Reincarnation? Surely we’ve been here before

At least Joanna Lumley doesn’t indulge in celebrity memoirs from a past life with royalty.

Over and out? The present Dalai Lama has announced that he might be the last

Usually it’s with Aztecs, or possibly ancient Egyptians. If not, then in some royal court. That’s where reincarnated people remember living before. The unusual thing about the past life that Joanna Lumley suspects she had is its modesty. “I think I might have been a boy in the First World War,” she says.

The actress felt immense calm, she said this week, when she visited Ypres, where presumably her past self fell. This sort of feeling – having been here before and recognising something that means a lot – compels some people to think reincarnation must be true. I wonder.

There is, to be sure, respectable reincarnation, of the Tibetan Buddhist school. Then there is wacky reincarnation, of what may be called the Shirley MacLaine school.

In 1938 a three-year-old boy on the bare Tibetan plateau of Amdo was shown some objects by a party of visitors. “Mine, mine,” he said of some. They became convinced he was the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, who had died a year before. He even remembered where his predecessor had left his false teeth. And so Lhamo Thondup became recognised as the 14th Dalai Lama.

His is a poignant story. He was taken from the windy fields of buckwheat to a vast monastery where he found companionship in the mice that ran over his bed. More troublesome later were Mao Tse-tung and his successors, who drove him into exile.

The Chinese now try to beat the Tibetan Buddhists at their own reincarnation game. When the Dalai Lama dies they will no doubt pick some promising boy and have his past-life credentials certified by stooges. To head off the divisions this would cause, the present Dalai Lama has announced that he might be the last, being regarded as an enlightened one with the choice of how he might be reincarnated. “Naturally my next life is entirely up to me,” he said a few months ago.

The Tibetan Buddhist school of reincarnation’s respectability need not make it true. The Dalai Lama has just been awarded the Templeton prize, the first winner of which, 40 years ago, was Mother Teresa. They strike the world as obviously good people. But it is impossible to see how they can both be right in their beliefs.

Tibetan Buddhism is a far-away religion of which we know little. Compassion and reincarnation sound comforting. The fearsome, fang-baring, three-eyed, orange-flame-spouting Dorje Shugden or Dolgyal does not. His crown is of five skulls and his necklace of freshly severed heads. This deity, or protector of dharma, depending on how you look at it, should not be propitiated, the Dalai Lama insists, for that would be spirit-worship. Others strongly disagree, which is why you often hear protesters shouting at the Dalai Lama.

The Dorje Shugden controversy suggests how much about Tibetan Buddhism is unfamiliar. You can’t just pick the reincarnation on the menu and skip the wrathful deities. In the West, an awful lot of Buddhism-fanciers are the toe-in-the-water kind. They don’t get up at 4am to meditate. I walked past a nightclub called Buddha the other day. No nightclubs are called Mohammed. We’re not taking Buddhism seriously.

“I was in the court of Charlemagne,” wrote Shirley MacLaine in her masterpiece The Camino, about walking to Santiago. Its subtitle is A Pilgrimage of Courage. The true courage must have come in publishing it.

Miss MacLaine not only discovered her close friendship with the Carolingian emperor, but tracked down his own future life. He turned up as Olaf Palme, “the Swedish prime minister with whom I had a love affair and whom I had written about in Out on a Limb and disguised as a British politician from the Labour Party”. Many politicians from the Labour Party must have breathed easier after reading that.

I can’t remember whether Miss MacLaine visited Aztec Mexico, but she had a memorable time in Lemuria, a civilisation of which Atlantis was part until everything got a bit too watery. “Did I have a child in this Lemuria?” she asks a spirit-guide in The Camino. “You simply impregnated yourself with your own androgynous desire,” came the reply. Easy as pie, when you know how.

Reincarnation is the in thing now, as spiritualism was after the First World War. It meets a longing for a life beyond the mundane. Spiritualism was not discredited by exposure of table-turning tricksters with Red Indian friends on the other side and false ectoplasm on this side. It just grew unfashionable, like the aspidistra.

Now it’s the “spiritual” without the -ism. This takes in crystals, angels, standing stones, Gaia, a diet of fruit and nuts and, in a weakened sense, the euro. Reincarnation, coherent or not, hardly deserves to be thrown into the same bran tub. Christians, though, believe, according to their creed, in almost the opposite, declaring that they look forward to the resurrection of the body. But that’s another story.