Reincarnation a Key to Understanding Hindu Reincarnation

Reincarnation

A Key to Understanding Hindu Reincarnation

When one thinks of the concept of a divine trinity, the first thing that most Americans would think of would be the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. However, there are other equally important trinities within other religions, for the number three has had religious relevance since ancient times. The sanctity of the number three might arise from the fact that it can be seen to represent the essential triad of life: Families and the species itself continue from past to future as each pair of parents gives rise to a child, who in turn joins with another to produce another child, and so humans step their way three by three into the future.

Hinduism also has a central trinity that in important ways parallels the Christian trinity -- or that is paralleled in important ways by the Christian trinity, depending upon which way one wishes to view the analogy. This concept is expressed as the Trimurti, a Sanskrit word that can be translated into English as "three forms." This trinity takes two related but distinct forms within Hindu thought and practice.

The trimurti is incorporated in the forms of three different gods: Brahma (who is the creator god), Vishnu (who is the preserver of life), and Shiva (who is the divine force of destruction). These three ideas of creation, maintenance, and destruction are intimately linked for the Hindu to these three gods, but they also exist separately from them so that the trimurti also expresses these general ideas apart from their divine representations.

This triad of deities is also sometimes referred to as Great Trinity and may be addressed as "Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh." The trimurti is sometimes depicted in art as three heads on one neck or as three faces on a single head, each looking in a different direction (Zimmer, 1972, p. 36). It is important to note that while there are clear parallels between the Hindu idea of trimurti and the Christian Trinity, there are also clear differences since within Hinduism there has never been a true equality among the three gods. Each strain of Hinduism and indeed each worshipper tends to value one of the gods more than the others.

The concept of the trimurti is fundamentally linked to the idea of reincarnation, which is at the heart of all Hindu belief. The concept of reincarnation is simple: A soul is born into one body, lives a life in that body, and at death is first freed and re-incorporated into another body. Each new life is dependent on the actions of the soul in its pervious life, and the goal (for the soul) is eventually to escape the wheel of life and to ascend to life without a body at all.

The parallels between this concept of life and the trimurti are fundamental, for the concept of life as creation, stability, and then destruction is the same cycle that exists within the idea of the cycle of reincarnation. Creation for each individual is the embodiment of the soul in whatever animal or human will bear that soul for a lifetime. The period of maintenance or stability is the period of life that exists for each individual in a particular form. And the destruction that is symbolized by Shiva evokes for the Hindu not a final act of destruction but simply the destruction of a particular body, a specific chapter in the long-running biography of each soul as it cycles up and down the ladder of life forms until it can escape reincarnation (Flood, 2003, p. 64).

This model of reincarnation (which is also described as the transmigration of souls) is carried out not only in human life but also in the divine pantheon, for gods and goddesses as well as humans can be reincarnated. Gods can in fact be reincarnated in human form, thus linking the divine cycle of creation-stability-destruction even more closely to human life (Jansen, 2003, p. 81).