Samsara (saṃsāra)

Samsara is the wheel of repeated birth, death and rebirth in which every embodied being turns, driven by karma and sustained by ignorance of the self. Vidura's parable of the man hanging over a pit in a forest, licking honey from a branch that mice are gnawing through, is the epic's most concentrated image of it. Escape from samsara is moksha, and the long philosophical books of the Mahabharata exist largely to argue about how a person still living in the world might find it.