Henry Lee was born in 1938 in Rugao, Jiangsu Province, China. His father, Li Haomin, was a wealthy merchant who regularly traveled between mainland China and Taiwan for business. His mother gave birth to 14 children, one of whom died in infancy. In 1946, to escape the Chinese Civil War, the children moved with their mother, Wang Shuzhen, to Taiwan.
Tragedy struck in January 1949. Li Haomin boarded the “Taiping,” a passenger ship bound for Taiwan. The vessel was overloaded, hit a fierce storm, and sank in the Taiwan Strait. Everyone on board perished. Wang Shuzhen was left to raise 13 children alone. She sold off the family’s remaining assets and endured years of hardship to put every one of them through school. A devout Buddhist, she lived to the age of 106.
Lee’s path to forensic science began with a practical decision. At 18, he was admitted to Taiwan Ocean University, but when the Central Police Academy offered free room and board, he enrolled there instead to ease the burden on his family. He graduated with top marks and served as an officer at the Taipei Police Department.
In 1964, Lee went to the United States to study. While attending New York University, he worked as a restaurant waiter, a securities firm clerk, a martial arts instructor, and a laboratory technician, sometimes holding three jobs at once. After ten years, he earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate in biochemistry. He then joined the forensic science faculty at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, rising from teaching assistant to tenured professor. In 1979, he became director of the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory and its chief forensic examiner. In 1998, he was appointed Connecticut’s Commissioner of Public Safety.
Over his career, Lee participated in more than 6,000 major criminal investigations across 17 countries, averaging some 200 cases per year. His case file reads like a chronicle of the late twentieth century’s most consequential crimes: the Kennedy assassination, Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the Clinton sex scandal, the Sept. 11 attacks, the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the mass ethnic killings in Yugoslavia, and the 2004 shooting of Taiwan’s vice president Annette Lu. He received over 800 awards and published more than 20 books and 200 academic papers. After 2006, numerous Chinese universities appointed him as an honorary or adjunct professor.
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A childhood name that did not match his siblings.
Lee spoke throughout his life about his belief that he had been a Buddhist monk in a previous incarnation. The story, as he told it, began with his childhood name.
In Chinese families, childhood names often follow a pattern among siblings. Lee’s brothers all had names containing the character “bao,” meaning “treasure.” His sisters’ names all included “zhu,” meaning “pearl.” His childhood name was entirely different: Jiechen, meaning “free from dust,” a term with distinctly Buddhist connotations. As a boy, he was baffled and hurt. When he asked his older brother about it, his brother teased him, saying he had been picked up off the street. Upset, he went to his mother, who reassured him that he was her biological son and then told him the real story.
From the moment of his birth, Lee had cried without stopping. Doctors could find nothing wrong with him. One day, a monk appeared at the family home. His father assumed the monk was there to beg for alms and offered rice, flour, oil, and salt. The monk declined. “I have not come to beg,” he said. “I have come to pay my respects to my master.” Lee’s father was confused. “How could your master be here?” The monk replied, “Has your family not just had a new baby boy? He is the one.”
The monk entered the room, saw the infant in his blankets, knelt, and kowtowed. “I pay my respects to my master,” he said. He explained that his master’s dharma name in a previous life had been “Jiechen,” and that the baby had been sent down from a higher realm as a form of punishment. Because the soul was unwilling to return to the human world, the baby would not stop crying. “You should call him Jiechen,” the monk said. Since the father had already given him the formal name Changyü, “Jiechen” became his childhood name.
Three encounters that Lee said confirmed his previous life.
Lee described three separate experiences over the course of his life that he believed verified the monk’s account.
The first came in 1987. At the invitation of China’s Ministry of Public Security, Lee traveled to the mainland to give lectures and took a boat to visit his ancestral hometown. When he stepped off the boat, a large crowd of relatives was waiting. An elderly man identified himself as Lee’s cousin on his mother’s side, surnamed Wang, who had worked for Lee’s father since childhood. The old man recited the full name and childhood name of each of Lee’s 13 surviving siblings without a single error. He also explained the origin of the name Jiechen and added that “Jiechen came from Langshan.”
The second verification came in 1989, when Lee returned to China to lecture again. He asked to visit Langshan, an island in the Yangtze River near the city of Nantong, on which stands an ancient Buddhist temple. Lee did not identify himself to the elderly monk at the temple. He asked to see historical records, but the monk said all written documents had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Lee then asked, “Have you ever heard of Dharma Master Jiechen?” The monk replied, “That is from a very senior generation. I heard my own master mention that there was a generation with the character ‘Jie’ in their dharma names.”
The third encounter took place years later in Taiwan. Lee arrived on a Sunday and, caught in heavy rain after his flight, decided on impulse to visit a temple. His hosts drove him to Dharma Drum Mountain, a major Buddhist monastery. The temple was in the middle of a dharma assembly, and Lee walked around quietly on his own. When he reached the seventh floor, the abbot hurried over and told him that Master Sheng Yen, the renowned Buddhist teacher who founded Dharma Drum Mountain, had heard of his arrival. Though Sheng Yen was in solitary retreat and gravely ill, he wanted to meet Lee.
The two men spoke for two and a half hours about life, karma, and cause and effect. As the conversation deepened, Master Sheng Yen’s voice grew stronger and more resonant. It emerged that they shared a profound connection: Sheng Yen had also ordained as a monk at Langshan. Lee told him, “I am Dharma Master Jiechen. You should pay your respects to your ancestral master.” They agreed to visit Langshan together someday. Master Sheng Yen passed away before they could fulfill that promise.
‘I most regret coming into this world to be reborn’
Lee said that he had spent his entire life in service to humanity. His greatest regret, he said, was having been reborn into the human world at all. For a cultivator, the purpose of spiritual practice is to transcend the human realm and escape the cycle of reincarnation. To be sent back was, in his understanding, a step backward.
Still, he found reconciliation with his fate. “Life is all about karmic connections,” he said. “That we can be friends, be husband and wife, be parents and children in this world is all a matter of destiny. Respect this destiny, love this destiny, and our lives will be very joyful.”
In April 2006, during a lecture at Peking University, an audience member asked Lee what he most regretted in life. His answer stunned the room: “You ask me what I most regret? I most regret coming into this world to be reborn.”
In traditional Chinese culture, the reincarnation of eminent monks is a recognized phenomenon. The great Northern Song literary figure Su Dongpo is traditionally held to have been a reincarnation of the monk Wujie. The Ming Dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming is believed to have been an elderly monk at a temple in Jiangxi in a former life. Their accumulated spiritual merit, according to this tradition, was transformed into blessings in their reincarnated lives.
Dr. Henry Lee passed away on March 27, 2026, at the age of 87.