Vedic sages rejected a simple heaven-or-hell afterlife as unfair
Rebirth sits at the heart of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, yet it also surfaces among Pythagoras and Plato, Kabbalists, the Druze and Celtic druids. In India, early thinkers argued that people live unequally good lives, so a single verdict of paradise or torment could not be just.
The English word comes from Latin for 'entering the flesh again'. Greek writers used metempsychosis, credited to Pythagoras, built from roots meaning change and to ensoul; palingenesis, 'being born again', was a near synonym. What returns differs by tradition: a soul, a mind, consciousness, or something beyond all three, reborn as a person, animal, plant, spirit or inhabitant of another realm.
Where the idea started is unclear. The earliest written references in India turn up in the Rigveda, the Yajurveda and the Upanishads of the late Vedic era, roughly 1100 to 500 BCE, before the Buddha and Mahavira. Scholars have also proposed the peoples of the Ganges valley or Dravidian South India as sources, though no direct evidence confirms it. The oldest Vedic layers pictured one afterlife in heaven or hell earned by merit; later rishis objected that virtue and vice come in degrees, and proposed rewards proportionate to one's deeds.
In the Indian religions, rebirth is an endless wheel called samsara, a kind of aimless wandering. It is also a chance: ethical living, meditation and yogic disciplines can end the cycle. That release goes by several names, including moksha, nirvana, mukti and kaivalya, and it is treated as the highest spiritual aim.
Most Abrahamic denominations reject reincarnation, but notable pockets accept it. Kabbalistic Judaism calls it gilgul, meaning cycle, and holds that humans return only as humans unless God decides otherwise; the notion runs through much Yiddish literature. Cathars, Alawites, Hasidic Jews, Rastafarians and Rosicrucians have held versions too, as did strands of Neoplatonism, Orphism and Roman-era Gnosticism. Interest has also grown among Europeans and North Americans in recent decades, and the logician Kurt Gödel is among modern philosophers who used the word transmigration.
Source: Reincarnation
