es A.D. It included the then prevailing Indian conception of transmigration, though Buddha himself was not pleased with the way this idea was expressed by Hindu religious leaders of his time. Buddha in fact denied their conception of the soul as a spiritual substance: "Authentic child of India, he never doubted that reincarnation in some sense was a fact, but he was openly uncomfortable over the way his Brahmanic contemporaries were interpreting the concept" (Smith 171).
Buddha never gives a clear statement of his own views on the subject. Instead, he used the image of a flame being passed from candle to candle to express the concept: "As it is difficult to think of the flame on the last candle as being in any meaningful sense the same as the original flame, the connection would seem instead to be a causal one in which influence was transmitted by chain reaction but not substance" (Smith 171). Buddha also gave an image for his idea of karma, or fate. He mixed this idea with his view of the transmigration of the soul.
...