Samsara

Samsara is the cycle of existence: being born, living, dying and being born again, over and over, driven by karma and by a basic confusion about who and what we are. The Sanskrit word carries the sense of wandering in circles. The Tibetan khorwa says much the same thing: going round. Think of a wheel that keeps turning because nobody has stopped it.

A wheel, and a state of mind

Traditionally six realms are described in which beings can take birth: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings. Tibetan paintings of the wheel of life show them side by side. At the hub are a cockerel, a snake and a pig, standing for desire, aversion and ignorance. They are what keep the wheel going.

The realms can be taken literally, and in the Tibetan tradition they are. Teachers also point out that you can find every one of them in an ordinary week. The restlessness of always wanting more. The tight grip of envy. Anger that colours everything it touches. Seen this way, samsara is not somewhere far off. It is what happens when a mind that does not know itself gets pulled in the same direction again and again.

That is why Nyingma teaching does not treat samsara as an outside world to be escaped from. In Dzogchen, samsara and nirvana share one ground. What separates them is recognition. Not recognising the nature of mind, we circle. Recognising it, we are free. Simple to say. Very far from easy.

Why we contemplate it

The suffering of samsara is the fourth of the four thoughts that turn the mind towards the Dharma, the reflections that open the Ngöndro. Precious human birth comes first, then impermanence, then karma, and finally this: no place within the cycle offers lasting rest. Not even the pleasant ones. Happiness in samsara is real enough, but it does not hold, and keeping hold of it takes constant effort.

None of this is meant to make anyone gloomy. The aim is a clear-eyed kind of weariness, in Tibetan ngé jung, usually translated as renunciation: seeing that it need not go on like this forever, and wanting to get out. Without that, practice easily becomes one more pastime among many. With it, practice has somewhere to go.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling the suffering of samsara comes up every Saturday, together with the other three thoughts, at the start of the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro class in Hoofddorp. You don't need to know anything about it beforehand to come along. Learning it is what the class is for.