Transmigration

Transmigration, passing of the soul at death into a new body or new form of being. Transmigration and reincarnation, or the rebirth of a soul in a new body (especially in a new human body), are roughly synonymous. Metamorphosis and resurrection are not synonymous with transmigration. Metamorphosis is the transformation of a living being into another form or substance of life (as a person into a tree); resurrection, especially the Christian doctrine of resurrection, is the rising again to life of the body after death.

The ancient Egyptians believed in the transmigration of souls; their dead were embalmed in order to preserve the body so that it might accompany the ka, an animating force that was the counterpart of the body, into the next world. Among the ancient Greeks, transmigration was a doctrine closely associated with the followers of the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. According to Pythagorean teaching, the soul survives bodily death, being immortal and merely confined to the body. After a series of rebirths in other bodies, each rebirth following a period of purification in the underworld, the soul becomes free eternally from the cycle of reincarnations.

Plato maintained that the soul is eternal, pre-existent, and wholly spiritual. After entering the body, it tends to become impure through association with bodily passions; it retains, nevertheless, a minimal knowledge of former existences. Delivery from the body occurs only after the soul passes through a series of transmigrations. If the soul has had a good character in its several existences, it is allowed to return to a state of pure being. If, however, its character has continually deteriorated in its transmigrations, it ends in Tartarus, the place of eternal damnation.

The idea of transmigration was never adopted into orthodox Judaism or Christianity. Among Jews, only the mystical Cabbalists adopted it as part of their system of philosophy. The Gnostics and the Manichaeans also believed in transmigration, but early Christians who adopted Gnostic and Manichaean doctrines were declared heretics by the Church.

In Eastern religious thought and philosophy, belief in transmigration seems not to have been part of the most ancient religious beliefs of the Aryan conquerors of India; it appears first in doctrinal form in the Indian religious and philosophical collection of the Upanishads. Ever since, however, samsara (the Sanskrit term) has been one of the major tenets of three major Eastern religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Thus, according to modern popular Hinduism, the state in which the soul is reborn is predetermined by the good or bad deeds (karma) done in former incarnations; the souls of those who do evil, for example, are reborn in lower states (such as animals, insects, and the spirits of trees). Ultimately, release from samsara and karma is attained after atonement for bad deeds and recognition that the individual soul (atman) and the universal soul (Brahman) are identical. Buddhism specifically rejects the existence of the atman. However, its conceptualization of the cause-and-effect chain of rebirths is functionally indistinguishable from the Hindu doctrine of transmigration.

Since ancient times, less structured societies than those embracing major Eastern or Western religions have also believed in various forms of transmigration. They have supposed the body to be inhabited by a single soul, or vital essence, which is believed to separate from the body at death (and also during sleep), passing out and in through the mouth or nostrils. Separated from the body after the body's death, the soul seeks to inhabit a new body, and if need be will enter the body of an animal or some other lower form of life. Among these cultures, it is believed that reincarnation is accomplished by transmigration of the soul of a dead person to the body of an infant of the same family, with the subsequent animation of the child. Family resemblances are traced to this process.