Samsara and Rebirth: The Wandering of the Soul

Central to the Jain understanding of the soul's predicament is the doctrine of samsara, the beginningless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through which every unliberated jiva wanders. The soul in its true nature is pure, luminous, and free, possessed of infinite knowledge, perception, bliss, and energy. Yet from time without beginning it has been entangled with karmic matter, and this entanglement drives it endlessly from one embodiment to the next. The wandering has no first moment; the Jains do not ask when the soul fell into bondage, for the bondage is beginningless, though it need not be endless.

The mechanism of this wandering is wholly explained by karma, understood in Jainism as a subtle physical matter rather than an abstract force. When a soul acts under the sway of the passions, attachment and aversion above all, particles of karmic matter flow toward it, asrava, and bind to it, bandha. This karma clings to the soul, obscuring its innate qualities and determining the circumstances of its future lives: the species into which it will be born, the length of its life, the body it will inhabit, and the pleasures and pains it will experience. At death the soul, still weighted with unspent karma, departs the body and, in a single instant or a few instants, travels to the site of its next birth, there to assume a new form dictated by its accumulated deeds.

The range of possible rebirths in Jainism is vast, for the tradition recognizes life in forms that other systems overlook. Souls transmigrate through four broad states of existence, the four gatis: as heavenly beings, as human beings, as denizens of the hells, and as animals and plants, this last category, tiryancha, encompassing the whole living world from the highest beasts down to the subtlest organisms. Jainism famously teaches that even earth, water, fire, and air harbor one-sensed beings, and that a soul may be reborn among these or among the countless microscopic nigoda, life-forms of the lowest order. From such depths a soul may rise, over immense spans of time, to human birth, and from human birth alone can it attain liberation. Thus human existence is precious beyond measure, a rare and fleeting opportunity amid ages of blind wandering.

This vision gives Jain ethics their extraordinary reach. Since every living being, however small, houses a soul essentially identical to one's own and equally capable of liberation, and since one has oneself passed through every such form in the long course of samsara, the injunction to non-violence, ahimsa, extends to all that lives. To harm another being is to injure a fellow wanderer on the same endless road. The scrupulous care of the Jain ascetic to avoid harming even insects and plants flows directly from this understanding of universal, transmigrating life.

Samsara is characterized above all by suffering. Even its pleasures are transient and bound up with fresh karmic entanglement, and the heavens themselves, however long their delights, are not final resting places, for their inhabitants too must eventually fall and be reborn. No station within the cycle offers lasting refuge. The only true goal is to escape the cycle altogether, to attain moksha, the complete liberation of the soul from all karmic matter.

The path out of samsara is the shedding of karma. By stopping the influx of new karma through restraint and right conduct, samvara, and by wearing away accumulated karma through austerity and equanimity, nirjara, the soul gradually purifies itself. When the last particle of karmic matter falls away, the soul is freed forever. It rises to the summit of the universe and dwells there as a Siddha in unclouded knowledge and bliss, never to be born again. Samsara, beginningless though it is, thus has an end, and that end is the soul's return to its own eternal nature.