“There is a story,” she says, “about one of the Buddha’s final lives before he attained enlightenment.”
“So basically, we’re talking mythology.”
“Maybe. Depends if you’re a Buddhist. Anyway, the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in India 2,500 years ago, saw all of his previous incarnations when he attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The whole evolutionary chain from insect to animal to human lives. And there’s a story about one incarnation in which he was the captain of a ferryboat carrying five hundred passengers. The Buddha—in this life the captain—had reached the level of a Bodhisattva. Among other things, that means that he was endowed with certain powers. He could see into the nature of things, read people’s minds, and see the karmic causes and effects of di
