Samsara and its connotations
The earliest occurrence of the term saṃsāra in the vedic scriptures is in the Kaṭhopaniṣad, generally assigned to the period of the 5th to the 4th centuries BCE. In the Kaṭhopaniṣad we find the following:
But the person who lacks discernment, who is unfocused, always impure, does not attain that goal, and passes into saṃsāra (saṃsāram adhigacchati). (KaṭhU. 3.7)
We must remember that we are in the midst of the parable of the chariot here (KaṭhU. 3.3–9), which provides a more or less clear context for our understanding of the term. After mentioning “that causeway” (setu) for those who wish to pass from this world to the “fearless shore,” the Kaṭhopaniṣad introduces the analogy of the chariot to illustrate how we may attain the goal (pada). The human composite is likened to a chariot drawn by horses (the sense faculties) proceeding along the (narrow) causeway to the (immortal) goal, specified in 3.9 as the highest step (paramaṃ padam) of Viṣṇu. There is a revealing contrast drawn in the text between the effect of not having due discernment to accomplish this task (3.7) and of having it (3.8): the person who lacks discernment veers off the causeway into saṃsāra, whereas the person who is duly discerning is born no more (bhūyo na jāyate), presumably because the goal has been attained or is in sight. Thus here saṃsāra seems to fall into the same semantic field as “rebirth” or “transmigration.” This is why some scholars have translated the term here in this way (e.g. Hume, 1931, 352, “reincarnation”; Rawson, 1934, 123, “transmigration”; Olivelle, 1996, 239, “the round of rebirth”). But there is more to it than that.
For though we can deduce from this analogy that by the time this section of the Kaṭhopaniṣad was composed, teaching about rebirth (and, no doubt, karman ) was being established at least in some segments of the vedic tradition as a – if not the– mark of saṃsāra (the instruction doubtless having started earlier; see e.g. BĀU. 3.2.13 and ChāU. 5.10.1–10), and that this condition was regarded overall as an undesirable one, we can also conclude, from the simile of the chariot, that the state of saṃsāra can provide the means (right knowledge) for us to attain our immortal goal. With due discernment, then, saṃsāra can become a liberating journey. Thus saṃsāra connotes more than simply “reincarnation” or “rebirth.” This is why in this article I shall focus on the concept of saṃsāra itself (rather than on some supposed metonym), in the context of what is usually understood as “Hinduism.”
The idea of, and possibly the term, saṃsāra (with the attendant doctrine of karman and rebirth) may well have entered vedic soteriology through some process of conceptual assimilation from Śramaṇa sources, namely from the teachings of those ascetics or “strivers” who lived outside the pale of orthodox vedic society. We cannot be sure of the historical details, but the presence of these ascetics as a loose category can be traced back to the earliest times of vedic culture as it developed in the context of a fading Indus civilization. The evidence available indicates that in time these ascetics tended to view mundane existence as a sorrowful process; only a life of austere practice ( tapas ) could purify one from ingrained mental dispositions to seek worldly satisfaction, and so enable one to attain a liberation of detachment from the world. No doubt the vedic thinkers would have integrated these ideas in their own way into a developing philosophy of life that, as the earliest strata of the Ṛgveda intimate, started with a robust affirmation of this-worldly existence. In any event, early textual Śramaṇa sources, for example those of the Buddhists, Jainas, and Ājīvikas, regularly resort to the term saṃsāra, in association with the idea of karman and rebirth, in their teachings (see e.g. Basham, 1951).
The term saṃsāra occurs again in Śvetāśvataropaniṣad 6.16, where a personal god is being eulogized as “the cause of saṃsāra and mokṣa.” Note, again, the implied contrast between these two states. If mokṣa is a form of liberation, then saṃsāra is a form of bondage. The late Maitryupaniṣad may well shed light on this contrast. There, the seeker, Κing Bṛhadratha, after describing the instabilities of this world, even of seemingly durable entities like the great oceans, mountains, and the pole star, laments to the sage Śākāyanya,
"What is the point of enjoying desires in a saṃsāra like this, when someone who has been consumed by them is seen to return repeatedly to this world? Be pleased to deliver me. In this saṃsāra, I am like a frog stuck in a sightless well (andhodapānastho bheka iva, i.e. a well that is waterless and/or choked with plants)" (MaitriU. 1.4).
Saṃsāra, then, is a bondage with a vicelike grip, a condition that goes against one’s true nature and best interests. It is a form of entrapment and destruction (as in the case of the frog stuck in the “sightless” well). Nevertheless, it is a bondage from which one can be freed by guidance and instruction. Once again, due discernment can find in saṃsāra a pathway to liberation. A version of Maitryupaniṣad adds a further nuance to the term. There the following verse is quoted:
Thought (citta), indeed, is saṃsāra.
One should purify it through effort.
As one thinks so one becomes.
This is the eternal mystery. (MaitriU. 6.34)
Perhaps through Buddhist influence, we have the idea here that intention is the guiding force through saṃsāra. The text goes on to say that one can destroy the binding effect of action by peace of mind; right thought, free from the desire that attaches one to this world, is a liberating force. In other words, saṃsāra is not only a state of the body, it is also a state of mind, and, depending on this state of mind, one can either be trapped in or liberated from saṃsāra.
Thus, in the context of the older Upaniṣads, which may be regarded as providing the semantic foundations for saṃsāra in Hindu tradition, we can derive, cumulatively, the following connotations of the term: it refers to a state of flux in which we normally exist, of continuing bodily rebirth, caused by lack of right knowledge about the way to liberation; we can be liberated from saṃsāra by due guidance, and by a discipline that harmonizes the various constituents of our being so that we become detached from the world of self-seeking desire (compare the recurring use of yukta, “yoked,” “harnessed,” apparently in a technical sense, in the analogy of the chariot). There is accord here with the etymological derivation of the term from the verbal form saṃsarati (sam + sṛ-), “to wander about,” “to pass through.” Saṃsāra betokens an essentially sorrowful condition; it is an undesirable state in which to be, yet we can pass through it to the immortal goal.
These meanings are consolidated and developed in that great conceptual laboratory for exploring the meaning of dharma or right living in Hinduism, namely, the Sanskrit epic known as the Mahābhārata , which is generally dated from around 400 BCE to 400 CE. The term saṃsāra and related forms occur in the constituted text (the so-called Poona edition) about six dozen times. The Mahābhārata follows the lead of the Upaniṣads and uses graphic, and on occasion similar, terminology to refer to and explain saṃsāra, giving the impression that by this time a common stock of images for saṃsāra was being formed. In the Mahābhārata, saṃsāra, in the first instance, is a state or condition that has a cause that is identified on occasion as unrighteous (adharmika) thought (MBh.13.112.47) or action (MBh.11.3.14–16), but more specifically, as unenlightened desire (kāma; MBh. 12.209.8.) or thirst (“Thus is the thread of saṃsāra sewn by the needle of thirst [tṛṣṇā]”; MBh. 12.210.34). The wandering intelligence (saṃsāriṇī prajñā; MBh. 5.33.20), that is, the embodied self, thirsting for worldly pleasures, is born (prajāyate; MBh. 13.112.83) or “falls” (patati; MBh. 3.2.67) or is “hurled” (kṣipta; ΜΒh.11.5.22) into saṃsāra – sometimes by God (BhG. 16.19), who transcends saṃsāra per se – as a result of unpurged karman or hateful behavior (note that just as the personal god of the Śvetāśvataropaniṣad is the cause [hetu] of liberation and saṃsāra, so the god of the Bhagavadgītā hurls into and rescues from saṃsāra: BhG. 16.19; 12.7). As such, saṃsāra is a state of retribution, punishment, and suffering. This explains why, on occasion, the individual is described as “being cooked (pacyamāna) in saṃsāra by the faults he has committed” (MBh. 3.200.33), where “cooking” connotes both the maturing of karman and the suffering that accompanies it.
Because the deluded self is born again and again into saṃsāra, the state is likened to a wheel (“Suffering much, [one] goes round in saṃsāra like a wheel (cakravad)”: MBh. 3.200.37, a trope it shares with time; compare the expression kālacakra that occurs in texts of this period). Indeed, in the Mahābhārata, we are given a version of the analogy of the chariot in the context of saṃsāra and rebirth. The feeble-minded person (durbudha) who rushes behind the speeding horses that are the senses “revolves in this round of saṃsāra like a wheel” (MBh. 11.7.14). But then the text adds, “But that controller who controls them with the mind, returns [to saṃsāra] no more” (MBh. 11.7.15). Once again, the ambivalence of saṃsāra is noted; it can seduce and ensnare, but it is also the place from which one can escape the trap.
But saṃsāra in the Mahābhārata is also compared to an ocean (sāgara), a mystery, an abyss (gahana), and a forest (vana, kāntāra), the idea being that one is liable to get lost and confused in its unfathomable depths, terrified by the fearful denizens that inhabit it. It is a precarious and fear-laden state in which one can find no rest. There is a marvelous allegory that illustrates these points (MBh. 11.5–7). Here we are told of a Brahman (dvija) who falls headlong into a deep well lying in a great forest that is enfolded in the arms of a fearful giantess. The forest is infested with ravening beasts, including huge five-headed serpents. The well is choked with creepers (compare the andhodapāna of Maitryupaniṣad 1.4 with the udapānaḥ samāvṛtaḥ of Mahābhārata 11.5.9), proliferating from a tree rooted in the well, which break his fall, suspending him head-downwards in their mesh. He hangs there precariously, a huge six-faced, twelve-footed elephant patrolling the edge of the well, with a great snake lying at the bottom of it, and rats busily gnawing away at the trunk of the tree. That immense, mysterious forest, we are told, represents saṃsāra; its predators are life’s afflictions, the elephant is the year (comprising 12 months and six seasons), the snake is time, and the rats are the passing days, while the huge woman is old age that “destroys form and beauty” (MBh. 11.6.6).
But saṃsāra need not be a joyless place. On the contrary. As our hapless Brahman dangles in the well (which signifies the body), attached to the creeper (which represents the desire of embodied selves to continue living; MBh.11.6.7–8), he drinks insatiably from streams of honey issuing from combs built in the tree’s branches by many-shaped and frightening bees. The bees signify desires (kāmāḥ), and the honey stands for the enjoyment of the pleasures that spring from these desires. But only the fool (bāla) or feeble minded is seduced by this meretricious sweetness. “The wise who know the turning of saṃsāra’s wheel, sever its fetters” (MBh.11.6.12). In fact, saṃsāra gives us the opportunity to reflect upon and question our parlous state so that we can seek a way out (MBh.12.28.40). Perhaps this is why saṃsāra is expatiated upon in the Mahābhārata (generally in contexts of instruction) rather than in the less didactic Rāmāyaṇa (c. 300 BCE–300 CE) where the term does not occur, though the concepts of karman and rebirth occasionally do (see Brockington, 1998, 450–451).
From denoting a general condition or state, saṃsāra in the Mahābhārata can also take on such meanings as “round” or “cycle” (compare the phrases “janmasaṃsārabandhanāt” and “janmasaṃsāramohitam”; MBh.13.135.3 and 14.19.8, respectively, and “mṛtyusaṃsāravartmani”; BhG. 9.3; also “putradāraśatāni . . . saṃsāreṣvanubhūtāni”; MBh.11.2.12), and “womb” or “birth” (thus “so’ dhamān yāti saṃsārān”; MBh.13.112.47). In texts of this period, the scope of saṃsāra embraces every station of life from the god Brahmā in his heaven down to grass (brahmādiṣu tṛṇānteṣu bhūteṣu; MBh.3.2.68), and sometimes even hell (naraka; MBh.3.200.34). It is in this context that a further connotation of saṃsāra emerges, namely, the interlinking of and interaction among all living beings in the round of repeated births: the celestial (deva) of one existence may be reborn as a human in the next, and indeed as an insect or denizen of hell in a subsequent birth. The image of saṃsāra as a wheel is particularly redolent of this notion of a constant rotation of identities, which is clearly hinted at in the Mahābhārata:
"Thousands of mothers and fathers, hundreds of sons and wives are experienced in our rebirths (saṃsāreṣu) – whose are they, and whose are we? No one belongs to one, nor does one belong to anyone ... while one dwells with dear ones in the endless revolving wheel of saṃsāra" (MBh. 12.28.38–40).
I shall give more detailed consideration to this idea in the entry on karman (and rebirth). The domain of saṃsāra falls outside the deathless world(s) of mokṣa or liberation, of course, however this term may be interpreted in the various traditions of Hinduism. In modern times, in some contexts, the scope of saṃsāra is given a more limited and/or psychological interpretation. Thus the 20th-century philosopher S. Radhakrishnan writes,
"When it is said that the human soul suffers the indignity of animal life, the suggestion is figurative, not literal. It means that it is reborn to an irrational existence comparable to animal life, and not that it is actually attached to the body of an animal" (Radhakrishnan, 1960, 204).
Other thinkers take up the idea that talk of rebirth has but symbolic value: to be born a “tiger” or “cock” means to be born with rapacious or lustful tendencies, to be born a Kṣatriya implies that one has a mercurial and brave temperament, and so on.
It is by the time that the Sanskrit Mahābhārata receives its traditional form, then, namely around the 5th century CE, that the basic concept of saṃsāra, together with much of its attendant imagery, is established in Hindu tradition (though the contribution of Buddhist and other Śramaṇa sources to this development remains obscure). The evidence from other authoritative Sanskrit sources of this period that are generally regarded as encompassed by the term “Hinduism” bears this out. These and subsequent texts either consolidate or clarify the data we have been considering in their particular ways, or develop them without adding much that is substantially new. Let us review some of these texts in illustration of this point. The influential Manusmṛti (c. 100 BCE–100 CE) speaks of all living creatures, from the demiurge Brahmā down to the lowest forms of plant life (compare Mbh. 3.2.68 above), as falling into “this ever-revolving (satatayāyini), terrible saṃsāra of being” (MaSm. 1.50). It distinguishes a threefold pathway of saṃsāra (“saṃsāragamanaṃ . . . trividham”; MaSm.1.117) that arises from action, which it later specifies as the realms of the celestials (deva), of humans (manuṣya), and of animals (tiryak), respectively (MaSm.12.40), each of which it further subdivides in somewhat bemusing detail (MaSm.12.41–51). The text then goes on to recount the various punishments meted out for different kinds of bad action, occasionally using the term saṃsāra in the sense of “womb” or “birth” (e.g. pāpān saṃsārān; MaSm.12.52). The text avers that the individual who has acquired right vision (samyagdarśana; MaSm.6.74) is not bound by actions; the person, however, who lacks this vision wanders about in saṃsāra. Once again we encounter the ambivalence of the term with respect to the destiny of saṃsāra’s inhabitants.
"Traversing saṃsāra’s course for many thousands of births (anekajanmasāhasrīṃ saṃsārapadavīṃ vrajan), and covered with the dust of false impressions (vāsanā), the individual attains delusion’s fatigue. But when the dust is washed away by the warm waters of true knowledge (jñāna), the traveller’s fatigue arising from delusion is removed" (ViP. 6.7.19–20).
The later Brahmāṇḍapurāṇa (bulk of the extant text c. 700–1000 CE) speaks of saṃsāra as extending to the hells (saṃsāre narakebhyaś ca trāyate; BrāṇḍaP. 3.4.3.92), and it assures us that those who worship the goddess Kāmākṣī speedily find release, even if they are saṃsārins, that is “worldly minded” or “subject to saṃsāra” (or even perhaps “entangled in family life”; BrāṇḍaP. 3.4.43.82; see also BrāṇḍaP. 3.4.35.66).
The important Bhāgavatapurāṇa (present text c. 9th cent.?) uses the term, together with a synonym saṃsṛti, on a number of occasions. Its Māhātmya or panegyric, as found in the Uttarakhaṇḍa of the Padmapurāṇa, speaks of saṃsāra as “hollow” (asāra), “sorrowful” (dukharūpin), and “bewildering, seductive” (vimohaka; BhāgP. 4.74). The Bhāgavatapurāṇa itself refers to saṃsāra as an ancient tree whose essence is (unenlightened) action (ya eṣa saṃsārataruḥ purāṇaḥ karmātmakaḥ; BhāgP. 11.12.21). We are told that when the “inner self” (antarātmā) is caught up in māyā and becomes attached to its bodily self, it is deceived in the wheel of saṃsṛti (saṃsṛticakrakūṭaḥ; BhāgP. 5.11.6; the commentator Śrīdharasvāmin glosses this as follows: saṃsṛtiś cakre kūṭayati chalayatīti tathā). Through its accumulated karman, the subtle body (liṅga) gives the individual a runaround in saṃsṛti, which engenders elation and sorrow, fear and grief (liṅgaṃ ... dhatte’nusaṃsṛtiṃ puṃsi harṣaśokabhayārtidāṃ; BhāgP. 6.1.51).
On occasion, saṃsāra is referred to as a tree sprouting from the primordial prakṛti, for example the Nāradīyapurāṇa (c. 800–1200) and the much later Brahmavaivartapurāṇa (c. 16th cent.; see Brown, 1974, 130, 159). But this idea doubtless derives from that of the inverted tree of Kaṭhopaniṣad (6.1) and Bhagavadgītā (15.1–3), which, to note but two examples, the Vedāntins Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja interpret as an image of saṃsāra in their commentaries on the Bhagavadgītā. In a more negative description of saṃsāra with respect to the role of women in the world, the Brahmavaivartapurāṇa refers to it as a sea “with waves in the forms of births, teeming with multitudes of alligators in the shape of women, with currents consisting of copulation,” and as “deep and treacherous” (Brown, 1974, 182). Finally, we may mention the Mahābhāgavatapurāṇa (c. 1100), in which tantric influence is salient; here, as Brown notes,
"[t]he 'supreme knowledge' (parā vidyā) is one of the three parts into which Prakṛti initially divides herself, Māyā and Paramā being the other two. Māyā is responsible for the creation of saṃsāra, Paramā is the energizing power, and Vidyā destroys saṃsāra" (Brown, 1974, 165).
But this is an elaboration of the ideas, already suggested in the Kaṭhopaniṣad and Bhagavadgītā, that saṃsāra sprouts from a primordial source and has the characteristics of ensnaring the unenlightened and yet providing the means for attaining liberation.
Whilst there is a considerable quantity of “tantric” and Śākta material to be found in the puranic corpus, of course (as our last example in particular indicates), the specifically tantric sources, both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava, also make mention of saṃsāra and give a wide range of images to describe it, though these too can be seen generally to repeat, derive from, or elaborate on the earlier or “original” stock of tropes (most of the texts mentioned below would date, in their present forms, from the latter half of the 1st millennium to the first half of the 2nd). Thus saṃsāra is likened to an ocean/sea (sāgara/arṇava: e.g. the Niśvāsakārikā and Pauṣkarasaṃhitā), a well (kūpa, see the maṅgala at the beginning of the Ahirbudhnyasaṃhitā 15), a hole or cave (vivara: from a quotation by Jayaratha in the Tantrālokaviveka), a wheel (cakra, e.g. Tantrasadbhāva, and Sātvatasaṃhitā), a tree (vṛkṣa/taru: e.g. the Niśvāsakārikā, the Tantrāloka, the Nāradīyasaṃhitā), a house and prison (sadmā/kārāgāra, e.g. the Tantrāloka), a noose/net (pāśa/jāla: the Niśvāsaguhya, Mokṣopāya), a forest (kānana: the Haravijaya), and poison (viṣa/gada: the Pratyabhijñānahṛdaya, Ahirbudhnyasaṃhitā etc.), not to mention a cage (pañjara), fire (agni/anala, deriving, no doubt, at least in part, from the analogy, mentioned earlier, of being “cooked” in saṃsāra), and even a drama (nāṭya), night (rātri), and mud or mire (paṅka). These last are all elaborations of the ideas that saṃsāra is an enticing but delusive display or show, or that it has unfathomable, encompassing depths (compare the images of the forest, ocean, well, cave), or that it is a place in which one is enmeshed by the mental impurities of passion and desire (see the view, already evident in the Kaṭhopaniṣad’s analogy of the chariot, that one must be “pure” [śuci] to escape rebirth [KaṭhU.3.8]; the text is not speaking here directly of ritual purity, as Maitryupaniṣad. 6.34, which uses the term śuddha [see Radhakrishnan, 1953, 844–845] makes clear – in fact, obtaining agreeable [śubha] or vile [pāpa] wombs is the result of good and bad karman, respectively; see Mbh. 3.200.31).
The traditional philosophical and theological (Sanskrit) texts tend not to depart from the basic conceptual mold and illustrative imagery of saṃsāra, though on occasion they offer tendentious clarifications and elaborations. Thus the Sāṃkhyakārikā (c. 400 CE?; Sāṃkhya ) speaks of the subtle body (liṅga) that undergirds our visible body, as “migrating” (saṃsarati; SāṃK. 40); this takes place through the “passion” (rāgāt) of rajas (SāṃK. 45). Only prakṛti is subject to saṃsāra, it avers, not puruṣa (SāṃK. 62). Saṃsāra, therefore, has a delusive quality to it, insofar as we think that our real selves, namely our puruṣas, are caught up in this world of transmigration (see the images of the snare and drama, mentioned earlier). Vātsyāyana’s Nyāyabhāṣya (c. late 5th cent.), commenting on Nyāyasūtra (c. 3rd–4th cents.?; Nyāya), states that saṃsāra is “the uninterrupted flow of such characteristics as false cognition (mithyājñāna) and the like that result in suffering (duḥkhāntāḥ)” (NyāBh.1.1.2) And with respect to 3.2.39 and 4.2.1, it argues that though the occurrence of rebirth in saṃsāra implies that the individual has an enduring self, it is one’s misidentification of this self with such things as the body, the sense faculties, experiences of pleasure and pain, and so on that is the root cause of this condition (NyāBh.3.2.39; 4.2.1). Uddyotakara in his Nyāyavārttika (c. 6th cent.) points out that saṃsāra implies a reciprocal, causal relationship (kāryakāraṇabhāva) between false cognition and suffering that is without beginning (anādi; NyāVā. 1.1.2). The point is that saṃsāra is without beginning, but not necessarily without end.
Elsewhere we find an elaboration of one trope or other of saṃsāra. The great Vedāntin Śaṅkara’s (8th cent.) allegorization of the inverted tree of Kaṭhopaniṣad (6.1) is a classic example. It was Śaṅkara who set the authoritative procedural blueprint for subsequent Vedantic theologizing in the different schools. At the beginning of his commentary on this verse, Śaṅkara states that the text is speaking of “the tree of saṃsāra” (saṃsāravṛkṣa), which extends from the unmanifest (hiraṇyagarbha) to unmoving things (avyaktādisthāvarānta). He proceeds to give a detailed allegory of different features of this upside-down tree, whose root is the highest brahman . I cannot expatiate here, but what is noteworthy is how this great tree, in Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Kaṭhopaniṣad, the Kaṭhopaniṣadbhāṣya, comprises elements that are injurious to liberation: "it arises from the seed[s] of ignorance [avidyā], desire [kāma] and [precipitate] action [karman]," as well as elements that are conducive to it: "its leaves are the Veda [Śruti], Smṛti, logic, instruction in knowledge; its beautiful flowers are the various actions of sacrificial ritual [ yajña ], almsgiving [dāna], austere practice [tapas], and so on" (KaṭUBh. 6.1).
Once again, the salvific ambivalence of saṃsāra is affirmed. Indeed, one has only to glance through a late text like the Anubhūtiprakāśa of Vidyāraṇya (14th cent.), which mentions saṃsāra several times in its exposition of 12 major Upaniṣads from an advaitic point of view, to appreciate how fixed Hindu thought concerning saṃsāra and its tropes had become. But this adherence to familiar conceptual parameters concerning saṃsāra only goes to show that the idea had, by then, long been accepted as a foundational one in the articulation of Hindu religious and moral thought.
In the contemporary parlance of various Indian vernaculars, the term “saṃsāra” has metamorphosed, outside religious and moral contexts, to take on such (related) meanings as “family,” “household,” and “family life” (sometimes in a verbal form: compare the Bengali, saṅgsār karā: “to engage in saṅgsār”). Thus, in his well-known novel Debī Caudhurāṇī, Bankimcandra Chatterji, the pioneer of modern Bengali prose, uses the expression “saṅgsār” in all these meanings (see Lipner, 2009, 149–150), and this is a usage that continues into present times. Similar usage occurs today (though not necessarily with a verbal form) over a range of other Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil.
There seems to be general agreement that the human state is the most decisive arena for seeking liberation from saṃsāra. Hence the undoubted negativity of saṃsāra is not really a pessimistic negativity. Rather, the point of saṃsāra, insofar as it represents a foundational concept in Hinduism, seems to be to provide a cautionary, even instructive, context, for encouraging the saṃsārin to seek its true destiny in (some manner of) final deliverance from the condition of attachment to this world, and it is this feature of saṃsāra that has been developed in one way or another by some modern Hindu thinkers in their efforts to come to terms with our increasingly globalized world.
(I am grateful to a number of scholars and others, whom I can thank here only in general terms, for generously providing advice and information.)
But the person who lacks discernment, who is unfocused, always impure, does not attain that goal, and passes into saṃsāra (saṃsāram adhigacchati). (KaṭhU. 3.7)
We must remember that we are in the midst of the parable of the chariot here (KaṭhU. 3.3–9), which provides a more or less clear context for our understanding of the term. After mentioning “that causeway” (setu) for those who wish to pass from this world to the “fearless shore,” the Kaṭhopaniṣad introduces the analogy of the chariot to illustrate how we may attain the goal (pada). The human composite is likened to a chariot drawn by horses (the sense faculties) proceeding along the (narrow) causeway to the (immortal) goal, specified in 3.9 as the highest step (paramaṃ padam) of Viṣṇu. There is a revealing contrast drawn in the text between the effect of not having due discernment to accomplish this task (3.7) and of having it (3.8): the person who lacks discernment veers off the causeway into saṃsāra, whereas the person who is duly discerning is born no more (bhūyo na jāyate), presumably because the goal has been attained or is in sight. Thus here saṃsāra seems to fall into the same semantic field as “rebirth” or “transmigration.” This is why some scholars have translated the term here in this way (e.g. Hume, 1931, 352, “reincarnation”; Rawson, 1934, 123, “transmigration”; Olivelle, 1996, 239, “the round of rebirth”). But there is more to it than that.
For though we can deduce from this analogy that by the time this section of the Kaṭhopaniṣad was composed, teaching about rebirth (and, no doubt, karman ) was being established at least in some segments of the vedic tradition as a – if not the– mark of saṃsāra (the instruction doubtless having started earlier; see e.g. BĀU. 3.2.13 and ChāU. 5.10.1–10), and that this condition was regarded overall as an undesirable one, we can also conclude, from the simile of the chariot, that the state of saṃsāra can provide the means (right knowledge) for us to attain our immortal goal. With due discernment, then, saṃsāra can become a liberating journey. Thus saṃsāra connotes more than simply “reincarnation” or “rebirth.” This is why in this article I shall focus on the concept of saṃsāra itself (rather than on some supposed metonym), in the context of what is usually understood as “Hinduism.”
The idea of, and possibly the term, saṃsāra (with the attendant doctrine of karman and rebirth) may well have entered vedic soteriology through some process of conceptual assimilation from Śramaṇa sources, namely from the teachings of those ascetics or “strivers” who lived outside the pale of orthodox vedic society. We cannot be sure of the historical details, but the presence of these ascetics as a loose category can be traced back to the earliest times of vedic culture as it developed in the context of a fading Indus civilization. The evidence available indicates that in time these ascetics tended to view mundane existence as a sorrowful process; only a life of austere practice ( tapas ) could purify one from ingrained mental dispositions to seek worldly satisfaction, and so enable one to attain a liberation of detachment from the world. No doubt the vedic thinkers would have integrated these ideas in their own way into a developing philosophy of life that, as the earliest strata of the Ṛgveda intimate, started with a robust affirmation of this-worldly existence. In any event, early textual Śramaṇa sources, for example those of the Buddhists, Jainas, and Ājīvikas, regularly resort to the term saṃsāra, in association with the idea of karman and rebirth, in their teachings (see e.g. Basham, 1951).
The term saṃsāra occurs again in Śvetāśvataropaniṣad 6.16, where a personal god is being eulogized as “the cause of saṃsāra and mokṣa.” Note, again, the implied contrast between these two states. If mokṣa is a form of liberation, then saṃsāra is a form of bondage. The late Maitryupaniṣad may well shed light on this contrast. There, the seeker, Κing Bṛhadratha, after describing the instabilities of this world, even of seemingly durable entities like the great oceans, mountains, and the pole star, laments to the sage Śākāyanya,
"What is the point of enjoying desires in a saṃsāra like this, when someone who has been consumed by them is seen to return repeatedly to this world? Be pleased to deliver me. In this saṃsāra, I am like a frog stuck in a sightless well (andhodapānastho bheka iva, i.e. a well that is waterless and/or choked with plants)" (MaitriU. 1.4).
Saṃsāra, then, is a bondage with a vicelike grip, a condition that goes against one’s true nature and best interests. It is a form of entrapment and destruction (as in the case of the frog stuck in the “sightless” well). Nevertheless, it is a bondage from which one can be freed by guidance and instruction. Once again, due discernment can find in saṃsāra a pathway to liberation. A version of Maitryupaniṣad adds a further nuance to the term. There the following verse is quoted:
Thought (citta), indeed, is saṃsāra.
One should purify it through effort.
As one thinks so one becomes.
This is the eternal mystery. (MaitriU. 6.34)
Perhaps through Buddhist influence, we have the idea here that intention is the guiding force through saṃsāra. The text goes on to say that one can destroy the binding effect of action by peace of mind; right thought, free from the desire that attaches one to this world, is a liberating force. In other words, saṃsāra is not only a state of the body, it is also a state of mind, and, depending on this state of mind, one can either be trapped in or liberated from saṃsāra.
Thus, in the context of the older Upaniṣads, which may be regarded as providing the semantic foundations for saṃsāra in Hindu tradition, we can derive, cumulatively, the following connotations of the term: it refers to a state of flux in which we normally exist, of continuing bodily rebirth, caused by lack of right knowledge about the way to liberation; we can be liberated from saṃsāra by due guidance, and by a discipline that harmonizes the various constituents of our being so that we become detached from the world of self-seeking desire (compare the recurring use of yukta, “yoked,” “harnessed,” apparently in a technical sense, in the analogy of the chariot). There is accord here with the etymological derivation of the term from the verbal form saṃsarati (sam + sṛ-), “to wander about,” “to pass through.” Saṃsāra betokens an essentially sorrowful condition; it is an undesirable state in which to be, yet we can pass through it to the immortal goal.
These meanings are consolidated and developed in that great conceptual laboratory for exploring the meaning of dharma or right living in Hinduism, namely, the Sanskrit epic known as the Mahābhārata , which is generally dated from around 400 BCE to 400 CE. The term saṃsāra and related forms occur in the constituted text (the so-called Poona edition) about six dozen times. The Mahābhārata follows the lead of the Upaniṣads and uses graphic, and on occasion similar, terminology to refer to and explain saṃsāra, giving the impression that by this time a common stock of images for saṃsāra was being formed. In the Mahābhārata, saṃsāra, in the first instance, is a state or condition that has a cause that is identified on occasion as unrighteous (adharmika) thought (MBh.13.112.47) or action (MBh.11.3.14–16), but more specifically, as unenlightened desire (kāma; MBh. 12.209.8.) or thirst (“Thus is the thread of saṃsāra sewn by the needle of thirst [tṛṣṇā]”; MBh. 12.210.34). The wandering intelligence (saṃsāriṇī prajñā; MBh. 5.33.20), that is, the embodied self, thirsting for worldly pleasures, is born (prajāyate; MBh. 13.112.83) or “falls” (patati; MBh. 3.2.67) or is “hurled” (kṣipta; ΜΒh.11.5.22) into saṃsāra – sometimes by God (BhG. 16.19), who transcends saṃsāra per se – as a result of unpurged karman or hateful behavior (note that just as the personal god of the Śvetāśvataropaniṣad is the cause [hetu] of liberation and saṃsāra, so the god of the Bhagavadgītā hurls into and rescues from saṃsāra: BhG. 16.19; 12.7). As such, saṃsāra is a state of retribution, punishment, and suffering. This explains why, on occasion, the individual is described as “being cooked (pacyamāna) in saṃsāra by the faults he has committed” (MBh. 3.200.33), where “cooking” connotes both the maturing of karman and the suffering that accompanies it.
Because the deluded self is born again and again into saṃsāra, the state is likened to a wheel (“Suffering much, [one] goes round in saṃsāra like a wheel (cakravad)”: MBh. 3.200.37, a trope it shares with time; compare the expression kālacakra that occurs in texts of this period). Indeed, in the Mahābhārata, we are given a version of the analogy of the chariot in the context of saṃsāra and rebirth. The feeble-minded person (durbudha) who rushes behind the speeding horses that are the senses “revolves in this round of saṃsāra like a wheel” (MBh. 11.7.14). But then the text adds, “But that controller who controls them with the mind, returns [to saṃsāra] no more” (MBh. 11.7.15). Once again, the ambivalence of saṃsāra is noted; it can seduce and ensnare, but it is also the place from which one can escape the trap.
But saṃsāra in the Mahābhārata is also compared to an ocean (sāgara), a mystery, an abyss (gahana), and a forest (vana, kāntāra), the idea being that one is liable to get lost and confused in its unfathomable depths, terrified by the fearful denizens that inhabit it. It is a precarious and fear-laden state in which one can find no rest. There is a marvelous allegory that illustrates these points (MBh. 11.5–7). Here we are told of a Brahman (dvija) who falls headlong into a deep well lying in a great forest that is enfolded in the arms of a fearful giantess. The forest is infested with ravening beasts, including huge five-headed serpents. The well is choked with creepers (compare the andhodapāna of Maitryupaniṣad 1.4 with the udapānaḥ samāvṛtaḥ of Mahābhārata 11.5.9), proliferating from a tree rooted in the well, which break his fall, suspending him head-downwards in their mesh. He hangs there precariously, a huge six-faced, twelve-footed elephant patrolling the edge of the well, with a great snake lying at the bottom of it, and rats busily gnawing away at the trunk of the tree. That immense, mysterious forest, we are told, represents saṃsāra; its predators are life’s afflictions, the elephant is the year (comprising 12 months and six seasons), the snake is time, and the rats are the passing days, while the huge woman is old age that “destroys form and beauty” (MBh. 11.6.6).
But saṃsāra need not be a joyless place. On the contrary. As our hapless Brahman dangles in the well (which signifies the body), attached to the creeper (which represents the desire of embodied selves to continue living; MBh.11.6.7–8), he drinks insatiably from streams of honey issuing from combs built in the tree’s branches by many-shaped and frightening bees. The bees signify desires (kāmāḥ), and the honey stands for the enjoyment of the pleasures that spring from these desires. But only the fool (bāla) or feeble minded is seduced by this meretricious sweetness. “The wise who know the turning of saṃsāra’s wheel, sever its fetters” (MBh.11.6.12). In fact, saṃsāra gives us the opportunity to reflect upon and question our parlous state so that we can seek a way out (MBh.12.28.40). Perhaps this is why saṃsāra is expatiated upon in the Mahābhārata (generally in contexts of instruction) rather than in the less didactic Rāmāyaṇa (c. 300 BCE–300 CE) where the term does not occur, though the concepts of karman and rebirth occasionally do (see Brockington, 1998, 450–451).
From denoting a general condition or state, saṃsāra in the Mahābhārata can also take on such meanings as “round” or “cycle” (compare the phrases “janmasaṃsārabandhanāt” and “janmasaṃsāramohitam”; MBh.13.135.3 and 14.19.8, respectively, and “mṛtyusaṃsāravartmani”; BhG. 9.3; also “putradāraśatāni . . . saṃsāreṣvanubhūtāni”; MBh.11.2.12), and “womb” or “birth” (thus “so’ dhamān yāti saṃsārān”; MBh.13.112.47). In texts of this period, the scope of saṃsāra embraces every station of life from the god Brahmā in his heaven down to grass (brahmādiṣu tṛṇānteṣu bhūteṣu; MBh.3.2.68), and sometimes even hell (naraka; MBh.3.200.34). It is in this context that a further connotation of saṃsāra emerges, namely, the interlinking of and interaction among all living beings in the round of repeated births: the celestial (deva) of one existence may be reborn as a human in the next, and indeed as an insect or denizen of hell in a subsequent birth. The image of saṃsāra as a wheel is particularly redolent of this notion of a constant rotation of identities, which is clearly hinted at in the Mahābhārata:
"Thousands of mothers and fathers, hundreds of sons and wives are experienced in our rebirths (saṃsāreṣu) – whose are they, and whose are we? No one belongs to one, nor does one belong to anyone ... while one dwells with dear ones in the endless revolving wheel of saṃsāra" (MBh. 12.28.38–40).
I shall give more detailed consideration to this idea in the entry on karman (and rebirth). The domain of saṃsāra falls outside the deathless world(s) of mokṣa or liberation, of course, however this term may be interpreted in the various traditions of Hinduism. In modern times, in some contexts, the scope of saṃsāra is given a more limited and/or psychological interpretation. Thus the 20th-century philosopher S. Radhakrishnan writes,
"When it is said that the human soul suffers the indignity of animal life, the suggestion is figurative, not literal. It means that it is reborn to an irrational existence comparable to animal life, and not that it is actually attached to the body of an animal" (Radhakrishnan, 1960, 204).
Other thinkers take up the idea that talk of rebirth has but symbolic value: to be born a “tiger” or “cock” means to be born with rapacious or lustful tendencies, to be born a Kṣatriya implies that one has a mercurial and brave temperament, and so on.
It is by the time that the Sanskrit Mahābhārata receives its traditional form, then, namely around the 5th century CE, that the basic concept of saṃsāra, together with much of its attendant imagery, is established in Hindu tradition (though the contribution of Buddhist and other Śramaṇa sources to this development remains obscure). The evidence from other authoritative Sanskrit sources of this period that are generally regarded as encompassed by the term “Hinduism” bears this out. These and subsequent texts either consolidate or clarify the data we have been considering in their particular ways, or develop them without adding much that is substantially new. Let us review some of these texts in illustration of this point. The influential Manusmṛti (c. 100 BCE–100 CE) speaks of all living creatures, from the demiurge Brahmā down to the lowest forms of plant life (compare Mbh. 3.2.68 above), as falling into “this ever-revolving (satatayāyini), terrible saṃsāra of being” (MaSm. 1.50). It distinguishes a threefold pathway of saṃsāra (“saṃsāragamanaṃ . . . trividham”; MaSm.1.117) that arises from action, which it later specifies as the realms of the celestials (deva), of humans (manuṣya), and of animals (tiryak), respectively (MaSm.12.40), each of which it further subdivides in somewhat bemusing detail (MaSm.12.41–51). The text then goes on to recount the various punishments meted out for different kinds of bad action, occasionally using the term saṃsāra in the sense of “womb” or “birth” (e.g. pāpān saṃsārān; MaSm.12.52). The text avers that the individual who has acquired right vision (samyagdarśana; MaSm.6.74) is not bound by actions; the person, however, who lacks this vision wanders about in saṃsāra. Once again we encounter the ambivalence of the term with respect to the destiny of saṃsāra’s inhabitants.
Later Textual References
The Purāṇas, as a group, do not mention the term much, and they add little original material, either to the basic concept or to its descriptive imagery; as such, they need not detain us for too long. We can offer only a few illustrations here (though it should be remembered that the dating offered for the various Purāṇas can be only tentative). The Viṣṇupurāṇa (c. 5th cent.) mentions the term sparingly and refers to saṃsāra as “hollow” (asāra; ViP. 1.17.90), and as a “field,” karṣaṇa (i.e. kṣetra, according to the commentator Śrīdharasvāmin), in which the seeds (of rebirth) are sown (compare ViP. 1.22.51). It points to the thousands of births that one is apt to undergo in saṃsāra, before liberating knowledge is attained:"Traversing saṃsāra’s course for many thousands of births (anekajanmasāhasrīṃ saṃsārapadavīṃ vrajan), and covered with the dust of false impressions (vāsanā), the individual attains delusion’s fatigue. But when the dust is washed away by the warm waters of true knowledge (jñāna), the traveller’s fatigue arising from delusion is removed" (ViP. 6.7.19–20).
The later Brahmāṇḍapurāṇa (bulk of the extant text c. 700–1000 CE) speaks of saṃsāra as extending to the hells (saṃsāre narakebhyaś ca trāyate; BrāṇḍaP. 3.4.3.92), and it assures us that those who worship the goddess Kāmākṣī speedily find release, even if they are saṃsārins, that is “worldly minded” or “subject to saṃsāra” (or even perhaps “entangled in family life”; BrāṇḍaP. 3.4.43.82; see also BrāṇḍaP. 3.4.35.66).
The important Bhāgavatapurāṇa (present text c. 9th cent.?) uses the term, together with a synonym saṃsṛti, on a number of occasions. Its Māhātmya or panegyric, as found in the Uttarakhaṇḍa of the Padmapurāṇa, speaks of saṃsāra as “hollow” (asāra), “sorrowful” (dukharūpin), and “bewildering, seductive” (vimohaka; BhāgP. 4.74). The Bhāgavatapurāṇa itself refers to saṃsāra as an ancient tree whose essence is (unenlightened) action (ya eṣa saṃsārataruḥ purāṇaḥ karmātmakaḥ; BhāgP. 11.12.21). We are told that when the “inner self” (antarātmā) is caught up in māyā and becomes attached to its bodily self, it is deceived in the wheel of saṃsṛti (saṃsṛticakrakūṭaḥ; BhāgP. 5.11.6; the commentator Śrīdharasvāmin glosses this as follows: saṃsṛtiś cakre kūṭayati chalayatīti tathā). Through its accumulated karman, the subtle body (liṅga) gives the individual a runaround in saṃsṛti, which engenders elation and sorrow, fear and grief (liṅgaṃ ... dhatte’nusaṃsṛtiṃ puṃsi harṣaśokabhayārtidāṃ; BhāgP. 6.1.51).
On occasion, saṃsāra is referred to as a tree sprouting from the primordial prakṛti, for example the Nāradīyapurāṇa (c. 800–1200) and the much later Brahmavaivartapurāṇa (c. 16th cent.; see Brown, 1974, 130, 159). But this idea doubtless derives from that of the inverted tree of Kaṭhopaniṣad (6.1) and Bhagavadgītā (15.1–3), which, to note but two examples, the Vedāntins Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja interpret as an image of saṃsāra in their commentaries on the Bhagavadgītā. In a more negative description of saṃsāra with respect to the role of women in the world, the Brahmavaivartapurāṇa refers to it as a sea “with waves in the forms of births, teeming with multitudes of alligators in the shape of women, with currents consisting of copulation,” and as “deep and treacherous” (Brown, 1974, 182). Finally, we may mention the Mahābhāgavatapurāṇa (c. 1100), in which tantric influence is salient; here, as Brown notes,
"[t]he 'supreme knowledge' (parā vidyā) is one of the three parts into which Prakṛti initially divides herself, Māyā and Paramā being the other two. Māyā is responsible for the creation of saṃsāra, Paramā is the energizing power, and Vidyā destroys saṃsāra" (Brown, 1974, 165).
But this is an elaboration of the ideas, already suggested in the Kaṭhopaniṣad and Bhagavadgītā, that saṃsāra sprouts from a primordial source and has the characteristics of ensnaring the unenlightened and yet providing the means for attaining liberation.
Whilst there is a considerable quantity of “tantric” and Śākta material to be found in the puranic corpus, of course (as our last example in particular indicates), the specifically tantric sources, both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava, also make mention of saṃsāra and give a wide range of images to describe it, though these too can be seen generally to repeat, derive from, or elaborate on the earlier or “original” stock of tropes (most of the texts mentioned below would date, in their present forms, from the latter half of the 1st millennium to the first half of the 2nd). Thus saṃsāra is likened to an ocean/sea (sāgara/arṇava: e.g. the Niśvāsakārikā and Pauṣkarasaṃhitā), a well (kūpa, see the maṅgala at the beginning of the Ahirbudhnyasaṃhitā 15), a hole or cave (vivara: from a quotation by Jayaratha in the Tantrālokaviveka), a wheel (cakra, e.g. Tantrasadbhāva, and Sātvatasaṃhitā), a tree (vṛkṣa/taru: e.g. the Niśvāsakārikā, the Tantrāloka, the Nāradīyasaṃhitā), a house and prison (sadmā/kārāgāra, e.g. the Tantrāloka), a noose/net (pāśa/jāla: the Niśvāsaguhya, Mokṣopāya), a forest (kānana: the Haravijaya), and poison (viṣa/gada: the Pratyabhijñānahṛdaya, Ahirbudhnyasaṃhitā etc.), not to mention a cage (pañjara), fire (agni/anala, deriving, no doubt, at least in part, from the analogy, mentioned earlier, of being “cooked” in saṃsāra), and even a drama (nāṭya), night (rātri), and mud or mire (paṅka). These last are all elaborations of the ideas that saṃsāra is an enticing but delusive display or show, or that it has unfathomable, encompassing depths (compare the images of the forest, ocean, well, cave), or that it is a place in which one is enmeshed by the mental impurities of passion and desire (see the view, already evident in the Kaṭhopaniṣad’s analogy of the chariot, that one must be “pure” [śuci] to escape rebirth [KaṭhU.3.8]; the text is not speaking here directly of ritual purity, as Maitryupaniṣad. 6.34, which uses the term śuddha [see Radhakrishnan, 1953, 844–845] makes clear – in fact, obtaining agreeable [śubha] or vile [pāpa] wombs is the result of good and bad karman, respectively; see Mbh. 3.200.31).
The traditional philosophical and theological (Sanskrit) texts tend not to depart from the basic conceptual mold and illustrative imagery of saṃsāra, though on occasion they offer tendentious clarifications and elaborations. Thus the Sāṃkhyakārikā (c. 400 CE?; Sāṃkhya ) speaks of the subtle body (liṅga) that undergirds our visible body, as “migrating” (saṃsarati; SāṃK. 40); this takes place through the “passion” (rāgāt) of rajas (SāṃK. 45). Only prakṛti is subject to saṃsāra, it avers, not puruṣa (SāṃK. 62). Saṃsāra, therefore, has a delusive quality to it, insofar as we think that our real selves, namely our puruṣas, are caught up in this world of transmigration (see the images of the snare and drama, mentioned earlier). Vātsyāyana’s Nyāyabhāṣya (c. late 5th cent.), commenting on Nyāyasūtra (c. 3rd–4th cents.?; Nyāya), states that saṃsāra is “the uninterrupted flow of such characteristics as false cognition (mithyājñāna) and the like that result in suffering (duḥkhāntāḥ)” (NyāBh.1.1.2) And with respect to 3.2.39 and 4.2.1, it argues that though the occurrence of rebirth in saṃsāra implies that the individual has an enduring self, it is one’s misidentification of this self with such things as the body, the sense faculties, experiences of pleasure and pain, and so on that is the root cause of this condition (NyāBh.3.2.39; 4.2.1). Uddyotakara in his Nyāyavārttika (c. 6th cent.) points out that saṃsāra implies a reciprocal, causal relationship (kāryakāraṇabhāva) between false cognition and suffering that is without beginning (anādi; NyāVā. 1.1.2). The point is that saṃsāra is without beginning, but not necessarily without end.
Elsewhere we find an elaboration of one trope or other of saṃsāra. The great Vedāntin Śaṅkara’s (8th cent.) allegorization of the inverted tree of Kaṭhopaniṣad (6.1) is a classic example. It was Śaṅkara who set the authoritative procedural blueprint for subsequent Vedantic theologizing in the different schools. At the beginning of his commentary on this verse, Śaṅkara states that the text is speaking of “the tree of saṃsāra” (saṃsāravṛkṣa), which extends from the unmanifest (hiraṇyagarbha) to unmoving things (avyaktādisthāvarānta). He proceeds to give a detailed allegory of different features of this upside-down tree, whose root is the highest brahman . I cannot expatiate here, but what is noteworthy is how this great tree, in Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Kaṭhopaniṣad, the Kaṭhopaniṣadbhāṣya, comprises elements that are injurious to liberation: "it arises from the seed[s] of ignorance [avidyā], desire [kāma] and [precipitate] action [karman]," as well as elements that are conducive to it: "its leaves are the Veda [Śruti], Smṛti, logic, instruction in knowledge; its beautiful flowers are the various actions of sacrificial ritual [ yajña ], almsgiving [dāna], austere practice [tapas], and so on" (KaṭUBh. 6.1).
Once again, the salvific ambivalence of saṃsāra is affirmed. Indeed, one has only to glance through a late text like the Anubhūtiprakāśa of Vidyāraṇya (14th cent.), which mentions saṃsāra several times in its exposition of 12 major Upaniṣads from an advaitic point of view, to appreciate how fixed Hindu thought concerning saṃsāra and its tropes had become. But this adherence to familiar conceptual parameters concerning saṃsāra only goes to show that the idea had, by then, long been accepted as a foundational one in the articulation of Hindu religious and moral thought.
The Means of Liberation from Saṃsāra
Let us consider now how one could exit or escape from saṃsāra in the tradition. This could be achieved by a variety of means, though these generally reduce to a variation of a number of themes mentioned already in the earliest cluster of texts. The prevalent means of egress from saṃsāra given here are a form of knowledge and/or practice – including devotion to or worship of a higher power or god – that purifies one from or annuls built-up karman (saṃsāra’s proximate cause) and “polluting” dispositions to seek worldly satisfaction (often described psychologically as “thirst” or “desire”); the latter are the basic cause of saṃsāra, and they perpetuate one in the cycle of rebirth. By such knowledge and/or action, which generally valorize some discipline or practice such as rituals of worship, a form of contemplation or yoga, in the context of a non-self-seeking ethic, one is detached from the deluded existence that is saṃsāra and enabled to find release or liberation (mukti, mokṣa). This liberation can occur in this life ( jīvanmukti ) as one awaits the last falling away of the body, or progressively, that is, by way of passage to and from a heavenly realm (or realms) of saṃsāra into the state of ultimate freedom (kramamukti). The agents of liberating knowledge and/or action vary too: they may be (the instruction of) a sage (ṛṣi), guru , or text, or (the saving action of) the supreme being or a representative (recall, for example, Kṛṣṇa ’s promise in Bhagavadgītā 12.7, as also the declaration in the Brahmāṇḍapurāṇa that worshipping the goddess Kāmākṣī will speedily free one from the thrall of saṃsāra). Such a prospect can make of saṃsāra, as noted earlier, a liberating journey.Saṃsāra in Modern Thought and Usage
In modern times, mention of saṃsāra as such generally occurs in religious and/or moral contexts, where traditional conceptual parameters and tropes tend to be rehearsed, though often with a particular agenda in mind. Thus, despite their philosophical differences, both Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) and S. Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) give prominence to the concept of saṃsāra in their philosophical works with a view to accentuating, as R.N. Minor (1986) points out, saṃsāra’s positive features as an arena of action that can engender real moral and spiritual growth by means of a selfless ethic, and further the process of the world’s evolution towards its ultimate goal. But this is to stress a feature of saṃsāra that, we have seen, is present in the earliest sources. Religious teachers of modern times too take recourse to the concept of saṃsāra, often repeating familiar tropes in the exposition of their views. The well-known Tamil sage Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), while paraphrasing a text generally attributed to Śaṅkara, uses such descriptions as “the burning winds of saṃsāra,” “the tree of saṃsāra,” “the ocean of saṃsāra,” “the wild and terrible forest of saṃsāra,” and so on (see Osborne, 1969, ch. 10).In the contemporary parlance of various Indian vernaculars, the term “saṃsāra” has metamorphosed, outside religious and moral contexts, to take on such (related) meanings as “family,” “household,” and “family life” (sometimes in a verbal form: compare the Bengali, saṅgsār karā: “to engage in saṅgsār”). Thus, in his well-known novel Debī Caudhurāṇī, Bankimcandra Chatterji, the pioneer of modern Bengali prose, uses the expression “saṅgsār” in all these meanings (see Lipner, 2009, 149–150), and this is a usage that continues into present times. Similar usage occurs today (though not necessarily with a verbal form) over a range of other Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil.
Conclusion
We have seen that in the Sanskritic tradition, saṃsāra – the idea entered into later strata of the vedic texts, probably through interaction with Śramaṇa sources – is regarded as an undesirable condition. It is natural to the unenlightened self, and with respect to the human and nether worlds, it is described as the abode of suffering, which the numerous metaphors of saṃsāra bring out in various ways. Even the joys of saṃsāra are delusive. Saṃsāra in the tradition is associated with the cyclical process of karman and rebirth, so that even in the heavenly realms its grip is inexorable, dragging souls down when good karman is expended into the lower realms, which are characterized by increasing levels of unhappiness and discord (indeed, as some texts take pains to emphasize, in the human condition the sufferings of saṃsāra begin consciously in the womb; compare e.g. BhāgP. 3.31.5–10). Its root cause is self-seeking thirst or desire, lodged in the form of ingrained “impressions” or traces (vāsanā) in the subtle body (even of unconscious beings). But there is a way out, generally identified in the tradition as some form of revealed knowledge (given by a text, sage, or god) and/or disciplined practice (a form of religious ritual, contemplation, or austerity, to be undertaken in the context of a non-self-seeking ethic).There seems to be general agreement that the human state is the most decisive arena for seeking liberation from saṃsāra. Hence the undoubted negativity of saṃsāra is not really a pessimistic negativity. Rather, the point of saṃsāra, insofar as it represents a foundational concept in Hinduism, seems to be to provide a cautionary, even instructive, context, for encouraging the saṃsārin to seek its true destiny in (some manner of) final deliverance from the condition of attachment to this world, and it is this feature of saṃsāra that has been developed in one way or another by some modern Hindu thinkers in their efforts to come to terms with our increasingly globalized world.
(I am grateful to a number of scholars and others, whom I can thank here only in general terms, for generously providing advice and information.)
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