ชื่ออักษร : K

K

Kumkum Verma

Kumkum Verma, a girl from in India, began talking about a previous life at the age of three-and-a-half. She said that she had lived in Darbhanga, a city of 200,000 people that was twenty-five miles away from her village, and that Urdu Bazar was the name of the section of the city where she had been. Her father, an educated man who was a landowner, homeopathic physician, and author, did not know anyone in Urdu Bazar, a commercial district where small businessmen, artisans, and craftsmen lived.Kumkum asked her family to call her Sunnary, which means beautiful, and made many statements about the previous life. Her aunt made notes of some of them six months before anyone tried to identify the previous personality. Dr. Stevenson, who met Kumkum’s family when she was nine years old, obtained an English translation of extracts of the notes, but he was unable to get the complete notebook, because it had been lost after being loaned to someone.

The extracts listed eighteen statements that Kumkum made that all proved to be correct for the previous personality, including the name of Urdu Bazar, her son’s name and the fact that he worked with a hammer, her grandson’s name, the name of the town where her father lived, the location of his home near mango orchards, and the presence of a pond at her house. She had correctly stated that she had an iron safe at her house, a sword hanging near her cot, and a snake near the safe to which she fed milk.

Kumkum’s father eventually talked about her statements to a friend who lived in Darbhanga. That friend had an employee from the Urdu Bazar section of the city, who was able to identify the previous personality, Sunnary or Sundari Mistry, whom Kumkum seemed to be describing. The previous personality’s family belonged to a relatively low artisan class and would have been quite unlikely to have social contact with a family with the education and social status of Dr. Verma’s family. In fact, they had little contact even after the case developed. The previous personality’s grandson visited Kumkum’s family twice. Dr. Verma went to Urdu Bazar once to meet the previous personality’s family, but he never allowed Kumkum to go. Apparently he was not proud of his daughter’s claim to have been a blacksmith’s wife in her previous life.

One interesting note is that Kumkum said that she died during an altercation and that her stepson’s wife had poisoned her. Sundari, who died quite unexpectedly five years before Kumkum was born, was preparing to be a witness for her son in his suit against her second husband, involving the son’s belief that his stepfather had misappropriated his deceased father’s money, when she died. No autopsy was performed, and Kumkum’s statement that she was poisoned remained unverified.

Also of note is that Kumkum spoke with an accent different from that of her family. The family associated it with the lower classes of Darbhanga and reported that in addition, Kumkum used some unusual expressions that seemed related to them as well.

Katsugoro

This case is cited by Lafcadio Hearn in Chapter X of his Gleanings in Buddha Fields(1). He states at the outset that what he is presenting "is only the translation of an old Japanese document - or rather series of documents - very much signed and sealed, and dating back to the early part of the present [i.e., the 19th] century." The documents were in the library of Count Sasaki in Tokyo. A copy of them was made for Hearn, who made the translation. Reduced to essentials, the facts related in the documents are as follows:

(1)Houghton Mifflin,Boston,1897.

Katsugoro was a Japanese boy, born on the 10th day of the 10th month of 1815, son of Genzo, a farmer living in the village of Nakano Mura, and his wife Sei. One day, at about the age of seven, Katsugoro, while playing with his elder sister Fusa, asked her where she came from before her present birth. She thought the question foolish and asked him whether he could remember things that happened before he was born. He answered that he could; that he used to be the son of a man called Kyubei and his wife Shidzu, who lived in Hodokubo; and that his name was then Tozo.

When later questioned by his grandmother, he said that until he was four years old he could remember everything, but had since forgotten a good deal; but he added that when he had been five years old Kyubei had died, and that a man named Hanshiro had then taken Kyubei's place in the household; that he himself had died of smallpox at the age of six, when his body was put in a jar and buried on a hill; that some old man then took him away and after a time brought him to Genzo's house, saying "Now you must be reborn, for it is three years since you died. You are to be reborn in this house." After entering the house, he stayed for three days in the kitchen; and he concluded: "Then I entered mother's honorable womb ... I remember that I was born without any pain at all!’

After relating all this, Katsugoro, asked to be taken to Hodokudo to visit the tomb of his former father, Kyubei. His grandmother Tsuya took him there and when they reached Hodokubo, he hurried ahead and, when he reached a certain dwelling, cried "This is the house" and ran in. His grandmother followed and, on inquiry, was told that the owner of the house was called Hanshiro; his wife, Shidzu; that she had had a son, Tozo, who had died thirteen years before at the age of six, his father having been Kyubei. Katsugoro, who was looking about during the conversation, pointed to a tobacco shop across the road, and to a tree, saying that they used not to be there. This was true, and convinced Hanshiro and his wife that Katsugoro had been Tozo, who had been born in 1805, and had died in 1810. (The year of birth of a Japanesechild,Hearn statesin a footnote, is counted as one year of his age.)

Evidently, Katsugoro's experience, as testified to in the affidavits translated by Hearn and summarized above, is radically different from that of Lurancy Vennum in the Watseka Wonder case. Nothing of the nature of obsession or possession appears in his case. His Katsugoro personality is at no time displaced or interfered with by that of Tozo, any more than is the personality of an adult "possessed" by the very different personality that was his in childhood, but which he remembers. The account presents Katsugoro as a normal boy, whose memories simply reached farther back than the time of his birth. Assuming the objective facts to have been as related in the affidavits translated by Hearn, the only explanation of them to suggest itself as alternative to reincarnation is that of paranormal retrocognition, by Katsugoro, of the various events and surroundings of the short life Tozo lived in another village some years before Katsugoro's birth, plus unconscious imaginative self-identification by Katsugoro with the retrocognized Tozo personality. This kind of explanation would require us to postulate in Katsugoro a capacity for retrocognitive clairvoyance far exceeding in scope any for the reality of which experimental evidence exists. And such postulation, if made at all, would undermine the empirical evidence not only for reincarnation, but equally of course for discarnate survival of the personality after death.