Meaning of death means the end of everything for an ordinary
person but for a buddhist there is life and hope after
death.
I think you are refering to the
wheel of rebirth and death, Samsara in Buddhism. Samsara, is
the concept of cycle of birth and consequent decay and death, in
which all beings in the universe participate and which can only be
escaped through enlightenment. Samsara is associated with suffering
and is generally considered the antithesis of Nirvana.
There are six realms in
Samsara, cyclic of existence.
What determines which of these six
realms one is reborn in, is one's previous actions and thoughts,
one's karma.
The Wheel of Samsara
The Six Realms are an allegorical description of
conditioned existence, or samsara, into which beings are reborn.
The nature of one's existence is determined by karma. Some realms
seem more pleasant than others -- heaven sounds preferable to hell
-- but all are dukkha, meaning they are temporary and
imperfect.
The Six Realms often are illustrated by the Bhava
Chakra, or Wheel of Life.
Please note that in some schools the realms of Devas and Asuras
are combined, leaving five realms instead of six.
1. Deva-gati, the Realm of Devas (Gods) and
Heavenly Beings
http://buddhism.about.com/od/basicbuddhistteachings/tp/Six-Realms-of-Existence.htm
Three important concepts in understanding Buddhism are
karma, Samsara, and Nirvana.
Karma refers to the law of cause and effect in a
person's life, reaping what one has sown. Buddhists believe that
every person must go through a process of birth and rebirth until
he reaches the state of nirvana in which he breaks this cycle.
According to the law of karma, "You are what you are and do what
you do, as a result of what you were and did in a previous
incarnation, which in turn was the inevitable outcome of what you
were and did in still earlier incarnations."(4) For a Buddhist,
what one will be in the next life depends on one's actions in this
present life. Buddha believed, unlike Hinduism, that a person can
break the rebirth cycle no matter what class he is born into.
The second key concept to understand is the law of
Samsara or Transmigration. This is one of the
most perplexing and difficult concepts in Buddhism to understand.
The law of Samsara holds that everything is in a birth and rebirth
cycle. Buddha taught that people do not have individual souls. The
existence of an individual self or ego is an illusion. There is no
eternal substance of a person which goes through the rebirth cycle.
What is it then that goes through the cycle if not the individual
soul? What goes through the rebirth cycle is only a set of
feelings, impressions, present moments, and the karma that is
passed on. "In other words, as one process leads to another, ... so
one's human personality in one existence is the direct cause of the
type of individuality which appears in the next."(5) The new
individual in the next life will not be exactly the same person,
but there will be several similarities. Just how close in identity
they will be, Buddha did not define.
Another article on samsara: http://www.esolibris.com/articles/buddhism/samsara.php
The third key concept is Nirvana. The term means "the
blowing out" of existence. Nirvana is very different from the
Christian concept of heaven. Nirvana is not a place like heaven but
rather a state of being. What exactly it is, Buddha never really
articulated.
Nirvana is an eternal state of being. It is the state in which
the law of karma, and the rebirth cycle come to an end. It is the
end of suffering, a state where there are no desires and the
individual consciousness comes to an end. Although to our Western
minds this may sound like annihilation, Buddhists would object to
such a notion. Gautama never gave an exact description of Nirvana,
but his closest reply was this. "There is disciples, a condition,
where there is neither earth nor water, neither air nor light,
neither limitless space, nor limitless time, neither any kind of
being, neither ideation nor non-ideation, neither this world nor
that world. There is neither arising nor passing-away, nor dying,
neither cause nor effect, neither change nor standstill."(6)
Although no Buddhist really understands the condition of Nirvana,
it is their eternal hope.
