Samsara

Samsara is the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, driven by ignorance, craving, and clinging. It is not merely the succession of physical lives but the continual spinning of conditioned existence itself — moment by moment, lifetime after lifetime — in which suffering repeats endlessly through grasping at impermanent phenomena.

At its core, samsara reflects the mind’s failure to see reality as it is. Misunderstanding impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self, beings become trapped in habitual reactions, continually seeking satisfaction where none can be found. Each moment of craving, aversion, and delusion perpetuates the cycle, binding one to further becoming (*bhava*) and suffering.

Importantly, samsara is not a place but a process — a dynamic unfolding of causes and conditions. Even within a single lifetime, one experiences countless cycles of arising and passing, hope and disappointment, becoming and loss. Each moment of mental proliferation reflects this ongoing spinning of becoming.

The goal of practice is not to escape to some other realm, but to bring this cycle to an end. Through insight into the conditioned nature of all experience, the practitioner gradually weakens attachment and identification. As clinging dissolves, the momentum of samsara slows, until finally, the entire cycle ceases in complete freedom (*nibbāna*).

Samsara is self-perpetuating only so long as ignorance remains. The Buddha’s path offers the means to awaken — to stop spinning the wheel — and to rest in the peace that lies beyond becoming.

“The world is on fire with aging and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, and despair; yet one who sees with wisdom is freed from samsara’s burning wheel.”
— Samyutta Nikāya 35.28