16–19; Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, 11–12; An Interpretation of Religion, 367–369; The New Frontier of Religion and Science, 194–200; Between Faith and Doubt, 152–158.
4. See, for example, Hick, Between Faith and Doubt, 152–153.
5. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 391 (emphasis in original).
6. Hick, Between Faith and Doubt, 151, 157.
7. See, for example, ibid., 151.
8. See Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 305; Philosophy of Religion, 133.
9. See Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 364.
10. Ibid., 327, 356, 327.
11. Ibid., 305.
12. For Hick’s discussion of empirical investigations into purported memories of former lives, see ibid., 373–378, and Between Faith and Doubt, 153–155.
13. It has been claimed that bodily characteristics such as birthmarks and wounds can be ‘“reincarnationally” inherited’ from a previous life (Christie-Murray, Reincarnation, 230), but this is not claimed to be because the material constituents of the body remain the same. Hence it would be misleading to speak of bodily continuity even in these cases. For extensive work on the putative links between reincarnation and birthmarks and birth defects, see Stevenson, Reincarnation and Biology.
14. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 304.
15. Ibid., 307; Philosophy of Religion, 134.
16. Hick, Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, 11. See also idem, Between Faith and Doubt, 155–156, and The New Frontier of Religion and Science, 199.
17. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 304. There are in fact cases of peoples who purportedly believe in ‘multiple simultaneous reincarnation’; see, for example, Mills, “Reincarnation Belief among North American Indians and Inuit,” 28–29. I briefly discuss such cases in Burley, “Believing in Reincarnation,” 272–277, but shall not be considering them here.
18. See Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 307–308.
19. It bears emphasizing, though, that there have been numerous disagreements between competing Buddhist schools on this and related matters. For illuminating discussion, see McDermott, “Karma and Rebirth in Early Buddhism,” esp. 167–172. For further discussion of Buddhist accounts of personhood, see Collins, Selfless Persons.
20. Hick uses the term ‘karmic process’ in, among other places, Between Faith and Doubt, 155, and Problems of Religious Pluralism, 26.
21. Hick, The New Frontier of Religion and Science, 196.
22. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 345.
23. Ned Block devised a distinction between ‘phenomenal consciousness’ and ‘access-consciousness’ in his article “On a Confusion about the Function of Consciousness.” I am doubtful that the distinction is a clear one, but, roughly speaking, to be phenomenally conscious of something is to have immediate perceptual awareness of it, whereas to have access-consciousness of that thing is for knowledge of it to be able to enter into one’s judgements and actions but without one’s necessarily being immediately aware that this is occurring.
24. See, for example, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, interviewed in Bärlocher, Testimonies of Tibetan Tulkus, 117.
25. Hick, An Autobiography, 226. See also his The Fifth Dimension, 248; The New Frontier of Religion and Science, 200; and Between Faith and Doubt, 158.
26. Nagapriya, Exploring Karma and Rebirth, 87–88. Occasionally, Buddhists do use phrases that suggest a soul being released from one body and entering another (see, for example, Tsering Wangyal’s article “The Reincarnation of Kathleen Frei,” quoted in Bärlocher, Testimonies of Tibetan Tulkus, 755), but such phraseology is relatively rare among Buddhists.
27. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 327.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 388.
30. Hick (ibid., 379) quotes a discourse attributed to the Buddha from the Samyutta Nikāya, 2.213–214, and also mentions a passage from the Sāmaññaphala Sutta (Hick, ibid., 396, n. 34). See also Hick, Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, 11, and Between Faith and Doubt, 156. For more recent translations of the primary material, see Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 673–674, and Gethin, Sayings of the Buddha, 33.
31. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 364.
32. Hick, Between Faith and Doubt, 157.
33. Hick, The New Frontier of Religion and Science, 196.
34. Ibid.
35. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 356.
36. Hick, Between Faith and Doubt, 152.
37. Ibid., 153.
38. See Shaw, The Jātakas. For further discussion, see Appleton, Jātaka Stories in Theravāda Buddhism.
39. I am thinking here of, for example, the way in which many philosophers of religion try to determine the truth-value of a belief in God (or the proposition that God exists), or of a belief in eternal life, while dealing only with very thinly described conceptions of how these beliefs feature in believers’ lives.
40. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 327, 356.
41. Ibid., 327.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 356.
45. Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 349. Cf. ibid., 363: ‘There are some Hindus and Buddhists who regard the idea of rebirth as an illuminating myth’.
46. In an endnote in An Interpretation of Religion (376, n. 9) the following sources are cited: Buddhadāsa, Toward the Truth; Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 173; Jennings, The Vedāntic Buddhism of the Buddha, xxiv–xxv; Deutsch, Advaita Vedānta, ch. 5.
47. See Jennings’ “General Introduction” in his The Vedāntic Buddhism of the Buddha, esp. xxiv–xxv, a passage from which is quoted in Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 358. See also Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 140–141.
48. Nagapriya, Exploring Karma and Rebirth, 132.
49. Ibid., 142.
50. Ibid., 127.
51. Ibid.
52. It might also suggest that ‘literal’ versus ‘metaphorical’ is not quite the right way of characterizing the important differences in this area. But I shall not elaborate that thought here.
53. Black, Models and Metaphors, 46.
54. Swearer, “Introduction: Buddhadāsa – ‘Servant of the Buddha’,” 10.
55. Buddhadāsa, Toward the Truth, 68, quoted in Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 360.
56. Buddhadāsa, ibid., quoted in Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 359–360.
57. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life, 300. See also Prajnananda, “Preface,” 9, and Minor, “In Defense of Karma and Rebirth,” 34.
58. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 327; cf. 356.
59. Ibid., 356.
60. Ibid.
61. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk 2, ch. 27, §14; quoted in Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 305–306.
62. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” §34.
63. Jennings, The Vedāntic Buddhism of the Buddha, xxiv.
64. See Nagapriya, Exploring Karma and Rebirth, 97–100.
65. Ibid., 97.
66. Ibid., 98–99.
67. Hick, Between Faith and Doubt, 153.
68. Harrison, I, Me, Mine, 18. This statement is also quoted in Mahārāja, Coming Back, 11–12.
69. For details of Harrison’s spiritual associations, see Tillery, Working Class Mystic.
70. See “Rime di Michel Angelo Buonarroti,” VI, in Duppa, The Life and Literary Works of Michel Angelo Buonarroti, 231.
71. Goethe, Selected Verse, 71. I was prompted to look up Goethe’s poem, and the one by Michelangelo, by some comments in Cioffi, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, 85.
72. Abhedananda, Reincarnation, 28.
73. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, 71.
74. Sharma, “Theodicy and the Doctrine of Karma,” 351.
75. For indications of how the belief in karma is sometimes intermingled with belief in supernatural beings who intervene in human affairs, see Daniel, “The Tool Box Approach of the Tamil to the Issues of Moral Responsibility and Human Destiny,” and Goldman, “Karma, Guilt, and Buried Memories,” esp. 419–420.
76. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 356.
77. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life, 307.
78. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 388.
79. See, for example, Hick’s characterization of ‘a naive Christian realist’ understanding of chapter 3 of the Book of Genesis in Hick, “Religious Realism and Non-Realism,” 6.
80. See Hick, “Preface,” “Jesus and the World Religions,” and The Metaphor of God Incarnate, esp. ch. 10.
81. ‘[T]he idea of divine incarnation […] has never been given a satisfactory literal sense; but […] it makes excellent metaphorical sense’ (Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 12).
82. Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 356.
83. This article is respectfully dedicated to John Hick, who died in February 2012. Despite its critical orientation, I hope that he would have appreciated this continued and extended attention to reincarnation.
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Notes on contributors
Mikel Burley
Mikel Burley is Lecturer in Religion and Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He works primarily in the areas of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural philosophy of religion. His recent and forthcoming publications include: Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips (New York: Continuum, 2012); “Reincarnation and Ethics,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81, no. 1 (2013): 162–187; “Karma, Morality, and Evil,” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 6 (2014): 415–430; and Rebirth and the Stream of Life: A Philosophical Study of Reincarnation, Karma and Ethics (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). He is also a co-editor of Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).