Rebirth

The sages, united with pure reason, renounce the results of their actions and, liberated from the cycle of birth, they attain a state of bliss.

One who truly knows in essence this divine nature of My birth and action — on leaving the body, is not reborn, but comes to Me, O Arjuna.

The Blessed Lord said: Many births have passed for Me, and for you too, O Arjuna. I know them all — you do not know them, O scorcher of foes.

Just as a person casts off worn-out garments and puts on others that are new, even so the embodied soul sheds worn-out bodies and takes on other new ones.

Just as the embodied soul in this body passes through childhood, youth, and old age, so too it passes into another body. The wise person is not deluded by this.

Whoever desires and clings to desires is reborn again and again because of those desires. But for one whose desires are wholly fulfilled, whose Self has been perfected, all desires dissolve right here.

One who thus knows purusha and prakriti together with its qualities — in whatever manner they may live, they are not born again.

All worlds up to the realm of Brahma are subject to return, O Arjuna. But having attained Me, O son of Kunti, there is no rebirth.

Having come to Me, the great souls who have reached the highest perfection do not take birth again in this abode of suffering, which is impermanent.

Dwelling deep in ignorance, the childish say: 'We have achieved our purpose!' But because those attached to rituals do not understand the truth, their rewards are exhausted, and they fall back from their earned worlds, afflicted.

These eighteen ritual forms are but frail, leaking boats—impermanent rafts. The fools who take them for the highest good will return again to old age and death.

As the wind carries fragrances away from their source, so the lord of the body, taking up these senses, departs from one body and moves on to another.

The purusha, dwelling within prakriti, experiences the qualities born of prakriti. Attachment to these qualities is the cause of its births in good and evil wombs.

Those who have no faith in this dharma, O scorcher of foes, without attaining Me, return again to the path of death and repeated becoming.

Those established in sattva rise upward; those in rajas remain in the middle; and those in tamas, being of the lowest quality, sink downward.

This very same multitude of beings arises again and again, dissolving at the coming of night, O Partha, and arising helplessly at the coming of day.

There, that one regains the awakened understanding accumulated in the previous body, and from that point strives still further toward full perfection, O joy of the Kuru clan.

Or else such a one is born into the lineage of wise yogis — yet this kind of birth is far rarer to obtain in this world.

Having reached the realms of the meritorious and dwelling there for countless ages, the one who has fallen from yoga is reborn into the home of the pure and the prosperous.

The Buddha declared, 'We are made up of our thoughts.' Our thoughts cause the cycle of birth and death.