Samsara - The six realms and rebirth

Samsara and conditioned rebirth

Samsara names repeated birth, life and death sustained by ignorance, craving and karma. It is not simply the present physical world or a picture of a wheel. Rebirth, punabbhava or punarbhava, concerns the arising of another life conditioned by the causal process of a preceding one; karma, or kamma, concerns intentional action, whose results help shape that process.

Buddhist rebirth should not automatically be described as an unchanged soul moving into another body. The doctrine of no-self rejects that enduring independent owner. In The Questions of King Milinda, Book II chapter II §1 in T. W. Rhys Davids' translation, a child and adult, and changing flames in a burning lamp, illustrate connected continuity without complete sameness. This is a paraphrase: the process is neither an unchanging individual nor an entirely unrelated replacement.

The comparison makes moral consequences intelligible. A person's later habits and circumstances can be influenced by earlier choices even though the person has changed. Traditional rebirth extends this causal account across lives. The ordinary example helps explain the proposal; it does not by itself prove that life after death occurs. Whether rebirth is true and whether a no-self account is coherent are different questions.

Nirvana, or nibbana, ends the conditions sustaining samsara. It is not another round of pleasurable existence, a permanent divine realm or the death of an eternal self. Good rebirth can improve conditions for practice while remaining conditioned and impermanent. The goal therefore differs from merely securing a more comfortable place in the cycle.

The six realms of existence

The six-realm model distinguishes kinds of rebirth and the difficulties characteristic of each. It is especially familiar through Tibetan presentations. Some Buddhist texts and images count five destinations by grouping gods and asuras; different classifications do not mean the traditions have no shared account of conditioned rebirth.

These associations express patterns of action and consequence. They are not a reliable formula for diagnosing a living person's previous life or predicting a realm from one isolated act. Intentions, habits and conditions interact. In particular, illness or poverty must not be treated as proof of moral inferiority, and an animal's vulnerability is a reason for compassion rather than contempt.

All six realms remain samsara. Hell is not necessarily eternal punishment imposed by a creator; devas are not permanently saved. A favourable result is exhausted when its conditions change. This is why the contrast between higher and lower rebirth is different from the contrast between samsara and liberation.