Flowers Fall: An Interview with Judith Simmer Brown

Touching the Depths

by Bethany Saltman, March 25, 2010

Judith Simmer-Brown is a professor of Buddhist studies at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is an Acharya, or senior teacher, in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, dean of the Shambhala International Teachers’ Academy, and she teaches widely on Buddhism and contemplative education. This is the second-half of an interview conducted following a retreat led by Brown at Zen Mountain Monastery.

I have a four-year-old, and my husband and I tend to be pretty clear about consequences, but sometimes I feel like we’re too hard on her, and expect too much. I wonder if we should be more emotionally indulgent—the whole kids-will-be-kids thing. We get so many mixed messages.
That’s right. I think that’s really, really difficult. When we were raising our kids we just had no idea how they were going to come out. And given how karma works, who our kids are is not based entirely on how we raise them. They have their own karma, as well. It’s very important to understand that we don’t own our kids; they aren’t just a product of what we do. They also have their own integrity and their own stream of cause and effect, and personalities and styles, separate from what we do.

At the same time, as we do in our practice, don’t we also have to take responsibility for what we’re putting into the pot?
That’s right. Our piece of it is very much there. The basic view in Tibetan Buddhism is that when children are conceived, there are three kinds of bodhichitta [the mind of enlightenment] that come together at the same moment. There is red, from the mother, white from the father, and blue from the previous life. And when the child develops in the womb and grows up, they are the product of the mother, the father, and their previous life.

My daughter is constantly asking me, “Where was I before I was in your tummy?”
Oh, how wonderful! And how do you answer?

I say, “Well, honey, I’m just not sure. Where do you think you were?”
Aren’t children just great? They just really inquire about these things.

How would you answer that question for a four-year-old?
I think you answered it beautifully. It’s better not to go off and develop too many theories for her, and to let her come up with a solution that works well for her.

What is the Tibetan Buddhist teaching on reincarnation, as it relates to children?
There’s a 49-day gap between lives, and every child who is conceived is somebody who has died—and when they say 49 days, it’s sort of metaphorical. The mind continuity from the previous life has its particular karmic tendencies, and it looks for an auspicious joining of mother and father. And when the father and mother are making love, the spirit will enter into the woman’s body. The attraction of the child to parents may be neurotic, and then the parents have to be very awake. Or the child may be more awake than the parents, or it may be attracted to a situation where’s there’s an opportunity to teach or serve the parents or to live out some previously unexpressed aspect of karma. There are a lot of different possibilities, depending on the amount of awakening in the previous life.