Saṃsāra

Samsara (a Sanskrit word literally meaning "wandering through") is a cycle of reincarnation, including one's actions and their consequences in all times past, present, and future. It's a concept found in many religions in East and South Asia, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Bon. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all originated in India and are impacted by Vedic thought and concepts. Bon developed in eleventh century Tibet, surrounded by both Buddhism and Hinduism.

Samsara is not synonymous with reincarnation, nor do all belief systems that include reincarnation include the concept of samsara. Reincarnation works very differently in the belief systems of the Druze and of the Ghulat Muslims, to name two examples. Most sects that teach the concept of samsara agree with the Buddha's declaration that the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth has no beginning but has been transpiring for eternity.

Background

The oldest Sanskrit-language scriptures, the foundational texts of Hinduism, are the Vedas, four collections of ancient texts (the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda). The culture that created them was a pastoral, tribal society scholars call the Vedic civilization, an Indo-Aryan people that arrived in the Indian subcontinent around 1500 BCE. The Vedic period in which the Vedas were written lasted for the next thousand years, the end of which was marked by the rise of urbanization and shramana movements that were the first to challenge the dominance of Vedic thought in the region. Between 500 BCE and the first century CE, the tangle between Vedic and shramana strains of thought gave rise to what is now called Classical Hinduism. Defining Hinduism, much less its origins, is always a complicated matter, since the word itself was invented by the British in the eighteenth century to simply and dismissively refer to "the religion of the Hindus," meaning the inhabitants of the Indian lands they were colonizing. To speak of a single or monolithic "Hinduism" is misleading.

The shramana movements take their name from the Sanskrit word for "seeker" or "ascetic," and included Jainism, which developed in the ninth century BCE, and Buddhism, which developed in the sixth century BCE. Both developed in an environment that was predominantly Vedic, and in response to new ideas that were being raised about proper behavior and the nature of the universe. Jainism rejected the idea of a creation and postulated an eternal uncreated universe, while demanding of its practitioners five major vows: the vow of ahimsa (to not injure any living being), to not lie, to not steal, to remain chaste, and to maintain detachment. It is a religion of asceticism and self-control.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, founded Buddhism as "the middle way," having rejected both the self-indulgence of his wealthy birth and the self-denial of the ascetic lifestyle he first attempted as a path to enlightenment. "The middle way" also has deeper meanings: It is also the emptiness that is the middle ground between the extreme of permanence and the extreme of nothingness, and for some Buddhists, a way of comprehending nirvana (the state of perfect enlightenment that is life's goal).

Overview

Although reincarnation is mentioned in the Vedas, samsara seems to have developed later in Indian thought, and so may have been contributed by the shramana movements. Samsara is related to the idea of karma. In Sanskrit karma simply means "action" or "deed," but in Indian thought it refers to a metaphysical framework of causality wherein the actions (and usually the intent) of any given individual influences the future of that individual. The effects of karma may be visited upon the individual within the same lifetime or many lifetimes later, and so otherwise unexplained fortunes—good or bad—occurring in the present may be the result of actions taken in previous lives.

In Hinduism, asceticism is the key to escaping the cycle of samsara. Avidya, or false knowledge, deludes individuals and prevents them from understanding their true self and their karma, while ego and desire lead to the actions that create karmic consequences that impact future rebirths. An ascetic lifestyle, one that does not give in to desires or the ego, one that takes few actions, quiets down this karmic chaos. This is a broad overview of a Hindu approach to samsara and rebirth. There are numerous conflicting views of reincarnation and proper living within Hinduism.

In Jainism, samsara is understood as an endless cycle of mundanity and suffering. The goal of a Jain is to achieve moksha, liberation from the cycle of samsara by first achieving enlightenment (so that further rebirths are not necessitated by karma) and then dying. Moksha is not an afterlife, but rather the end to the unceasing suffering of existence. This is considered the only true goal of the soul, with all other pursuits a distraction, and the focus of Jainism is for every person to help each other on the path toward moksha.

Similarly, in Buddhism and Bon, samsara is described using terms like suffering, anxiety, dissatisfaction, incompleteness, and desire. The repetitiveness of samsara, as the individual passes in and out of the world of the living again and again, results from the individual fixating not only on phenomena of the world (both pleasures and suffering) but also on the self, where for the Buddhist, enlightenment requires emptiness and losing the sense of self.

Buddhist cosmology describes six realms through which the individual passes in the cycle of samsara: the god realm, the demi-god realm, the human realm, the animal realm, the hungry ghost realm, and the realm of eighteen hells. (Most Buddhist traditions do not believe in the "soul" in the sense of a permanent existing spirit the way other religious traditions do, and instead refer, in modern language, to a transfer of consciousness from one life to the next over the cycle of samsara. This consciousness has no intrinsic existence of its own, any more than the heat of a hot stone is its own entity independent of the stone, but that heat can be passed from the stone to a jar of water it's dropped into.

Bibliography

Batchelor, Stephen. After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age. New Haven: Yale UP, 2015. Print.

Buswell, Robert E, and Donald S. Lopez. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. Print.

Dalai Lama. Buddhism: One Teacher, Many Traditions. Somerville: Wisdom, 2014. Print.

Gross, Rita M. Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. New York: SUNY P, 1992. Print.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. New York: Broadway, 1999. Print.

Lopez, Donald S., Jr. The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings. New York: HarperOne, 2009. Print.

Lopez, Donald S., Jr. From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013. Print.

Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. New York: Grove, 1974. Print.