Samsara: The Wheel of Life and Transcendence

After my father died in 2019, I began to photograph Samsara – the Buddhist understanding of the “wheel” of life or “the suffering-laden cycle of birth, death and rebirth of all life, matter and existence”. Sometimes the word is used to mean “aimless, directionless wandering” or simply “world.” At the center of Samsara is the cause of suffering - attachment, aversion, and ignorance. I feel an urgency to illustrate our daily struggle of desire, disappointment, and impermanence as well as the ways in which people overcome adversity and suffering, especially in turbulent times such as these.

A painting of the wheel hangs in most Buddhist monasteries and serves as my guide. It depicts Six Realms of Existence, particular states of mind which shape the choices we make in our lives. These are: desire, ignorance, pride, jealousy, greed, and hate. Being a practicing Buddhist of 30 years I feel compelled to also include photographs of the six “liberating” actions which lift us out of suffering, giving us hope: generosity, discipline, patience, joyous effort, contemplation and wisdom. Emotion and action are key to describing Samsara. I have been gathering images from daily life in the Pacific Northwest, tableau, abstraction and intentional wandering which describe our Samsaric world.

My pictures from the last few years depict common themes in all our lives, birth, death, loneliness, misfortune, aging, fragility, fear and hope. I see evidence of Samsara in varying subjects – in the person experiencing homelessness, my daughter after a skateboarding accident; in dead animals and in the birth of a friend’s baby. In a Washington State Park there is a telephone in the forest where people can talk to ghosts of dead relatives. On the Oregon Coast there is a family living in a collapsing house. As I am photographing Samsara I am favoring images drawn from everyday life so that viewers can more easily recognize how the scenes depicted in the “wheel” appear in their daily lives too. A photograph of an embrace may make a viewer appreciate the touch of a loved one. The photograph of my father’s corpse may entice a viewer to remember impermanence. These are photographs of modern people in contemporary settings expressing emotions, thoughts, gestures and ideas drawn from the “Wheel of Life” so that a wide audience may identify with the Buddha’s enlightened vision on the nature of human life and consciousness.

Jason Langer, 2024