---
type: Concept
title: "Saṃsāra"
description: "The beginningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth driven by karma and sustained by ignorance."
reception_note: "Present samsara as the beginningless cycle of conditioned existence, not as a punishment scheme attached to karma-as-fate; it inherits that distortion as a secondary node of the Blavatsky chain documented in the Error Genealogy."
tags:
  - metaphysics
  - transmigration
  - Vedanta
  - non-translatable
darshana:
  - Pan-dharmic
not:
  - term: "Reincarnation (Western New Age)"
    why: "Implies a fixed personal identity moving to a new body; saṃsāra carries the subtle body and saṃskāras, an evolving pattern, not a fixed personality."
    instead: "Keep Saṃsāra untranslated; gloss as the beginningless cycle of transmigration."
  - term: "The wheel of life (simplified)"
    why: "A flattened folk image; saṃsāra is a precise mechanism driven by karma and sustained by avidyā across all fourteen lokas."
  - term: "Worldly existence (dismissive)"
    why: "Treats it as mere mundane life; saṃsāra is the beginningless condition of transmigration, neutral, ending only with mokṣa."
related:
  - /concepts/karma.md
  - /concepts/moksha.md
  - /concepts/jiva.md
  - /concepts/maya.md
  - /concepts/chitta.md
  - /concepts/loka.md
timestamp: "2026-06-18"
okf_version: "0.2"
---

# Saṃsāra

**Not:** Reincarnation (in the Western New Age sense), The wheel of life (oversimplified), Worldly existence

## What It Actually Means

Saṃsāra is the beginningless (*anādi*) cycle of transmigration — [Jīva](/concepts/jiva.md) moving through countless embodiments driven by [Karma](/concepts/karma.md) stored in [Chitta](/concepts/chitta.md), sustained by [Māyā](/concepts/maya.md). It encompasses all realms of existence — not just human birth but birth in any of the 14 [Lokas](/concepts/loka.md).

Saṃsāra is not "bad" in a moral sense — it is a natural condition that persists as long as ignorance (*avidyā*) persists. It ends permanently with [Mokṣa](/concepts/moksha.md).

## Why the Substitutes Fail

**"Reincarnation"** (Western usage) typically implies a fixed personal identity transferring to a new body — "I was Cleopatra in a past life." Saṃsāra involves the *sūkṣma śarīra* (subtle body) carrying *saṃskāras* — not a fixed personality, but an evolving pattern of impressions.

## Audience Metaphor

Saṃsāra is like switching between characters in an infinite video game — each character has different attributes, different levels, different challenges. The player (Ātman) is always the same, but keeps getting absorbed into each new character, forgetting they're playing. Mokṣa is putting down the controller.

## Citations

1. [Bhagavad Gītā](/references/bhagavad-gita.md) 2.22 — "As a person discards worn-out clothes and puts on new ones"
2. [Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad](/references/brihadaranyaka-upanishad.md) 4.4.1–6

## Error Genealogy

This term is a secondary node in a documented mistranslation chain (a partial genealogy):

- Karma-as-fate / "cosmic justice" / "what goes around comes around" descends from H.P. Blavatsky's *The Key to Theosophy* (1889), which recast karma in English as a quasi-mechanical law of retribution; New Thought absorbed it and 20th-century usage completed the drift, inverting a doctrine of agency into one of resignation. See [G4 — Karma = fate / cosmic retribution](../../../GENEALOGIES.md) in the repository root for the full chain and sources.
