Samsara defines the predicament that the Indian traditions seek to escape: unending wandering through lives marked by suffering and impermanence. It is inseparable from karma, which governs the direction of rebirth, and from the goal of release, moksha in Hinduism, liberation of the purified soul in Jainism, nirvana in Buddhism. The traditions differ sharply over what, if anything, transmigrates: Hinduism and Jainism affirm an enduring self or soul that persists through the cycle, while Buddhism denies any permanent self and describes rebirth as a causal continuity, a stream of conditioned states, without positing anything that literally passes from one life to the next, a position later Buddhist philosophy pressed to its limit by arguing that samsara and nirvana are, from the standpoint of ultimate truth, not two separate realities at all.
The shared picture nonetheless unites the traditions in treating ordinary existence as something to be seen through rather than simply lived, a stance that separates them from religious outlooks in which a single earthly life, followed by a final judgment, is the whole of the story. Comparative theologians sometimes note that samsara's very structure, an impersonal law working itself out across countless lives without requiring a judging deity, gives these traditions an account of justice and consequence that does not depend on divine intervention in each individual case, even where a creator or supreme being is also affirmed.