Saṃsāra
Saṃsāra, written संसार in Devanagari, is a Sanskrit word that carries two meanings at once: wandering, and world. Join them and the world becomes a place you drift through without ever arriving. In everyday terms the word suggests running around in circles. For a great many thinkers in India, that image describes the condition of every living being, who circles endlessly through life, death and rebirth. Where did this idea come from, if the oldest sacred hymns barely mention it? Why would a heaven of rewards require a second death? And what did each tradition say about the way out?
The Sanskrit scholar Monier-Williams traced saṃsāra to a verbal root, sṛ, joined to the prefix saṃ. Together they mean to go round, to revolve, to pass through a succession of states. The prefix sam stands for samyak, meaning well, and sar simply means to move. An older relative of the word, saṃsaraṇa, appears in ancient texts. It describes going around through successive states, including the birth and rebirth of living beings and of the world, without obstruction.
Another cousin is saṃsṛti, defined as the "course of mundane existence, transmigration, flow, circuit or stream". The scholar Stephen J. Laumakis reads the word as "aimless and directionless wandering". English phrases for the same idea include the wheel of life, the karmic cycle and transmigration. Saṃsāra always stands against its opposite, liberation from the cycle. That freedom has several names: moksha, mukti, nirvāṇa, which Pali texts spell nibbāna, and kaivalya.
Many scholarly books drop the diacritics and write simply samsara. A lesser-used word for the same idea is Punarjanman, and the origins of the belief it names are obscure.
Among the oldest layers of Vedic writing, the afterlife was a matter of accounting. Virtue earned a place in heaven, and vice earned a place in hell. Later Vedic sages, the Rishis, found that picture too simple. People do not live equally good or equally bad lives. Some good people are better than others, and evil comes in degrees.
The sages argued that it would be unfair for the god Yama to sort everyone into one of two bins. So they proposed an afterlife proportioned to merit. Once the merit is spent, the soul comes back and is born again. Passages such as section 6:31 of the Mahabharata and section 6.10 of the Devi Bhagavata Purana describe this round of life, death, rebirth and redeath.
This line of questioning began with a blunt puzzle: what is the true nature of a human being, and do people die only once? Out of it came two early terms, Punarmṛtyu, meaning redeath, and Punaravṛtti, meaning return. Thinkers described two realities in each person. One was the unchanging Atman, the Self, tied to Brahman, the immortal and blissful ultimate reality. The other was the ever-shifting body, living in the phenomenal world of maya. Redeath marked the end of blissful years in svarga, heaven, and sent the being back to that world.
What these thinkers did not supply was a mechanism, and that gap shapes the whole later history of the idea.
The Rigveda, the oldest of the Vedas, hides only traces of the idea, in sections 1.164, 4.55, 6.70 and 10.14. Scholars note that its hymns hint at rebirth without ever explaining it. Damien Keown places the notion of cyclic birth and death around 800 BC. By then the word saṃsāra itself had arrived, paired with moksha in several Principal Upanishads. It appears in verse 1.3.7 of the Katha Upanishad, verse 6.16 of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, and verses 1.4 and 6.34 of the Maitri Upanishad.
According to Sayers, the earliest Vedic layers center on ancestor worship, including the rite of sraddha, which offered food to the ancestors. Later works, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, show a different outlook. They lean on reincarnation, care little about ancestor rites, and begin to interpret the old rituals philosophically. Even there the doctrine stays unfinished, and the early Upanishads give no specific mechanics.
The idea was not only Indian. Notions of reincarnation turn up in the texts of ancient Greece during the first millennium BCE as well. The detailed doctrines bloomed from about the middle of that millennium, in Buddhism, in Jainism and in various schools of Hindu philosophy. The Sramana movements, which include Buddhism and Jainism, brought new emphasis from about the 6th century BC. They put human suffering at the center and started religious life from rebirth, redeath and the truth of pain. Early Buddhist Pali Suttas discuss this with terms such as Āgatigati.
Who borrowed from whom is hard to say, since the evidence is slim and speculative. The theories most likely grew in parallel, with traditions influencing one another.
John Bowker calls a human birth a "rare opportunity to break the sequence of rebirth, thus attaining Moksha, release". That sentence captures how Hindu thought treats the whole cycle. In Hinduism, saṃsāra is the journey of the Ātman, which is eternal, indestructible and blissful. The body dies, but the Self does not. In fact the Ātman never reincarnates at all, since it cannot change. What is born, changes and dies is the body and personality.
Karma links one life to the next. Good intent and good action shape a good future, and bad intent and bad action shape a bad one. This applies both to circumstances within the present life and to the forms and realms of later lives. Living by dharma is believed to improve the future. The journey gives the Ātman repeated chances to act well or badly and to pursue moksha.
Hindu traditions name four main paths toward that release: bhakti, or devotion; karma, or work; jñāna, or knowledge; and raja, or meditation. The Upanishads concentrate on self-liberation, and the Bhagavad Gita surveys several paths. Harold Coward finds in the Upanishads a "very optimistic view regarding the perfectibility of human nature". The goal is a continuing journey of self-knowledge, ending in the discovery of the true Self within.
All Hindu schools accept saṃsāra, but they disagree about what freedom looks like. Madhvacharya's Dvaita Vedanta holds that the individual Self and Brahman, identified with Vishnu and Krishna, are two different realities. Loving devotion and the grace of Vishnu bring release, which comes only after death, a state called videhamukti.
Adi Shankara's Advaita Vedanta argues the opposite. For this nondualist school, the Ātman and Brahman are identical, and suffering comes from ignorance, impulsiveness and inertia. Meditation and self-knowledge lead to moksha, and this liberation can be reached within a single lifetime, which is called jivanmukti.
Not every tradition agreed that the exit lay in knowledge or devotion. Some said it lay in stopping action altogether.
Jain teachers hold that each soul passes through 8,400,000 birth-situations as it circles through saṃsāra. The ancient Ajivika tradition shared this number, but Hindu and Buddhist thought did not. According to Padmanabh Jaini, the soul moves through five kinds of body: earth, water, fire, air and plant life.
This makes ordinary life morally charged. Rainfall, farming, eating and even breathing all involve tiny living beings being born or dying, their souls changing bodies. Harming or killing any life form, a human being included, is a sin with negative karmic effects. Jain texts explicitly condemn injuring plants and minor life forms. Buddhist texts, by contrast, do not clearly condemn it, though some Buddhist and Hindu texts do warn against harming plants and seeds.
In Jainism, saṃsāra and karma sit at the foundation of theology, and the tradition developed pioneering ideas on both from its earliest days. Saṃsāra means worldly life, marked by continuous rebirth and suffering. Souls begin in a primordial state and move along a continuum of consciousness. Karma pushes some souls upward and others backward. Unlike the Hindu view, the Jain cycle has a definite beginning and end.
Jainism accepts the soul, called jiva, and gives it free will. That separates it from the Ajivikas, who joined saṃsāra to the belief that there is no free will. Jain teachers saw saṃsāra as bondage and urged asceticism and the stopping of action as the way out. Souls are plural, each in its own karma-saṃsāra cycle, so Jainism rejects both Hindu and Buddhist nondualism.
One class of souls, the Ābhāvya, can never be liberated. A soul enters that state after an intentional and shockingly evil act. A freed soul is a Siddha, omniscient and eternal at the apex of the universe.
Who can reach that apex has been argued within the faith. In the Digambara sect, women must first earn merit to be reborn as men. The Shvetambara sect holds that women too can win liberation.
Jeff Wilson describes Buddhist saṃsāra as the "suffering-laden cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without beginning or end". Buddhists picture it as a wheel, the Bhavacakra, and often use the term punarbhava, meaning re-becoming. Escaping the wheel, which is nirvāṇa, is the foundation and chief purpose of the religion.
Paul Williams stresses that karma drives the wheel. Short of enlightenment, each person is reborn according to the "completely impersonal causal nature" of their own karma. The Four Noble Truths, accepted by every Buddhist tradition, aim to end this re-becoming and the suffering that goes with it.
Buddhists built a detailed map of where beings are reborn. Early traditions counted five realms: hells (niraya), hungry ghosts (pretas), animals (tiryak), humans (manushya) and gods (devas). Later traditions listed six, splitting off the demi-gods, the asuras, who had been counted among the gods. In many Buddhist traditions today, the hungry ghost, heavenly and hellish realms correspond to the ritual, literary and moral spheres.
All six realms are linked, and beings travel through them life after life. Ignorance, desire and purposeful karma, meaning ethical and unethical acts, keep them turning. Death is merely a state on the way to another existence.
Buddhism also parts company with the Hindu account of the self. Where Hindu schools affirm the Ātman, Buddhist traditions deny that any such soul exists and teach Anattā, no self. They describe nirvāṇa through Anattā and Śūnyatā, emptiness, rather than through Ātman and Brahman.
Steven Collins observes that the fuller Buddhist theory of rebirth grew out of fear of redeath. The antidote was called amata, the death-free, a state treated as another name for nirvāṇa.
Guru Nanak founded Sikhism in the 15th century, and Cole and Sambhi say he took up both the cyclical view of existence and the cyclical view of time from ancient Indian religions. In Sikh texts the word is sometimes spelled Saṅsāra. Sikhism holds that the body is perishable, that rebirth recurs, and that each cycle brings suffering.
The Sikh view still differs from many Hindu schools. Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair points out that Sikhism firmly rests salvation on the grace of God. Its teachings urge bhakti, devotion, to the One Lord as the path to mukti. In this respect it resembles some devotional sub-traditions within Hinduism, such as Vaishnavism.
Sikhism parts ways with Jainism on the question of asceticism. It does not accept that an ascetic life leads to liberation. Instead it values social engagement and the life of the householder, joined with devotion to One God as Guru. Here, the way out of the cycle runs through family and community life instead of through renunciation.
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Common questions
What does saṃsāra mean?
It is a Sanskrit word meaning both wandering and world, and it names the cycle of life, death and rebirth that living beings are believed to undergo.
Is saṃsāra described in the Vedas?
Only faintly. The Rigveda hints at it in a few sections, but the idea develops fully in the early Upanishads and then in Buddhism, Jainism and Hindu philosophical schools.
What is the opposite of saṃsāra?
Liberation from the cycle, called moksha, mukti, nirvāṇa or kaivalya depending on the tradition.
How do Hindu and Buddhist views of saṃsāra differ?
Hindu traditions hold that an unchanging Ātman is the essence of each being, while Buddhist traditions deny a soul and teach Anattā, no self.
What is distinctive about the Jain view?
Jainism counts 8,400,000 birth-situations, holds that souls pass through earth, water, fire, air and plant bodies, and says the cycle has a definite beginning and end.
How does Sikhism view saṃsāra?
Sikhism accepts rebirth and suffering in each cycle, but it relies on the grace of God, devotion to One Lord and householder life rather than asceticism.
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