4. The transmigration of souls.
The aim which Jainism, like Buddhism, sets before its disciples is the escape from the endless round of successive existences, known as Samsāra, through the extinction of the karman or sum of actions. This is attained by complete subjection of the passions and destruction of all desires and appetites of the body and mind, that is, by the most rigid asceticism, as well as by observing all the moral rules prescribed by the religion. It was the Jīna or prophet who showed this way of escape, and hence he is called Tirthakār or ‘The Finder of the Ford,’ through the ocean of existence.[7] But Jainism differs from Buddhism in that it holds that the soul, when finally emancipated, reaches a heaven and there continues for ever a separate intellectual existence, and is not absorbed into Nirvāna or a state of blessed nothingness.