Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c7.s8.t2.2

v1.c7.s8.t2.2

Samsara concept in Vedic Upanishad - In the vedic period, Indians started to think where they would go after death. ègveda mentions of Death “Yama” and Western Pure Land, and believed that people who do good will enter Western Pure Land after they die. ègveda says that “reuniting with ancestor, meeting Yama, and obtaining the returns of benevolence in Western Pure Land”. In Vedic period, people believed that the soul lasted forever, and death meant that the soul could walk from one world to another. Indian religions in later ages emphasised that Samsara was directly related to a human’s behaviour. Such contents were also mentioned in the Veda, but the difference was that the latter stressed that people doing good would ascend to heaven, but it had not directly shown that people doing evil things would go to hell.