[TML] China Regulates Buddhist Reincarnation

[Jeff Zeitlin]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:46:17 -0400, "Samuel Weiss" <samwise1 at msn.com>
wrote:

[Unattributed quote]

>>It sounds like something out of Roger Zelazny's 'Lord
>of Light'.<

>No.

>It IS something out of an H. Beam Piper Paratime story.

>I can't remember the name of it without digging it out, but it involved 
>a world where they believed in reincarnation and so had little real fear 
>of death, and consequently a very well developed dueling code. The 
>Paratime people were there when someone invented a machine to recall 
>past life memories, and things started going crazy, including one 
>restored person laid claim to a noble title as the prior holder of said 
>title.

I believe that the story was "Last Enemy", and while reincarnation was
accepted as scientific fact in the Second Level Akor-Neb civilization,
Hadron Dalla (as Dallona of Hadron) developed a machine (and
pharmaceutical treatments) to assist in allowing a person to RETAIN
past-life memories, which previously could only be recorded while in a
trance state, and were not always that detailed.

Reincarnation was a major factor in the political scene, where the two
major parties were the Volitionalists, who believed that you chose who
you would reincarnate as, and the Statisticalists, who believed that the
discorporate individuality was in something analogous to a somnolescent
state, and was irresistibly drawn to the nearest about-to-be-born
infant, and would have to reincarnate in that infant only.
Dalla/Dallona's experiments showed inarguably that the Volitionalists
were correct, and that led almost immediately to a civil war along
reincarnational-political lines, in part catalyzed by the reincarnation
event described above.