Reincarnation in Japan - Saint Francis Xavier and the Japanese Bonze
The following report is taken from the story of Saint François-Xavier by Father Bouhours. It is a theological discussion between a Japanese monk named Tucarondono, and Saint Francis-Xavier, then a missionary in Japan.
“- I don't know if you know me, or to put it better, if you recognize me," Tucarondono said to François-Xavier.
- I do not remember having ever seen you, the latter replies.
The bonze then burst in laughter and turned to other bonzes, his colleagues whom he had brought with him:
- I clearly see," he said to them, "that I will have no difficulty in defeating a man that has dealt with me more than a hundred times, and pretends to have never seen me.” Then, looking at Xavier with a smile of contempt: “Don’t you have anything left,” he continued, “of the goods that you sold me at the port of Frénasoma?”
“In reality,” replied Xavier, with an always serene and modest face, “I have never been a merchant in my life, and I have never seen Frénasoma.”
- “Ah! what a lack of memory and what a stupidity!” resumed the monk, looking astonished, and continuing his bursts of laughter:
- “What! Is it possible that you forgot that?”
- “Refresh my memory,” replied the father gently, “you who have more wit and memory than I do.”
- “I don't mind,” said the monk, proud of the praise Xavier had thrown at him. “It is now just fifteen hundred years that you and I, who were merchants, traded in Frénasoma, and that I bought a hundred pieces of silk from you, very cheaply. Do you remember it now?
The saint assessed where the bonze's speech was going and asked him honestly how old he was.
" - I'm fifty-two years old," said Tucarondono.
“- How can it be,'' Xavier went on, “that you were a merchant fifteen centuries ago, if you have only been in the world for half a century, and how did we deal in those days, you and I, in Frénasoma, if most of the other bonzes teach that Japan was only a desert, fifteen hundred years ago?”
"- Listen to me,” said the bonze; “you will hear the oracles, and you will agree that we have more knowledge of past things than you have of present things.”
“- You must therefore know that the world has never had a beginning, and that souls, strictly speaking, do not die. The soul emerges from the body in which she was enclosed; she seeks another one, fresh and vigorous, where we are reborn sometimes with the noblest sex, sometimes with the imperfect sex, according to the various constellations of the sky and the different aspects of the moon. These changes of birth cause our fortunes to change too. For it is the reward of those who have lived holy, to have the fresh memory of all lives that one has had in past centuries, and to represent oneself entirely as one has been for ages, in the form of prince, merchant, man of letters, warrior and other figures. On the contrary, someone like you that knows so little about his own affairs, who does not know what he has been and what he has done over the course of countless centuries, shows that his crimes have made him worthy of death so many times that he has lost the memory of the lives he changed.”
Observation: We cannot suppose that François-Xavier invented this story, that was not to his advantage, nor can we suspect the good faith of his historian, Father Bouhours. On the other hand, it is not less certain that it was a trap set for the missionary by the bonze, since we know that the memory of previous existences is an exceptional case, and that, in any case, it does not ever has such precise details; but what emerges from this fact is that the doctrine of reincarnation existed in Japan at that time, in identical conditions to those that are taught today by the Spirits, except for the intervention of the constellations and the moon. Another no less remarkable similarity is the idea that the accuracy of memory is a sign of superiority; the Spirits tell us, in fact, that in worlds more elevated than Earth, where the body is less material and the soul is in a normal state of freedom, the memory of the past is a faculty common to everyone; there one remembers their former lives, like we remember the first years of our childhood. It is obvious that the Japanese are not at this degree of dematerialization that does not exist on Earth, but this fact proves that they have its intuition.
