IB World Religions 1.2.3. Where Are We Going? Reincarnation and Moksha Notes

1.2.3. Where Are We Going? Reincarnation and Moksha

Favourable and unfavourable rebirth

1. Hindus call rebirth punarjanma (being born again). The atman does not stay with one body, and the body it takes next is said to follow from the karma it carries into that moment.
2. The direction of travel can go either way. Hindus speak of favourable rebirth into circumstances that make religious life easier, and of unfavourable rebirth into circumstances that make it harder.
3. The range is wider than human lives. Traditional teaching includes birth as an animal, as a preta (a hungry departed spirit) or among the gods, according to how the accumulated karma stands.
4. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that whatever state a person dwells on at the end is the state they go to. Many Hindus therefore treat the manner of dying as religiously serious.
5. That belief shapes what happens at a Hindu deathbed. Relatives may place tulsi leaves and Ganges water in the dying person's mouth and recite the name of a deity, so that the last attention rests where it should.
6. Rebirth is not usually framed as a sentence handed down by a judge. Hindus describe it as the natural ripening of what a person has already set in motion.

Temporary heavens and hells

1. Hindu tradition does describe heavens and hells. Svarga is the heavenly world of enjoyment and naraka is the realm of punishment, and the Puranas describe both in detail.
2. Neither is final. Hindus generally hold that a stay in svarga or naraka lasts only as long as the karma that paid for it, and that rebirth follows when it runs out.
3. This makes heaven a problem rather than a solution. A soul enjoying svarga is still inside samsara and still on its way back into it.
4. The Bhagavad Gita states it plainly: those who have enjoyed the wide world of heaven return to the world of mortals once their merit is spent.
5. The dead are also spoken of as pitrs (ancestors) who dwell for a time in the pitr-loka, the world of the fathers. Families keep offering to them, which assumes they are still travelling.
6. The temporariness is why moksha has to be described as something different in kind. It is not a better address inside the same system.

Moksha as the goal

1. Moksha means release or liberation. It names the end of samsara for the atman: no further birth, no further death, and no further ripening of karma.
2. Moksha stands at the top of the traditional list of human aims. Beside dharma (duty), artha (wealth and security) and kama (pleasure), it is the aim the others are meant to serve.
3. Many Hindus describe moksha as the removal of what binds rather than the gaining of something new. On that account the atman was never actually lacking anything.
4. Moksha is said to end the consequences of past karma and not only the making of fresh karma. Traditions speak of stored karma being burned up rather than left unpaid.
5. It is not usually described as extinction. The atman is not said to be destroyed, though schools disagree sharply about what remains and in what form.
6. It is not usually described as a place either. Hindus use language of merging, of nearness and of arriving at the feet of God, and different schools mean different things by those words.

Moksha and this life

1. Some Hindu traditions hold that liberation can be reached before death. That state is jivanmukti (liberation while living), and the one who reaches it is a jivanmukta.
2. Such a person is described as continuing to eat, teach and travel while no longer generating binding karma. The remaining life is said to play out momentum already set going.
3. Liberation completed at death is videhamukti (liberation without a body). Schools weigh the two differently, and several devotional traditions hold that full liberation comes only after death.
4. Most Hindus, in ordinary practice, do not describe themselves as aiming at moksha this time round. A better rebirth, a well-lived householder life and the welfare of the family are the nearer goals.
5. Place is treated as making a difference. Kashi, the city of Varanasi, is held by many Hindus to grant liberation to those who die inside it, and pilgrims travel there to spend their last days.
6. Water carries similar weight. After cremation, families commonly immerse the ashes in the Ganges or another sacred river, and travel long distances to do it.

Moksha in two schools

1. Where a school places the atman decides what it can say liberation is. The disagreement is about the ending, not about the diagnosis.
2. Advaita Vedanta, following Shankara, teaches that the atman is Brahman already. Moksha is therefore the ending of the ignorance that hid this, and not a journey to anywhere.
3. On that reading liberation is often compared to waking. Nothing is acquired, and what falls away is a misreading of what was always the case.
4. Vishishtadvaita, following Ramanuja, teaches that the atman is real and distinct and belongs to God as a body belongs to the soul that governs it. Moksha there is unbroken communion with Vishnu, with the individual preserved.
5. Bhakti traditions carry that further. Devotees of Krishna, of Shiva or of the Goddess speak of eternal service and nearness, and some say plainly that they would rather serve God than dissolve into him.
6. Both are called moksha and both refuse svarga as the goal. What they describe at the end of the road is not the same, and Hindus have argued about it for centuries.