People Who Say They Saw a Past Life
From time to time, people claim that they have seen or remember a past life. Recent videos by Dr. Jeon Hyeon-su also present reincarnation as real and speak as though past lives can be seen. An EBS documentary shows a young monk saying that he had been a Buddha in a past life and was born again as a human being to save people. Such cases show that the world remains full of superstition even in the twenty-first century.
I believe the Buddha tried to break this kind of superstition 2,600 years ago. Yet people who say they follow his teaching run in the opposite direction, using his name to spread reincarnation, past lives, and memories of past lives. It is an even greater problem when someone such as Dr. Jeon, who says he has studied Buddhism deeply, spreads these beliefs. I therefore begin by asking what it means to “see” and to “remember,” and why the claim to have seen or remembered a past life is a delusion.
Before believing that someone saw a past life, we must first ask: What is seeing, and what is remembering?
Question, Observe, and Think in Terms of Dependent Arising
Buddhism is a path of liberation. By liberation, I mean breaking free from misguided delusions, desires, hopes, and the suffering they create. To do that, we must raise doubts and questions, observe, and think in terms of dependent arising. Such thinking is not fantasy produced with our eyes closed. It begins by observing relationships, causes, and effects in reality and uses those observations to seek answers.
We encounter ourselves and the world through the six sense faculties—eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. Buddhism observes body and mind, the five aggregates, in reality and examines the relations within them. The questions and answers I offer today are not truths to be accepted on faith. You must also be able to observe, question, and reason for yourself.
Buddhism does not demand faith in what cannot be observed. It is wisdom that seeks answers in observable reality.
We Cannot See the Past; We Can Only Recall It
Seeing is a process occurring in the present: light enters the eyes, information reaches the brain, and the brain interprets it. I cannot now see the morning from a few hours ago, nor can I see yesterday. Unless an event was separately recorded on video, no one can place the past before their eyes again.
The phrase “seeing a past life” is therefore contradictory from the beginning. Even if we assume that a past life existed, one could only claim to recall it, not see it. We cannot see the past; we can only summon something through memory. Unless we introduce fantasies about reversing time or a cosmic archive such as the Akashic Records, what we actually see is only the present moment.
We do not see the past. We only recall it. The phrase “I saw a past life” confuses the very nature of seeing.
The Superknowledges in the Samaññaphala Sutta Are Fiction, Not Buddhism
Once the claim changes from seeing a past life to recalling one, it becomes a question about memory. I take the Samaññaphala Sutta as an example. The text is framed as a king asking what fruits one gains by becoming a renunciant and the Buddha answering. It says that after entering meditative absorption one acquires six superknowledges, including knowledge of former lives: one life, two lives, a thousand, ten thousand, and even countless lives across cosmic eons. The person supposedly remembers where and into what family and race he was born, what he ate, how he lived, and how he died.
I call this fiction. The Samaññaphala Sutta supports reincarnation and knowledge of former lives as if they were facts, but this conflicts with dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self. A mind-made body flying through the sky, touching the sun and moon, seeing distant places, and remembering innumerable lives is not the Buddha’s teaching. It is imagination added by people who believed in supernatural powers and reincarnation. A story does not become fact merely because it is called scripture.
The presence of rebirth and supernatural memory in the Samaññaphala Sutta does not make them facts. I regard its account as Hindu-style fiction that deifies the Buddha, not as Buddhist teaching.
The Imagined Self That Leaves the Body
For someone to remember a past life, there must be something that survives the death of this body and moves into another one. People in the past imagined it under names such as ātman, pudgala, sattva, and jīva. I understand the four notions in the Diamond Sutra—the notions of self, person, sentient being, and life—as four forms of the same fantasy: that a “me” exists apart from the body. A mental entity that survives death and changes bodies is required before the story of past-life memory can even begin.
But Buddhism does not observe such an invisible entity. It turns toward the six sense faculties and the five aggregates—our present body and mind. There, both body and mind are found to change through relations and conditions. No independent, unchanging, unaffected self is discovered. This is dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self. Without a soul that leaves the body and changes into another one, neither a reincarnating entity nor its past-life memories can be established.
A Buddhism that teaches non-self cannot contain a mental entity that preserves memories eternally and independently of the body.
Memory Is Inscribed in the Body, Not in a Soul
When we observe human beings in the twenty-first century, memory depends on the body, not on a soul. Damage to certain regions of the brain destroys memories; damage to language-related regions can take away speech; dementia breaks down memory and recognition. The soul has not malfunctioned. The body has changed. Mind does not operate separately from the body.
Suppose a soul existed. How could a soul with no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, or brain see, hear, smell, taste, feel, or think? With what could it see heaven and hell, find its way into another fetus, or remember the past? Once all relation to the body is severed, the soul can do nothing. Buddhism speaks of the six faculties, the six sense objects, and the five aggregates together precisely because mental activity depends on real conditions and the body.
Without eyes and a brain, one cannot see; without bodily change, one cannot remember. Memory is not a warehouse belonging to a soul separate from the body.
The Limits of Memory and the Bodily Nature of Learning
Even after looking carefully at our own hand, we cannot remember it accurately once we close our eyes. Only a tiny part of this morning or yesterday remains. Repetition, strong shock, threats to life, pleasure, and reward make certain information more memorable because it matters to survival and action. We cannot recall every detail of our mother’s face even after a lifetime of seeing her. Someone who has observed human memory should therefore find it difficult to accept the claim that every scene from thousands or tens of thousands of lives can be remembered perfectly.
Language and skills work in the same way. Multiplication facts come quickly, speech becomes natural, bicycles can be ridden, and instruments can be played because the brain and body changed through countless repetitions. A child learns language over a long period of listening, speaking, failing, and repeating. If hypnosis or a spiritual attainment suddenly produces fluent speech in an ancient language, when and how did the brain and body change enough to make that language possible?
Learning and memory result from changes in the brain and body. A claim that a past life’s language and memories suddenly arrived without any such change turns the entire process into a black box.
Asking Us to Believe a Black Box Is Not Buddhism
Even if we provisionally accept Dr. Jeon’s hypnosis cases or the young monk’s claim, the central problem remains. The entire process by which information from a dead person reached another person’s brain is a black box. Nothing observable tells us whether a soul carried the memory, whether it came from a cosmic archive, or whether someone accessed it upon awakening. Imagining karmic consciousness or ālayavijñāna as another invisible storage device does not solve the problem.
Buddhism does not ask us to believe this black box. It asks us to observe what seeing, remembering, body, and mind actually are. We can observe the brain and body far more closely than people could 2,600 years ago. If we still believe stories about flying through the sky, touching the sun and moon, and remembering lives across endless eons merely because they appear in scripture, that is not wisdom but superstition.
If the Samaññaphala Sutta were literally true, the Buddha should have remembered life as a single-celled organism, creatures crawling on ancient sea floors, dinosaurs, and the entire process of human evolution. He never said such things. Ironically, a scripture intended to make the Buddha omniscient creates a standard under which no Buddha has ever existed.
Hiding an unobservable transmission process and asking us to believe only its alleged result is not Buddhism. It turns imagination, conjecture, and desire into superstition presented as fact.
Wake Up from the Dream of Past Lives and See This Life
I judge claims of seeing or remembering past lives to be either delusions or lies. Someone such as Dr. Jeon, who speaks in the name of Buddhism, should not transmit that delusion to others. EBS, too, should examine whether the foreign young monk’s story is superstition instead of merely consuming it as something mysterious.
When people believe superstition, they sacrifice their bodies, property, time, and money to empty dreams. The deeper problem is that they fail to think through impermanence, non-self, and dependent arising, and therefore fail to see how precious this present life is and how it should be lived. Buddhism never told us to believe the Buddha. Buddhism is the way of observing the world, raising questions, thinking through dependent arising, and repeatedly breaking free from our own delusions.
Only after waking from the dream of past lives can we see this life. Do not believe—question. Observe and think through dependent arising.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.