On the Lives We Wore Before, the Forms We May Yet Become, and the Animal That Already Lives Within
A Parable from the Slopes of Merapi
In the village of Tegalmulyo, on the western flank of Merapi where volcanic soil grows everything without asking permission, there lived a herder of goats named Suradi who in seventy years never once raised his hand against an animal. The village children called him peculiar. His wife Warsini called him blessed. But Suradi himself said nothing of blessing; when asked why he treated each goat with such ceremony — greeting them at dawn, naming every one, sitting through the night beside a sick animal the way one sits beside a dying elder — he offered only this:
“Aku ora ngerti sapa sing nang njero.”
I do not know who is inside.
When Suradi died in the wet season of his seventy-second year, the oldest goat in his flock — a grey-bearded creature he had named Wicaksana, meaning the wise — refused to eat for three days. It stood at the threshold of the house as if waiting for a word of release. The villagers made no attempt to explain this. Explanation, they understood, is what you reach for when you cannot tolerate wonder.
I. The Garment the Soul Discards
Long before molecular science confirmed that the carbon inside your bones was once scattered across dying stars, the rishis of ancient India proposed something stranger and more intimate: that the soul itself has worn other shapes, walked on other numbers of legs, breathed through gills, sung in a register no human ear can produce.
The Bhagavad Gita offers the most precise image of this:
वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि। तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णान्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही॥
vāsāṃsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navāni gṛhṇāti naro ‘parāṇi / tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāny anyāni saṃyāti navāni dehī //
“As a person sets aside worn garments and takes up new ones, so the soul, having set aside worn-out bodies, moves into others that are new.” (Bhagavad Gita, 2.22)
The Chandogya Upanishad is more specific still, and more unsettling. Of those who return from the lunar world into another life, it says: those who lived with discernment rise toward Brahmin or Kshatriya or Vaishya births. But those whose choices curved crooked enter births proportional to that crookedness — śvayonau vā sūkara-yonau vā — into the womb of a dog, the womb of a pig. (Chandogya Upanishad, 5.10.7)
This is not metaphor dressed in scripture. The sages meant it as cosmic law, and the Sanskrit word that governs it — karma, meaning simply action — carries no drama of punishment. The soul is not condemned to the womb of the dog. It arrives there, by the accumulated direction of its own making.
What the Hindu account insists upon, and what makes it so difficult for the modern mind to hold without flinching, is that the animal form is not an indignity. It is a classroom one has qualified for by demonstrating that the lessons available at the human level have not yet been absorbed.
II. The Six Worlds That Wait Without Judgment
The Buddhist mapping of rebirth is the cartographer’s art applied to metaphysics: precise, unsentimental, and offered without the flavor of punishment. The Pali canon describes five destinations for the soul between lives — pañca gati — the hell realms, the realm of hungry ghosts, the animal realm, the human realm, and the heavenly realms. Certain later traditions add a sixth: the asura realm, for those whose power has outgrown their wisdom.
The Dhammapada opens with a verse that reorders the entire inquiry:
Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā
“Mind is the forerunner of all that arises. Mind is their master. Mind is their maker.”
Which means: the animal birth does not arrive from outside. It precipitates from within, like salt crystallizing out of water that has carried it, unseen, for a very long time.
But what distinguishes the Buddhist account from every aristocracy of species is this: the Buddha himself, according to the Jataka tales, had lived inside animal forms hundreds of times before his final human birth. He had been a monkey who gave his own body as a bridge so his troop could cross. A golden deer of such luminosity that a king lowered his bow in recognition. A rabbit who leapt into fire to feed a wandering sage. A parrot who stayed in a burning forest to call out warnings to other creatures.
These were not humiliations the future Buddha endured on his way to something better. They were lives of complete moral weight, in which the perfections — pāramitā — were being ripened in forms that had no language for what they were doing, only the doing of it. The animal did not need to know the word for compassion to practice it. It needed only to act. The practice was enough.
The animal, in Buddhist cosmology, is not beneath the human on some vertical ladder. It stands alongside the human, at a different station on the same circle, carrying in its silence a kind of wisdom that speech has never quite been able to replicate.
III. Sangkan Paraning Dumadi: The Origin and the Direction of Return
The Javanese mystical tradition does not argue for transmigration the way a philosopher argues a position. It inhabits the idea the way a river inhabits its banks — not by claiming the banks as its own, but by moving through them, shaping them, being shaped.
The concept of sangkan paraning dumadi — the origin and the directed return of all that comes into being — is perhaps the most quietly radical idea in the Javanese philosophical inheritance. Sangkan is where a thing comes from. Paraning is where it is going. Dumadi is the act of becoming, of arising into form. Together they say: every form that exists is in transit between its source and its homecoming, and the length of that transit, and the number of forms it wears along the way, is determined by the ripeness of the soul’s readiness to return.
The Serat Wedhatama, composed by KGPAA Mangkunegara IV, opens its first canto with an instruction whose weight only deepens with reading:
Mingkar-mingkuring angkara, akarana karenan mardi siwi, sinawung resmining kidung, sinuba sinukarta, mrih kretarta pakartining ngelmu luhung, kang tumrap ing tanah Jawa, agama ageming aji.
“Turning away from what destroys, because one desires to cultivate the children of one’s inner life, woven into the beauty of song, adorned and made beautiful, seeking the fulfillment of noble wisdom, that which lives in the land of Java — religion is the garment of those who rule themselves.”
The siwi — the children one cultivates — are not only literal descendants. They are the soul’s nascent capacities: discernment, restraint, the willingness to feel the weight of another’s existence. A soul that departs this life without having grown these capacities does not vanish. It continues, in a form proportional to the stage of its cultivation.
The Kakawin Sutasoma of Mpu Tantular reaches further still. In its fourteenth-century metaphysical synthesis of Hindu and Buddhist streams, it proclaims what has become the most famous phrase in the entire philosophical inheritance of the archipelago:
rwāneka dhātu winuwus Buddha Wiswa, bhinnêki rakwa ring apan kena parwanosen, mangkang Jinatwa kalawan Śiwatatwa tunggal, bhinnêka tunggal ika tan hana dharma mangrwa.
“They are called the two substances, Buddha and Siva; they are said to be different, yet how can they be separated? For the Dharma of the Jinas and the Dharma of Siva are one; they are different, yet they are the same, for there is no duality in Truth.”
This is usually cited as a political statement about tolerance. Its metaphysical consequence, however, is more demanding: if the divine substance is indivisible, it cannot be absent from any form of existence. The worm moves through the same sacred substance as the rishi. It simply moves through it more quietly, without awareness of what it carries.
The Negarakertagama of Mpu Prapanca opens its great chronicle of Majapahit by invoking Siwa and Buddha not as separate powers but as two faces of one illumination, flowing through all manifested forms — including the king, who is understood not as inherently divine by blood, but as a temporary vessel through which the divine moves during this particular passage of cosmic time. The vessel is not permanent. The illumination continues past the vessel’s use.
IV. The Greek Who Remembered Being a Thornbush
Among the pre-Socratic philosophers of the Aegean world, it was Empedocles of Akragas — a man who reportedly wore purple robes and golden sandals, as though he had already returned from somewhere gods visit — who made the most astonishing personal testimony. In what survives of his poem Katharmoi, the Purifications, he wrote:
ἤδη γάρ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε θάμνος τ᾽ οἰωνός τε καὶ ἔναλος ἔλλοπος ἰχθύς
ēdē gar pot’ egō genomēn kouros te korē te thamnos t’ oionos te kai enalos ellypos ikhthys
“Already have I been a boy and a girl, a thornbush and a bird, and a mute fish leaping from the salt-dark sea.” (Empedocles, Fragment B117)
Here is not an Eastern mystic, not a Brahmin initiate, not a monk trained in the techniques of inward recollection — but a Greek scientist-poet who classified the four elements, explained the mechanism of the eye, and in the same breath insisted with the confidence of firsthand experience that he had once been a thornbush. That he had known the cold green silence of ocean from inside fish-bones. That he had sung in a voice no longer available to him.
His predecessor in this conviction was Pythagoras, of whom Diogenes Laertius preserves a story of such strange tenderness that one cannot determine whether it is anecdote or parable: walking past a dog being beaten in the street, Pythagoras called out for the man to stop — for, he said, he recognized in the dog’s crying the voice of a friend who had died. The bystanders laughed. Pythagoras did not.
Plato gave the entire tradition its most elaborate mythological architecture in the closing pages of the Republic, in the vision of a soldier named Er who returns from the threshold of death to report what the soul undergoes between lives. Souls, he recounts, are given the power to choose their next embodiment. Some choose animal forms. The soul of the warrior Ajax, raw with the humiliation of the Trojan War, chooses the body of a lion — an existence of power without language, of pride without the burden of being understood. Odysseus, exhausted from too much cleverness across too many years, chooses the life of a private man who means nothing to history. The soul, in Plato’s telling, selects its next form not arbitrarily but with the gravity of one who has learned — however slowly — what it most needs to practice next.
V. The Sufi Ladder Built of Deaths
No tradition has spoken of the soul’s passage through non-human forms with more musicality, more grief, and more joy simultaneously than the Sufi stream flowing through Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. In the third book of the Mathnawī, he constructs what might be called a theology of upward dying: each form does not merely end — it dies into the next form, and in dying, rises.
از جمادی مُردم و نامی شدم وز نما مُردم به حیوان سرزدم
Az jamādī murdam va nāmī shodam vaz namā murdam be haivān sar zadam
“I died from mineral and became plant. I died from plant and emerged as animal.”
And then:
مُردم از حیوانی و آدم شدم پس چه ترسم کِی ز مردن کم شدم
Murdam az haivānī va ādam shodam pas che tarsam kī ze mordan kam shodam
“I died from animal and became Man. So why should I fear — when has dying made me less?” (Mathnawī, Book III)
What Rumi is charting here is not merely a history of the soul’s origins. He is describing a direction. The mineral knew nothing; the plant knew the sun and turned toward it without knowing why; the animal knew desire and followed it without questioning whose desire it truly was; the human stands at the threshold of knowing that it knows — and trembles there, because that trembling is the beginning of something Rumi does not name, only gestures toward with the full weight of his longing: a form beyond form, a life no longer borrowed from any previous classroom.
But what prevents Rumi from becoming a thinker of contempt for lower forms is his insistence that not one death along this ladder was wasted. The jasmine had to bloom before it could be crushed into attar; the animal had to hunger before it could learn that hunger was not the deepest word available to it. Nothing in the chain was a detour. Everything was the road itself, wearing a different face.
Ibn Arabi, the great theosophist of Andalusia, adds a further dimension through his concept of the barzakh — the liminal interval between states of being, the bridge that is neither shore. In the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, he describes existence as a continuous self-disclosure of the divine through an infinite progression of forms, each form revealing a name of God that no other form could reveal. Which means: what the soul learns inside animal existence — the form of patience inside a tortoise, the form of devotion inside a returning bird — cannot be learned any other way. The animal life is not a deficit in the soul’s biography. It is an irreplaceable chapter.
VI. The Dream That Has No Waking
The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi offers what may be the most vertigo-inducing version of this inquiry — not because it predicts we might be reborn as beetles, but because it suggests we might already be, and not know it.
In the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, the Qí Wù Lùn — the Equalization of All Things — he describes a dream:
昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與！ 不知周也。俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。 不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與？
Xī zhě Zhuāng Zhōu mèng wéi húdié, xǔxǔ rán húdié yě, zì yù shì zhì yú! Bù zhī Zhōu yě. É rán jué, zé qú qú rán Zhōu yě. Bù zhī Zhōu zhī mèng wéi húdié yú, húdié zhī mèng wéi Zhōu yú?
“Once upon a time, Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, fluttering with complete ease — a butterfly entire in itself, aware only of butterfly-pleasure. He did not know he was Zhuangzi. Then he woke, suddenly and completely, unmistakably Zhuangzi. But he could not determine: had Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly? Or was a butterfly now dreaming it was Zhuangzi?” (Zhuangzi, Chapter 2)
This is not a riddle with a hidden answer. It is a riddle whose purpose is to dissolve the assumption behind the question. The question of which form the soul truly inhabits assumes a stable self beneath all the forms — a permanent resident who simply changes apartments. Zhuangzi’s butterfly suggests there is no such resident. There is only the transformation itself, continuous and without preference for any particular shape.
The separation between Zhuangzi and butterfly, between human consciousness and animal consciousness, is a convention of language, not a truth of existence. The Chinese philosophical term is huà (化) — transformation, metamorphosis, that which moves between states without ceasing to be whatever it essentially is. Zhuangzi uses it not as metaphor but as description. Everything that exists is in the middle of its next huà, right now, without announcement.
And in the seventh chapter, Zhuangzi tells of Hundun — Chaos, the primordial undifferentiated — who is killed by his well-meaning friends when they drill the seven orifices into him so he can see and taste and hear as they do. He dies immediately. The moral is not cruelty; it is this: the violence of insisting that every form of consciousness must be shaped in the human image, organized around human organs, legible to human categories. Something is always killed by that insistence. Something that had its own knowing, its own way of moving through existence — before we named it lesser.
VII. The Animal That Already Lives Within This Life
The sages, however, were not speaking only of other lives before or after. They were also — and perhaps most urgently — speaking of now.
The Javanese mystical tradition, particularly in its Kejawen understanding of the soul, holds that a human body does not automatically produce a human quality of being. The nafsu — the passions, from the Arabic nafs, the breath-soul — are classified in classical Javanese mystical teaching into four: nafsu lawwamah (the self-reproaching, restless soul), nafsu amarah (the raging soul), nafsu supiyah (the soul of pleasure-seeking), and nafsu mutmainah (the soul at rest in its own depth). The first three are understood, with full seriousness, as the animal soul in human clothing. Not as a metaphor for bad behavior. As an ontological description of a soul not yet fully arrived into its human form.
The Serat Wulangreh, composed by Sunan Pakubuwana IV, addresses this directly in its call for continuous self-discipline:
Padha gulangen ing kalbu, ing sasmita amrih lantip, aja pijer mangan nendra, ing kaprawiran den kesthi, pesunen sariranira, sudanen dhahar lan guling.
“Train yourself in the heart, to be keen to the inner signs; do not live only to eat and sleep; hold valor as your direction; restrain the body; reduce the appetite and the urge to surrender to rest.” (Serat Wulangreh, Pupuh Gambuh)
The training demanded here is not moral optimization. It is the completion of the human form from within — the soul finishing what birth began, becoming genuinely, not merely biologically, human. To eat and sleep without restraint, to rage without reflection, to pursue pleasure as the entire purpose of a life — these are not sins against morality in the Wulangreh’s understanding. They are a failure to complete the species.
This is where the Javanese tradition converges with Confucian thought in a way neither tradition would have expected to encounter each other. Mencius, in the Mengzi, insists that the distinction between human and animal is not intelligence, not language, not the capacity to use tools. It is rén (仁) — the living sensitivity to the inner life of another, the capacity to feel another’s suffering as a claim on one’s own attention. A human who has allowed this capacity to atrophy — through the long practice of indifference, through the slow habituation to cruelty, through the management of convenience that has replaced the experience of genuine encounter — has not committed a sin. He has made a descent. Voluntary and gradual and largely unnoticed. He has moved his soul to an address lower than the one it was born into.
The Arjunawiwaha of Mpu Kanwa deepens this with a different angle. On the slopes of Mount Indrakila, where Arjuna retreats to practice ascetic discipline before the great war, the text describes something remarkable in its understated terror: through the compression of spiritual practice, Arjuna temporarily exceeds the boundary of ordinary human form. He becomes something between human and divine, so concentrated in his stillness that the god Siwa arrives to test him, disguised as a hunter from the forest. The encounter suggests that the human form is not a fixed ceiling. In both directions — downward toward the animal, upward toward the luminous — the boundary is more like a river’s surface than a wall: always present, always moving, always crossable by the right kind of weight.
But it is Ranggawarsita, in the Serat Kalatidha, who speaks most honestly about what happens to the soul in an age that has forgotten all of this:
Amenangi jaman edan, ewuh aya ing pambudi, melu edan nora tahan, yen tan melu anglakoni, boya kaduman melik, kaliren wekasanipun, ndilalah karsa Allah, begja-begjane kang lali, luwih begja kang eling lawan waspada.
“Living through a time of madness, one struggles greatly to navigate with wisdom. To join the madness is unbearable, yet not joining it, one is left behind and starves. Yet, by divine providence, however fortunate the one who forgets — more fortunate still is the one who remembers and remains watchful.” (Serat Kalatidha)
Ranggawarsita wrote this in the nineteenth century, but his jaman edan — the age of madness — is every age in which the animal inside the human has been given the keys and permitted to drive. The madness he mourns is not political alone. It is the madness of a collective soul that has moved, in large portions, back into the animal address — still walking on two legs, still speaking in syntax, but operating from nafsu amarah and nafsu supiyah alone, the hunger and the rage that never needed to evolve beyond the animal to function.
The Kutaramanawa Dharmasastra of Majapahit, that great codification of cosmic and civil law, establishes the moral architecture within which all of this makes sense: dharma — the right ordering of existence — is not imposed from above as divine fiat. It grows from the nature of each form of being, from what that form requires to be itself completely. To live against dharma is not to offend a legislator. It is to live against the grain of what you are, which is to say: to move against the direction of your own ripening.
VIII. What the Goat Knew
Let us return, finally, to Tegalmulyo, where the grey-bearded Wicaksana stood for three days at the threshold of a dead man’s house, refusing to eat, waiting in its silence for something it would never be able to explain even if it had the words.
The philosophical traditions this essay has gathered — Hindu, Buddhist, Javanese, Pythagorean, Sufi, Taoist, Confucian — agree on nothing about the mechanics of the soul’s transit through forms. They disagree on whether a stable self persists across the borders of species, or whether what continues is more like a flame passed between candles — no longer the same flame, yet nothing has been lost. They disagree on whether animal birth is a descent requiring compensation, or merely a lateral move into a classroom with different furniture. They disagree on whether liberation means escaping form entirely, or inhabiting it with increasing luminosity until the form itself becomes transparent.
But underneath all these disagreements, a single recognition runs like groundwater: the boundary between human and non-human is not the fixed wall that our comfort requires it to be.
The Javanese ethical tradition speaks of tepa slira — the capacity to measure another’s experience against the ruler of one’s own body, to know what they carry by placing yourself, however briefly, inside the weight of it. Most often it is taught as an interpersonal practice: feel your neighbor’s situation before you act. But its cosmological root reaches further. If the soul has genuinely worn other forms — if Suradi’s goat may be carrying in its grey-bearded patience an ancestor still practicing the lesson of restraint; if the copper-winged butterfly on Sekarwati’s loom may be a teacher between assignments — then tepa slira cannot stop at the edge of the human species. It must extend to every form that moves through this world, because every form that moves through this world may be carrying, in its silence, something that was once — or will one day be again — whatever you are now.
Sangkan paraning dumadi. Every form is in transit between its source and its return. What matters is not which form the soul currently inhabits, but whether — in whatever form, wearing whatever skin — it is moving, however slowly, toward memayu hayuning bawana: the constant, tender, unfinished work of making the world more beautiful than it found us.
The soul has not always had these hands. It has had roots that drank in silence, wings that caught thermals without knowing the word for trust, fins that read currents whose mathematics no equation has ever fully described. And perhaps — if the sages are correct in their strangest and most persistent claim — the soul holds the memory of all of these, somewhere beneath language, in the place where dreams arise and the butterfly and the man have not yet negotiated which of them is sleeping.
Eling lan waspada. Remember, and remain watchful.
The old Javanese teachers said this without specifying what to remember, or for what to watch. Perhaps they meant: remember that you have been everything. Watch, therefore, how you treat everything.
Because in the body of everything you have ever harmed, there may have been — or may yet be — a version of yourself, still learning, still on the way, wearing the only form available to it at that particular moment of the long, unfinished passage home.
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