“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present.” That refrain pops up regularly in Cloud Atlas, the just-released major motion picture based on the best-selling novel by David Mitchell. To my recollection, the quotation doesn’t appear in the book itself, but the sentiment surely does, along with this follow-on: “And by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future.”

As a biologist intrigued by Buddhism, and who is exploring the parallels and convergences between this modern and largely Western science and that ancient and largely Eastern “wisdom tradition,” I find myself increasingly convinced that Kipling was wrong: The twain have met, and for the most part, they get along swimmingly.

Nonetheless, I and many other Buddhist sympathizers part company with traditional Buddhist beliefs when it comes to the doctrine of reincarnation. As we…

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In an aversion to animals, the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized.
—Walter Benjamin

Recently, I was walking through the upper meadow of our property (we live on 10 rural acres east of Seattle), when I startled a coyote that had just ripped into a juvenile rabbit. The coyote either wasn’t very clever, or not very hungry, or was perhaps especially frightened, because in any event, she dropped the rabbit and loped away. I was left to confront a tiny, bedraggled, hopelessly lacerated fellow mammal, whose intestines were slithering onto the ground, but who was still very much alive. We looked into each other’s eyes.

I don’t know what the poor rabbit saw—whether it “recognized” me somehow—but in those …

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