Professor Suthers: The [Bhagavad] Gita has admitted the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul [reincarnation]. What does your Vaishnava Philosophy say about this?
Srila Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati Thakur Jagad Guru Prabhupada:-- The “Gita” is not separate from the Vaishnava Philosophy. The Shrimad Bhagavatam fully reveals the true import of this doctrine, viz. that of changes of births for the soul.
Christianity has disregarded the principle of change of births on the alleged ground that if it is accepted, men will not restrain their sinful propensities, rather they will indulge in vices at their sweet will in their present life, on the expectation that they will be able to make good their sins, guilts, and wrong doing of this life in the course of the following ones.
But the Shrimad Bhagavatam has crowned the principle with its true significance by means of a much fuller scientific and philosophical meaning, by instructing the urgent necessity for ardently taking up and culturing devotion to God even while the human form of life, not easily available in the after-lives, is at our disposal, without spending a single moment thereof in other useless pursuits.
If we do not accept the doctrine of transmigration of the soul and adopt the instruction of the Shrimad Bhagavatam, we shall not be able to get over the all-devouring disaster of regarding matter as the sole object of our concern, which has kept its mouth wide open.
Though most of the Christians do not admit transmigration, yet many of the intellectual giants of the Christian world have shown several instances of their acceptance of the doctrine. Even in the Bible in St, John 9.1.2, we find, “And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, “Master, who has committed the sin? This man or his parents, that he was born blind from his birth?”
It is seen that even some Christian Fathers clearly gave instructions about transmigration. Origen said: “Is it not more in conformity with reason that every soul for certain mysterious reasons is introduced into a body and introduced according to its deserts and former actions.?” And Goethe says, “I am sure that I, such as you see me here, have lived a thousand times and I have to come again another thousand times.” What the Greeks called metempsychosis and is called transmigration in the English language was at one time, more or less, admitted in ancient Greece, Egypt, and many places in the west.
Some say that the apostles of Christ the Great, failing to reconcile their previous and subsequent conclusions with the doctrine of transmigration, were compelled to discard it. Yet no rationalist among the Christians has been able to refute the doctrine on the basis of sound reasoning; on the other hand, most of them have had to admit it even.
Heredotus, Pindar, Plato etc. have all accepted it. Huxley, the illustrious scientist of the nineteenth century, has written in his religious work, Evolution and Ethics: “None but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity, like the doctrine of evolution itself, viz., that of transmigration which has its root in the world of reality and it may claim such support as the great argument of “Analogy” is capable of supplying.” Professor Lutoloski has said, “I cannot give up my conviction of a previous existence before my birth, and I have the certainty to be born again after my death, until I have assimilated all human experiences, having been many times male and female, wealthy and poor, free and enslaved, generally having experienced all conditions of human existence.”
But such transmigration theories of the empiricists of the west or those of the western philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like Franciscus Mercurius Helmont, Leichtenbourg, Lessing, Herder, Schopenhauer, etc. or of Jalaluddin Rumi of the Sufi sect of Persia, or of the Theosophists, or of the Indian Nyaya Philosophy under the aphorism: “From the desire for the mother’s breast milk due to the habit of the previous life,” or of the Buddhistic doctrine of annihilation in matter—these are assailable by various hostile reasonings and, having their origin in inductive concepts are incomplete and imperfect.
But the conclusion in this respect of the Shrimad Bhagavatam is fully flawless and significant. The Vaishnava Philosophy having shown the royal road to the acquirement of the highest blessedness even in the present life, there is no need for waiting for future lives. As such, the Vaishnava Philosophy is thoroughly aloof from all wrangling full of useless riddles over the doctrine of transmigration.
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Interview: Professor Suthers
Of Ohio State University January, 1929
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