This paper analyses three concepts crucial to the Buddhist doctrine: (1) Death which all living beings have to go through and which figures in the canonical texts in a personified form as Mara, the ruler of samsara, and death as the dissolution of the constituents of personality which even Mara must undergo. However, the actuality of death, even within samsara, is virtually denied by the doctrine of rebirth and by the passing into the deathless state of nibbana on liberation. (2) Rebirth is described as a continual process governed by the circular chain of dependent origination which guarantees individual continuation through life from childhood to old age and through the sequence of rebirths. It can be broken only by a free decision and subsequent effort to accomplish liberation. (3) Identity of the individual is preserved by this continuity despite the absence of any unchanging core of the personality, which is unfathomable and continues even into the state of liberation. This was the teaching of the Pudgalavada school which spelled out the implications of the Pali discourse known as the `Burden bearer` and which was supplemented in Mahayana by the teaching according to which five samsaric khandhas are transformed into the fivefold transcendental wisdom of the accomplished ones.
