_Individual beginninglessness is the key-word, the guiding clue to the Buddha-thought._ In it is exhausted the teaching of Kamma. The _I_-process has its _in-force_, its Kamma from out a previous existence. Otherwise expressed: The _I_-process is not the result of an impact, has not been set going, but burns on from beginninglessness down to this present moment, itself ever and again _perpetuating itself_. Whenever an existence disintegrates, the Kamma in virtue of which it has been burning takes hold anew in a new location and there sets alight a new _I_-process that unfolds itself into a new personality. _The Buddha teaches re-births._ The self-perpetuation of the individual energies, the Kammas, in the formation of ever new individualities, is by the Buddha called “Samsāra.” This word is most frequently translated, “the circling round of re-births,”--a rendering that may easily lead to a false conception. Where the entire universe is nothing but a huge summation of single combustion processes, there no circling round can be; there each moment of existence always and everywhere is something that never before has been and never again will be. With the translation “circling round of re-births,” one only works with physics and its reversible processes; one is in danger of apprehending life mechanically. As a matter of fact, “Samsāra” means nothing but the “together-wandering,” the ascent and descent of the beings in the universe, that ever and again, now here now there, come into manifestation anew, according as their Kamma here or there takes hold. “Without beginning, without end is this Samsāra. A beginning of beings encompassed by nescience who, fettered by the thirst for life, pass on to ever new births, verily is not to be perceived.” The thinking man naturally asks, “Is there any proof of such a teaching? or must it simply be believed?” In the latter case it were as worthless to the genuine thinker as is every religion of faith. Whether I call that on which I believe, force or energy, god or Kamma, makes no essential difference. But to this question there are two answers--an answer of a real, and an answer of an abstract nature. The answer of real nature is supplied by the Buddha when he affirms of himself that simultaneously with the attainment of his Buddha-knowledge, he acquired the faculty of remembering his previous forms of existence back into eras of time the most stupendously remote. He teaches, however, that every one who, like himself, has wrestled his way to the same knowledge, obtains this same capacity of calling to remembrance his previous states of existence.