What is samsara?
Photo by Maria Teneva
A creative definition of the Buddhist term ‘samsara’:
Wandering on.
We go to bed to rest but often spend our dreams wandering around, searching for something, or trying to get somewhere. It can be a relief to wake up and have the dream scenario stop.
You’re no doubt familiar with the word ‘nirvana’, well ‘samsara’ is its counterpart. Samsara is to nirvana as hell is to heaven. And just like heaven and hell, we often talk of them as places we will go to.
My brother once asked me, ‘What if when you die you find out you are wrong?’. As if Buddhism was something you practised for ‘the afterlife’.
Practising the Dharma, we gradually discover that much of what we think of as ‘things’, such as places, people, and objects, are actually more like ‘processes’.
Samsara too is a process. It’s something we are doing. So what is it we’re doing when we’re doing samsara?
One definition of the word is ‘wandering on’. It’s pointing to the way our stream of consciousness flows on, from one moment to the next, even from one life to another.
As Thanissaro Bhikkhu says,
“We have the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them. As one world falls apart, you create another one and go there. At the same time, you bump into other people who are creating their own worlds, too.”
Let’s forget the afterlife, for now. Here, at this very moment, we can be creating a heavenly state or a hellish one.
The term ‘wandering on’ makes me think of my dreams. It’s not until I ‘wake up’ from the dream that the wandering stops. So does it follow that ‘waking up’, nirvana, is a kind of stopping? A coming to rest. Peace.
(Definition of Nirvana to follow soon)
