What Hinduism Can Teach Us About Death

Death and religion are an interesting combination. Not only do they go together, but they’re almost inevitably intertwined. It's hard to look at one without looking at the other. In a way, religion exists because death does.

Heaven and hell in Christianity, reincarnation and nirvana in Buddhism, or the Underworld in Ancient Greek mythology. Every religion has its version of death and of what comes after.

One that I find particularly interesting is Hinduism.

For somebody new to spirituality, some Hindu concepts might feel pretty far out there. But they offer a fresh and genuinely interesting perspective on death, especially for a Westerner raised on the linear life-then-nothing model.

Here are five concepts from the world's oldest religion that might just change how you think about dying.

Karma

Karma is probably the most famous Hindu concept, and most people have at least a vague idea of what it means. Something like cosmic justice.

Be good and good things happen. Be bad and bad things happen.

That's not wrong, but the concept of karma in Hinduism is a bit more sophisticated than that.

In Hinduism, karma — the Sanskrit word for action or something that is done — is the principle that every act has a consequence, and that consequence follows the soul across lifetimes. It's less of a punishment or reward, and more the natural mechanics of cause and effect.

Every act, every karma, is the consequence of some previous karma, which is the consequence of some previous karma, and so on. You are basically the sum of your karma, and you use this lifetime to work through what you've built up in previous incarnations.

What makes this relevant in the context of death is that karma doesn't stop when the body dies. Your soul carries its karma into the next life, where it shapes the conditions you're born into.

The circumstances of your current life — your tendencies, your relationships, your struggles — are, in this view, the fruit of everything that came before. They have been chosen for you, for your soul, to make the best possible use of this lifetime.

For some of us, that means a life of poverty or chronic illness. For others, wealth, privilege, and an easy run. Some souls are here for a long stretch, while others pass through quickly, dying young, with most of life still unlived. According to Hinduism, none of this is random, and every soul has its own curriculum to work through.

Samsara

Samsara is the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Over and over, across countless lifetimes, in countless forms.

The soul, called the Atman in Sanskrit, moves from body to body the way you move from one day to the next.

Your body is like a spacesuit for living on this plane of reality. You need it, you take care of it, but you eventually take it off once it’s served its purpose, and you go on about your business without the suit.

When the body dies, the soul just keeps going until you have no more karma left to work through.

Wondering how long this has been going on? Here's how Ram Dass puts it:

Imagine a mountain of solid rock six miles long, six miles wide, and six miles high. Once every hundred years a crow flies by with a silk scarf in its beak, just barely caressing the top of the mountain with it. The length of time it would take to wear away that mountain is how Buddha described the journey to enlightenment. That's the game of incarnations. In the vastness of time any one incarnation is like the blink of an eye in relation to a seventy-year life span. Every time you blink, that's like another incarnation.

So this might not be your first time around.

According to Hinduism, we're just going round and round and round, working our way through built-up karma from previous lifetimes.

Incarnation after incarnation.

In that sense, death is not so much an end but a natural part of a much bigger circle. Birth, death, rebirth. Birth, death, rebirth.

Maya

We all have a pretty solid sense of what's real. Or do we?

What if what you thought of as real is only relatively real? Not unreal, but not absolutely real either.

Maya is the Hindu concept of illusion.

The idea that what we perceive as solid, permanent, and real is at a deeper level a kind of dream. Not fake, but temporary. The Indian sages called this the dream of waking life. You are so caught up in the drama of the story that you forget you're watching it.

Haven't you ever been in a dream that felt incredibly real, only to wake up and realise you were still dreaming, caught in another dream? Well, this life could just be another one.

Why does this matter for death?

Because if your identity is something you've constructed — an ego, a personality, a name, and a set of habits — then what dies when the body dies is not you. The real you, the awareness underneath all of it, doesn't go anywhere.

You don't die. Only who you think you are dies.

As Ram Dass writes:

These bodies we live in, and the ego that identifies with it, are just like the old family car. They are functional entities in which our Soul travels through our incarnation. But when they are used up, they die. The most graceful thing to do is to just allow them to die peacefully and naturally — to "let go lightly." Through it all, who we are is Soul... and when the body and the ego are gone, the Soul will live on, because the Soul is eternal.

Lila

Lila is my favourite Hindu concept.

It translates to game or divine play.

The idea is that the universe isn't a serious, heavy, grinding machine of cause and effect. It's more like a game that God is playing with himself for fun, and you and I are just characters in it.

There's no goal and no winner. The point is just to play.

The Hindus believe the whole universe is a divine game; God disguising himself as the many beings of this world, playing hide and seek with himself.

But really there is only one: God.

He created the world in play and plays the world from the inside. There seem to be other things and beings besides God — humans, trees, animals, rocks, rivers, cars — but only because he is dreaming them up as part of his play.

Whether you believe this is true or not, there's something genuinely liberating about looking at the world this way.

The Western mind treats life like a serious project with success metrics and timelines, while Hinduism treats it like a game. And games are usually more fun than projects.

Moksha

Moksha translates to liberation or salvation and is the highest goal of human life in Hinduism. It means liberation through God-realisation.

When you've achieved Moksha, the Hindus say you are done. Not dead, but done. Finished, in the best possible sense.

Your soul has learned everything it came here to learn, and is free. There's no more karma to work out, so there's nothing left for you to do here. You are a finished and complete being. Free from Samsara, the repeated cycle of births and deaths.

Your soul has completed its long journey and is merging back into the source; the One, God, or as Hinduism calls it, Brahman, the universal consciousness that underlies everything.

The good news is that everyone gets there eventually. Some sooner, some after many, many more lifetimes. But the destination is the same for all of us. As Hinduism Today describes it: the soul eventually merges into God like a drop of water merging with the ocean.

Or as Alan Watts put it: We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples."

Hinduism is, in this sense, among the most optimistic of the major religions about death because it sees death not as an ending, but as one stop on a very long journey that eventually ends in something like coming home.

I find this the most comforting idea in all of Hinduism. Not because it promises anything specific, but because it suggests the journey has a clear direction and a happy end.

That we're all, slowly and in our own time, finding our way back to something good.

Hinduism and Death

So what do Karma, Samsara, and co. have to do with death?

A lot, at least for me.

These five concepts not only describe what Hinduism believes happens after you die, but they also reframe what death even is. From the Western default of death as an ending to seeing death as a transition, a chapter in a much longer journey, but definitely not the final stop.

Whether you're religious, spiritual, both, or neither, these ideas are interesting concepts to work with.