One thing I’ve always wondered about past lives is the validity of the assumption that past lives are serial, linear and singular. E.g… is there really a true “my fourth life ago”?. When I see a rope woven, I see many strands and threads coming together to form a single rope. Indeed, it’s symmetric. Ropes fray and part into many strands, thence into many threads. When I see the delight of the butterfly, I also see the suffering of the caterpillar-eaten plant. Suffering is just suffering, bound to delight irrevocably. If self now is a delusion, then what about self past–would it not also be a delusion?
Take the genes in our bodies. These are karmic and come from two immediate prior selves–our parents. I am near-sighted genetically and that has changed my interaction with the world. And so on. So the notion of a single prior unique nth life has always struck me as not-quite-accurate.
And if we entertain the hypothesis that past lives can be simultaneous, overlapping and all widely interwoven, then the notion of time sequence and duration in the consideration of Buddha’s past lives becomes oddly flexible and unknowable.