Every Hindu funeral rite is aimed at getting the dead safely to a heaven or a good rebirth, and the theology behind it says both are temporary. This produces a two-storey religion that the tradition is entirely open about: most people, most of the time, are working for a good next life, an ancestral realm, or relief from a specific trouble, and the goal of ending rebirth altogether belongs to renunciates and to old age. The Upanishads treat heaven with something close to contempt — a place where merit is consumed and the soul is then sent back down. What the schools then fight about is the mechanism: knowledge in Advaita, surrender in the Vaishnava schools, the exhaustion of karma in Mimamsa-influenced accounts, the isolation of consciousness from nature in Samkhya-Yoga. Jainism and Buddhism, which are outside the Vedic fold, agree with all of this about heaven and disagree about almost everything else.