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Doctrine

Samsara

Also Known As The round of rebirth · cyclic existenceOriginal Term samsara (Sanskrit, wandering on)
Action, Rebirth and Consequence
Origin 800 BCE to 500 BCE

Samsara is wandering on: the beginningless process in which beings are born, die and are born again, driven by action and the craving that motivates it. It is the problem that the Dharmic traditions exist to solve, and understanding that it is the problem rather than the setting is the first requirement for reading any of them.

It is not purgatory, and the comparison fails at every joint. Purgatory is remedial, temporary and terminal, it purifies, it ends, and everyone in it is going somewhere better. Samsara purifies nothing; it has no end unless one is achieved; nobody administers it; and it includes the pleasant destinations as well as the unpleasant ones, so that a rebirth in a heaven is a continuation of the difficulty rather than an escape from it. Above all, the aim is not to complete the process but to stop it.

The traditions differ over what it is that continues. Hindu accounts generally have an enduring self that transmigrates, taking bodies as one takes clothes. Buddhism denies any such self and therefore has to explain rebirth without a transmigrating entity, which is one of the harder problems it sets itself; the classical answers use images of causal continuity without identity, one flame lit from another, neither the same nor different, and the later schools develop the notion of a continuum of mind rather than a thing that travels. Jainism has an enduring soul which is literally weighed down by the matter that adheres to it.

The tone is worth noting because it is often missed. Rebirth is not presented as a consoling doctrine or a second chance. It is presented as a predicament, unbounded in extent, exhausting, and to be got out of.

Facts
Status
Status Within the Tradition
Standard teaching, not formally defined 1Tradition: Hinduism
The received account of the round of rebirth
Standing as a Comparative Category
A standard analytic category in the study of religion 2
Doctrinal Category
Action, Rebirth and Consequence 1
Doctrinal category (class)
Action, Rebirth and Consequence 1
Origins
Origin Period
800 BCE to 500 BCE 1
Held By
Hinduism; Buddhism; Jainism; Sikhism 1
Belief
Defining Doctrinal Position
Hindu and Buddhist teaching agree that samsara is something to escape rather than an end in itself, but differ sharply on what escapes it: a persisting self in most Hindu schools, against Buddhism's denial of any fixed self passing between lives. 3
Position Profile
Opposing Position
Materialist schools within ancient Indian philosophy, notably the Charvaka, rejected samsara and rebirth outright, holding that consciousness ends with the body. 3
The Claim
The Claim
That living beings are bound to a beginningless cycle of birth, death and rebirth, driven onward by karma and by craving or ignorance, according to tradition. 3
Learn More
The Wheel One Is Trying to Leave

Samsara is the beginningless round of birth, death and rebirth in which, on the Indian religions' shared picture, all unliberated beings are caught. The word means "wandering" or "flowing together," and the image is of a wheel turning without a first moment, driven by karma and by the ignorance or craving that keeps beings attached to existence.

It is important that samsara is not a version of purgatory, and the atlas states the contrast plainly: it is not remedial, not a temporary sentence, not overseen by a judge weighing a single life, and the goal is not to pass safely through it but to get out of it altogether. Release, moksha in the Hindu and Jain traditions, nirvana in the Buddhist, is liberation from the cycle as such. The older Upanishads already describe the round of rebirth governed by the quality of one's deeds, and the Buddhist discourses treat the beginning of samsara as inconceivable, an endless prior stretch of wandering from which awakening is the only exit.

What Is Reborn, and What It Means to Escape

The traditions agree on the wheel and disagree on the rider. In Hinduism it is the enduring self, the atman, that transmigrates from body to body until knowledge, action or devotion secures its release, and liberation is the self's realisation of its true nature or its union with the divine. In Buddhism there is no such self to transmigrate, the doctrine of anatta denies it, so rebirth must be explained as a causal continuity, one conditioned state giving rise to the next, "neither the same nor another," like one flame lighting a second; what is reborn is a process, not a soul. In Jainism it is the jiva, the individual soul, dragged down and shaped by the karmic matter clinging to it. In Sikhism the soul passes through many births, and the cycle is broken not by technique alone but by grace and by absorption in the divine Name.

These are not variant descriptions of one belief but genuinely different metaphysics sharing a vocabulary. What unites them is the evaluation: continued existence in samsara, however pleasant a given life may be, is the problem to be solved, and the religions of Indian origin are in large part programmes for solving it.

Samsara
Filter Results1 entry

Reincarnation (samsara)

Samsara
Connections

Affirmed By

Reincarnation (samsara), Beliefs & Restrictions

Rebirth through samsara affirmed as the condition the tradition seeks release from.

Belongs to Tradition

Buddhism, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Hinduism, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Jainism, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Mahayana, Denominations

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Nichiren, Denominations

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Pure Land, Denominations

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Sikhism, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Theravada, Denominations

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Tibetan Buddhism, Denominations

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Vajrayana, Denominations

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Zen, Denominations

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Contrasts With

Metempsychosis, Doctrines

A separate lineage of thought that resembles it without deriving from it.

Depicted In

Wheel of Life (Bhavacakra) Thangka, Sacred Art & Iconography

The wheel as a whole, held in the jaws of Yama, is the museum's own description of samsara itself: the six realms of possible rebirth and "the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth," with Yama's grip on the wheel read as the precarious impermanence of everything within it.

Source Wheel of Life, accession C2006.66.131 (Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art)Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, catalogue entry; Elena Pakhoutova (Senior Curator) with Smarthistory

Positions on This Question

Advaita Vedanta, Schools of Theology

Transmigration is held in Advaita as real at the empirical level and as belonging to the ignorance that liberation dispels, not to the self.

Source Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III: Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara and His PupilsKarl H. Potter (ed.)
Dvaita Vedanta, Schools of Theology

Transmigration is held in Dvaita as fully real.

Source A History of the Dvaita School of Vedanta and Its LiteratureB. N. K. Sharma
Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Denominations

Transmigration is held in Gaudiya Vaishnavism as fully real.

Source Encyclopedia of HinduismDenise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.)
Gelug, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Gelug school, and the contemplation of its defects is one of the four thoughts that turn the mind at the head of the lamrim.

Source Introduction to Tibetan BuddhismJohn Powers
ISKCON (Hare Krishna), Denominations

Transmigration is held in ISKCON, and the movement's introductory teaching commonly begins from it.

Source Hare Krishna TransformedE. Burke Rochford Jr.
Jodo Shinshu, Denominations

Samsara is held in Jodo Shinshu, and the tradition's account of the ordinary being caught in it without means of escape is the ground of its whole teaching.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Jonang, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Jonang school.

Source Introduction to Tibetan BuddhismJohn Powers
Kagyu, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Kagyu school, and its defects are contemplated among the four preliminary thoughts.

Source Introduction to Tibetan BuddhismJohn Powers
Karma Kagyu, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Karma Kagyu school.

Source Introduction to Tibetan BuddhismJohn Powers
Kashmir Shaivism, Denominations

Transmigration is held in Kashmir Shaivism as belonging to the state of contraction the tradition holds the self to have entered by its own freedom.

Source The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir ShaivismMark S. G. Dyczkowski
Lingayatism, Denominations

Transmigration is held in Lingayatism, and the graded path is an account of how it is brought to an end.

Source Encyclopedia of HinduismDenise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.)
Madhyamaka, Denominations

Samsara is held in Madhyamaka, and Nagarjuna's argument that there is not the slightest distinction between samsara and nirvana is the school's sharpest claim about it.

Source Mulamadhyamakakarika (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way)Nagarjuna
Nath Sampradaya, Denominations

Transmigration is held in the Nath tradition, and the perfected body is presented as the way out of it.

Source Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)
Nichiren Shoshu, Denominations

Samsara is held in Nichiren Shoshu.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Nyingma, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Nyingma school.

Source Introduction to Tibetan BuddhismJohn Powers
Rinzai, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Rinzai school.

Source Zen Buddhism: A History, Volume 2: JapanHeinrich Dumoulin
Sakya, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Sakya school, and the lamdre teaching takes samsara and nirvana as inseparable rather than as two places.

Source Introduction to Tibetan BuddhismJohn Powers
Shaivism, Denominations

Transmigration is held across the Shaiva schools.

Source An Introduction to HinduismGavin Flood
Shaktism, Denominations

Transmigration is held across the Shakta traditions.

Source Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious TraditionDavid R. Kinsley
Shingon, Denominations

Samsara is held in Shingon.

Source Kukai: Major WorksYoshito S. Hakeda
Shri Vidya, Denominations

Transmigration is held in Shri Vidya.

Source The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Sakta TantrismDouglas Renfrew Brooks
Smartism, Denominations

Transmigration is held in Smartism.

Source An Introduction to HinduismGavin Flood
Soka Gakkai, Denominations

Samsara is held in Soka Gakkai.

Source Soka Gakkai's Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern JapanLevi McLaughlin
Soto, Denominations

Samsara is held in the Soto school.

Source Zen Buddhism: A History, Volume 2: JapanHeinrich Dumoulin
Sri Vaishnavism, Denominations

Transmigration is held in Sri Vaishnavism as fully real.

Source The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious UnderstandingJohn B. Carman
The inseparability of samsara and nirvana, Beliefs & Restrictions

Samsara taken as inseparable from nirvana rather than as the condition escaped from.

Tiantai, Denominations

Samsara is held in Tiantai, and the school's account of the three thousand realms present in a single moment of thought places samsara and awakening in the same instant rather than at two ends of a road.

Source Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai BuddhismBrook Ziporyn
Vaishnavism, Denominations

Transmigration is held across the Vaishnava schools as really occurring to a really existing soul.

Source An Introduction to HinduismGavin Flood
Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, Schools of Theology

Transmigration is held in Vishishtadvaita as fully real, since the world and the soul are real.

Source The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious UnderstandingJohn B. Carman

Held Differently

Samkhya, Denominations

Transmigration is held in Samkhya, carried by the subtle body that persists through lives until discrimination ends its course.

Source Classical Samkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and MeaningGerald James Larson
Tendai, Denominations

Samsara is held in Tendai.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of BuddhismRobert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Related To

The Six Realms, Doctrines

The six realms are the destinations within samsara.

Sources
1. An Introduction to Hinduism
Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press, 1996On samsara, karma and liberation in the Indian traditionsView the Source
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
3. The Foundations of Buddhism
Rupert Gethin, Oxford University Press, 1998View the Source
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014View the Source
The Principal Upanishads
Harper, 1953On the round of rebirth governed by action, in the Brihadaranyaka and ChandogyaView the Source

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