Samsara

Samsara is the Indian concept of the beginningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that conditions all sentient existence. The Sanskrit word means wandering or continuous flow, and the philosophical use names the totality of conditioned existence within which beings transmigrate from life to life until liberation. The concept is shared across Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions, though the metaphysical accounts differ.

For most Hindu schools, samsara is governed by karma (the moral law of action) and is the condition from which moksha (liberation) is the release. For Buddhist philosophy, samsara is the totality of conditioned existence characterized by dukkha (unsatisfactoriness) and is the condition from which nirvana is the awakening. The Madhyamaka tradition, in Nagarjuna's hands, argues that samsara and nirvana are not ultimately distinct: the same conditioned reality is samsara when grasped in delusion and nirvana when grasped in wisdom.

The shared concept of samsara across the Indian traditions does not entail shared accounts of what undergoes rebirth or what liberation consists in. For Hindu schools, an individual self (atman) — variously interpreted across Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and Dvaita Vedanta — passes through a sequence of lives until liberation. For Buddhist philosophy, there is no enduring self; what persists is a stream of conditioned states, and rebirth is the continuation of this stream into new conditions.

Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka tradition gives the most philosophically subtle account of samsara. The cycle of rebirth is real in the conventional sense — the moral physics of karma operates within it — but is empty of intrinsic nature in the ultimate sense. Samsara and nirvana are not metaphysically distinct realms; they are the same conditioned reality grasped differently. The doctrine has profound consequences for Buddhist ethics: liberation is not escape to another world but the transformed apprehension of this one.