The most characteristic doctrine of Indian religion—rarely absent in India and imported by Buddhism into all the countries which it influenced—is that called metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul or reincarnation. The last of these terms best expresses Indian, especially Buddhist, ideas but still the usual Sanskrit equivalent, _Saṃsâra_, means migration. The body breaks up at death but something passes on and migrates to another equally transitory tenement. Neither Brahmans nor Buddhists seem to contemplate the possibility that the human soul may be a temporary manifestation of the Eternal Spirit which comes to an end at death—a leaf on a tree or a momentary ripple on the water. It is always regarded as passing through many births, a wave traversing the ocean. Hindu speculation has never passed through the materialistic phase, and the doctrine that the soul is annihilated at death is extremely rare in India. Even rarer perhaps is the doctrine that it usually enters on a permanent existence, happy or otherwise. The idea underlying the transmigration theory is that every state which we call existence must come to an end. If the soul can be isolated from all the accidents and accessories attaching to it, then there may be a state of permanence and peace but not a state comparable with human existence, however enlarged and glorified. But why does not this conviction of impermanence lead to the simpler conclusion that the end of physical life is the end of all life? Because the Hindus have an equally strong conviction of continuity: everything passes away and changes but it is not true to say of anything that it arises from nothing or passes into nothing. If human organisms (or any other organisms) are mere machines, if there is nothing more to be said about a corpse than about a smashed watch, then (the Hindu thinks) the universe is not continuous. Its continuity means for him that there is something which eternally manifests itself in perishable forms but does not perish with them any more than water when a pitcher is broken or fire that passes from the wood it has consumed to fresh fuel.