Samskara

An impression left on the subtle body by past experience — the unit of continuity across lives.

Overview

Every thought, perception, and action leaves a trace. In Vedanta these traces are called samskaras. They are stored in the subtle body and, together with latent desires (vasanas), are what carry character forward from one lifetime to another. When Swami Sarvapriyananda explains how transmigration works in 02-13-15, this is the mechanism he names: the subtle body curls up at death, and when it takes a new body, some of its stored samskaras are reactivated — but selectively, depending on the body, the environment, and past karma.

Samskaras explain two things that otherwise puzzle: (1) why a newborn already has tendencies, preferences, and sometimes extraordinary aptitudes (prodigies), even though specific memories from a past life are ordinarily not accessible; and (2) why even within one life, deep habits are so hard to shift — they are a stack of reinforcing impressions, not single choices.

Spiritual practice works by laying down new samskaras and gradually weakening old ones; titiksha, in particular, is a way of not adding reactive samskaras when life pushes.

Related concepts

• sukshma-sharira — where samskaras are stored
• titiksha — the discipline that refuses to add reactive samskaras
• samsara — the wandering that samskaras carry forward
• karma-yoga — acting without depositing binding samskaras

In the Gita

• 02-13-15 — samskaras as what transmigrates with the embodied one

Lecture evidence

• Ep. 4 [09:20]: Samskaras and vasanas are what goes from lifetime to lifetime in the subtle body.
• Ep. 4 [22:40]: Past karma gives this body; what is suitable to this body and environment in the stored samskaras gets expressed now — not all at once.