This belief - the transmigration of the soul, after the death of the body, into other bodies, either of men, beasts or gods - is part of the animistic creed so widely found throughout the world that it was probably universal.
Curiously, Buddhism itself is ruled by the ghost or shadowy remainder of belief in transmigration - Karma.
But the Buddha, while rejecting the sacrifices and the ritualistic magic of the brahmin schools, the animistic superstitions of the people, the asceticism and soultheory of the Jains, and the pantheistic speculations of the poets of the pre-Buddhistic Upanishads, still retained the belief in transmigration.
The idea is there also put forward in connexion with a belief in transmigration.
Incidentally it held out the hope, to those who believed in it, of a mode of escape from the miseries of transmigration.