I want to share with you something I found online that seems like it would be incredibly interesting to reincarnationists everywhere, Jivamala: A Buddhist Practice of purification relating to reincarnation –

(From the site Many Lives.)

This site describes one person’s practice of the Jivamala, a process of purification where the individual embarks on a spiritual journey to remember past lives in order to be free of the bondage of those lives.

One of the fundamental elements of Buddhism is the doctrine of reincarnation. Human beings die and are reborn over and over again because they fail to see things clearly and wake up to the spiritual emptiness which lies behind the phenomenal world. It is this false perception of the nature of things that leads to wrong thinking and wrong behavior, which in turn causes this painful cycle of death and rebirth.

In the sixth century BCE, when prince Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) began his process of awakening, tradition has it that his first stage of meditation involved remembering his past lives.

The Jivamala practice maintains that a similar process can be revealed to and practiced by others who are on the spiritual path. This site contains detailed biographies of many lives, and documents the initiatory Jivamala practice showing how it works. It also contains descriptions of many deaths and many afterlives, where several of the past lives or personalities describe where their actions and experiences in life led them after death.

The Jivamala practice is ideally performed by renunciants (monks or nuns) initiated into a Tantric Buddhist lineage, but is sometimes also practiced by householders. The Jivamala practice should only be performed under the direction of an inner guide, a dakini, or bhairava, or bodhisattva acting as a yidam (spiritual guide or tutelary deity). In this instance, the practice of the Jivamala was revealed to a householder by a bhairava. The practice was therefore not begun in a traditional way, since it was not handed down to a disciple by a living teacher in a recognized spiritual lineage.

This is a description of a meditative practice based on the life of the earthly Buddha.

Click here for the website.


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