What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe self returns in new lives, again and again, until something releases it.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Hinduism and The Order of the Solar Temple are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across8 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderJainism · c. 550 BCE
Newest holderAum Shinrikyo · 1984 CE
Turns up as13 tenets · 2 experiences · 1 rite · 1 scripture
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 11 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
Action bears fruit: karma binds consequence to deed across lifetimes.
No judge required — cause and effect run through moral life as surely as through nature.
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The self is reborn until liberation.
Samsara is the default condition; moksha — release — is the shared goal the schools define differently.
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Beings are reborn through six realms.
Gods, jealous gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, hell-beings — a wheel with no exit but awakening, and human birth the rare rung where the work can actually be done.
held by most
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The funeral, and the merit poured after.
Chanting at the body, robes given to monks in the dead one's name, and water poured out while the merit is dedicated to them — repeated at seven-day intervals while the interval lasts.
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The Pure Land receives the faithful.
Rebirth there, where awakening is easy — grace, in a Buddhist key.
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Karma is a substance.
Not a moral ledger and not a law of consequence — fine physical matter, drawn to the soul by passion and stuck there by it, with a measurable weight, duration and intensity. This is the distinctive Jain claim, and the technical literature on it runs to thousands of pages.
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The soul is the shape of the body it fills.
It expands and contracts to fit — an elephant's soul fills an elephant, an ant's fills an ant, and the same soul does both across lives. It is not a point and not everywhere; it is exactly as big as what it is currently living in.
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Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Poa — that a killing could improve the victim's next life.
Poa in Tibetan practice is a rite performed for the dying to guide consciousness at death. Asahara inverted it: a person accumulating bad karma could, he taught, be killed by an enlightened master as an act of mercy. This is the doctrine that made the murders internally legible, and it is rejected by every Buddhist school it was borrowed from.
⚖ contested within
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
Souls reincarnate within the community.
At death the soul passes instantly to a Druze newborn — the community is a closed circuit of souls, which is why no one joins and no one leaves.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
A human birth is the opening, and it closes.
The soul is said to pass through 8.4 million forms; the human one is the rare chance to remember the Name and get out of the cycle. Karma sets the terms — but the Sikh accent falls on grace, which can cut the sequence short without notice.
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
The cycle is 5,000 years and it repeats exactly.
World history is a wheel of four ages that comes round identically, and the present moment is the confluence just before it turns. Every teaching in the system depends on this timing.
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
You are not your body and not your mind.
You are a thetan: an immortal spiritual being who has lived before, who fell into the trap of matter, and who is now identified with the equipment.
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The Order of the Solar Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
The Transit.
The order's name for the departure — a passage, not a death. Letters posted to journalists, scholars and relatives days before the October 1994 deaths set out the doctrine at length and are the reason so much of the internal teaching is on the record.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
They come back into the family.
A child is often identified as a returning ancestor, and the names say so plainly: Babatunde, father has returned; Yetunde, mother has returned. It is not transmigration into anything at all — the tradition holds the return happens within the lineage.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Poa — that a killing could improve the victim's next life.
Poa in Tibetan practice is a rite performed for the dying to guide consciousness at death. Asahara inverted it: a person accumulating bad karma could, he taught, be killed by an enlightened master as an act of mercy. This is the doctrine that made the murders internally legible, and it is rejected by every Buddhist school it was borrowed from.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →