What Is Reborn, and What It Means to Escape

The traditions agree on the wheel and disagree on the rider. In Hinduism it is the enduring self, the atman, that transmigrates from body to body until knowledge, action or devotion secures its release, and liberation is the self's realisation of its true nature or its union with the divine. In Buddhism there is no such self to transmigrate, the doctrine of anatta denies it, so rebirth must be explained as a causal continuity, one conditioned state giving rise to the next, "neither the same nor another," like one flame lighting a second; what is reborn is a process, not a soul. In Jainism it is the jiva, the individual soul, dragged down and shaped by the karmic matter clinging to it. In Sikhism the soul passes through many births, and the cycle is broken not by technique alone but by grace and by absorption in the divine Name.

These are not variant descriptions of one belief but genuinely different metaphysics sharing a vocabulary. What unites them is the evaluation: continued existence in samsara, however pleasant a given life may be, is the problem to be solved, and the religions of Indian origin are in large part programmes for solving it.