What is samsara (the cycle of rebirth) and how do you get out of it?
Draft: Sasha
Samsara (saṁsāra) is the continuing round of births, deaths and further births, in which beings are held by ignorance (avijjā) and craving (taṇhā). The word literally means “wandering on”. The way out is nibbāna: craving fades, ignorance ends, and with them the whole chain that produces suffering.
Samsara is not a place or a separate world you can enter or leave. It is a name for a process: one conditioned state gives rise to the next, with no discoverable beginning. The Buddha said the first point of this wandering cannot be found, however long you look for it (SN 15.3). The early texts list five destinations (gati) where rebirth can occur: hell, animals, ghosts (pettivisaya), humans, gods (MN 12). Rebirth among the gods is pleasant and lasts a long time, but it is no exit - it also ends in another birth.
None of this is driven by fate or by an outside power. In dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda), ignorance is the condition for the links that follow: craving leads to clinging, clinging to becoming (bhava), becoming to birth. Kamma is intention (cetanā), not a substance that drags us around the circle. Nothing transmigrates through death - no self, no unchanging consciousness. The monk Sāti, who thought otherwise, was corrected by the Buddha in sharp terms (MN 38). What continues is causal connection, not an entity.
The way out is set out in the second and third noble truths: craving that leads to renewed becoming produces suffering, and its complete fading brings that suffering to an end (MN 141). The means is the noble eightfold path, grouped as virtue, concentration and wisdom (MN 44). When craving and ignorance are pulled up by the root, no fuel is left for another birth. That is arahantship.
Two points cause most of the confusion. Leaving samsara does not mean relocating to a better part of it: MN 106 shows that even the refined formless attainments do not liberate while clinging remains. And the end of rebirth is not the annihilation of a person. Asked whether a Tathāgata exists after death, the Buddha answered neither yes nor no - those options do not apply here, any more than it applies to ask which direction a flame went when it went out (MN 72).
Awakening also comes in stages. A stream-enterer (sotāpanna) is still reborn, but the number of remaining births is now limited; the complete absence of further birth comes with arahantship.
Where to read: MN 38, MN 141, MN 72; on the undiscoverable beginning of samsara, SN 15.3.