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.