IB World Religions 4.4.3. Eschatology: Samsara, Karma and the Aim of Moksha Notes

4.4.3. Eschatology: Samsara, Karma and the Aim of Moksha

Samsara as the setting

1. Hindu teaching about last things does not start with an end. It starts with samsara, the beginningless round of birth, life, death and rebirth through which the atman is held to travel.
2. The word means wandering through, and Hindus use it for a process with no recorded start and no natural finish.
3. What wanders is not the personality. Hindus hold that name, memory, body and temperament belong to a single lifetime, while the atman that carries on is untouched by any of them.
4. Because the round is beginningless, Hindus are not asking how death first entered the world. The question they put instead is why the atman keeps returning, and how the returning can be brought to a stop.
5. Samsara is not described neutrally. Texts call it an ocean that has to be crossed and a wheel that turns whether or not the rider wants it to.
6. The world through which it turns is maya, real enough to act in but not the settled final reality it appears to be.

Attachment, desire and karma

1. Hindus explain the turning of the wheel with a chain that starts in ordinary experience. Living inside maya breeds attachment, attachment breeds desire, desire issues in action, and action leaves karma.
2. Karma means action, and then it means the residue an action leaves behind. Every deed is held to deposit a result that has to be worked out sooner or later.
3. In most accounts the law is impersonal. No deity is pictured sitting in judgment, because the result follows the deed as reliably as any physical consequence follows its cause.
4. Hindus distinguish punya, merit or spiritual excellence, from pap, the fault that weighs the other way, and hold that both alike must be discharged.
5. Intention counts as heavily as the deed. An act done out of craving is said to bind far more tightly than the same act done as duty, without hunger for what it will bring.
6. This is why the Bhagavad Gita does not tell Arjuna to stop acting. It tells him to act without attachment to results, which is held to let a person work without adding to the store.

Rebirth and its realms

1. Hindus hold that the store of karma shapes the next birth, settling the body, the family, the circumstances and the length of the life the atman takes up.
2. Rebirth is not confined to human bodies. Texts describe the atman passing into animal and plant forms too, which is one ground Hindus give for ahimsa, non-violence towards living things.
3. Many Hindus also speak of temporary destinations between lives. Svarga, a heaven of enjoyment, and naraka, a hell of suffering, are described as places where particular karma is used up.
4. Both are held to be strictly temporary. Neither is a final verdict, since a heaven that runs on merit must end when the merit runs out.
5. Hindus honour the pitris, the ancestors, and many hold that offerings made for the recently dead help them through the passage to their next birth.
6. The result is an account of last things with no last judgment in it. What has to be escaped is not a punishment but the round itself.

The Vedanta schools on moksha

1. Moksha means release, and it names the ending of samsara rather than a place reached after death.
2. The schools agree on the word and disagree sharply over what release consists of, which is why Hindus have no single account of the end.
3. Advaita Vedanta, following Shankara, holds that the atman was never separate from Brahman at all, so moksha removes an ignorance rather than gaining anything new.
4. On that reading the freed self does not travel anywhere or keep a private identity, because the sense of being a separate individual was the very mistake being corrected.
5. Vishishtadvaita, following Ramanuja, holds that the atman is genuinely real and genuinely distinct, and that moksha is unending loving nearness to God while remaining oneself.
6. Dvaita, following Madhva, presses the distinction hardest, teaching that God and the atman stay permanently separate and that the freed soul serves and enjoys God forever.

Moksha in devotional traditions

1. For the great bhakti movements what matters at the end is relationship rather than absorption, and they describe it in the language of love rather than of knowledge.
2. Vaishnavas speak of the freed devotee entering Vaikuntha, the deathless realm of Vishnu, and staying there in the presence of God.
3. Gaudiya Vaishnavas describe Goloka, the realm of Krishna, where the devotee takes up an eternal part in the loving service surrounding him.
4. Teachers of Shaiva Siddhanta hold that the freed soul comes to share the nature of Shiva without ever becoming Shiva.
5. Shaktas describe the goal as union with the Goddess, whose creative power the freed soul is held to share rather than to escape.
6. Across these traditions the shared claim is that liberation is given by grace as much as earned by effort, which is why devotion rather than analysis is treated as the road.

Liberation in this life

1. Hindus do not all agree that liberation must wait for death. Jivanmukti, liberation while still living, names the state of someone held to be free while the body carries on.
2. The jivanmukta is described as still eating, speaking and working, but without the craving that would lay down fresh karma.
3. Karma already earned is said to play itself out like a potter's wheel that keeps turning after the potter has lifted a hand from it.
4. Videhamukti is the term for release at the death of the body, and Dvaita along with some devotional schools holds that only this later form is available.
5. Hindus point to teachers such as Ramana Maharshi as people their communities regarded as liberated while still alive.
6. Because release can be described as available now, this teaching bears on the present. It changes how a person is expected to live today, not only what they expect afterwards.