Nirvāṇa

Nirvāṇa (Sanskrit; Pāli nibbāna) is the goal of the Buddhist path: the complete cessation of suffering (duḥkha) and of the cycle of rebirth (Saṃsāra). The word means “blowing out” or “extinguishing”, as a fire goes out — specifically, the extinguishing of the “three fires” of greed (rāga), hatred (dveṣa) and delusion (moha). In the Four Noble Truths, nirvāṇa is the third truth, the cessation of suffering through the cessation of craving. It is the Buddhist counterpart to the Hindu and Jain Mokṣa, but differently understood, since Buddhism denies a permanent self that could be liberated.

Two nirvāṇas

The early texts distinguish nirvāṇa with remainder (sa-upādi-śeṣa) — attained by an awakened person during life, when the defilements are extinguished but the body and mind (the “remainder” of past karma) continue — and nirvāṇa without remainder (an-upādi-śeṣa), or parinirvāṇa, at the death of an awakened one, when the aggregates themselves cease and there is no rebirth. The Buddha attained the first under the Bodhi tree and the second at Kuśinagara.

Describing the indescribable

The early texts mostly describe nirvāṇa negatively — as the end of craving, the unconditioned, the deathless — but sometimes positively, as peace, the highest happiness, the further shore, the island, the refuge. The most famous passage (Udāna 8.3):

There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If there were not this unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned.

What happens to an awakened one (tathāgata) after death? The Buddha refused to say. To the wanderer Vacchagotta, who asked whether he exists after death, does not exist, both or neither, the Buddha answered that none of these applies, and gave the image of the fire: if a fire burning before you goes out, and someone asks in which direction it has gone — east, west, north or south — the question does not fit the case. So with the Tathāgata: “deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom, like the great ocean” (Aggivacchagotta Sutta, MN 72).

Interpretations

Buddhist schools disagreed about nirvāṇa’s status. The Theravāda Abhidhamma lists it as the one unconditioned ultimate reality. The Sautrāntikas held that it is merely the absence of suffering, not a positive entity. Nāgārjuna argued that nirvāṇa, like everything, is empty, and that “there is not the slightest difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa” — nirvāṇa is not a separate place but the end of grasping. The Mahāyāna distinguished the arhat’s nirvāṇa from the “non-abiding nirvāṇa” (apratiṣṭhita-nirvāṇa) of the Buddhas, who remain active in the world out of compassion.

European scholars of the nineteenth century debated whether nirvāṇa meant annihilation (as Schopenhauer partly thought, and Nietzsche condemned as “nihilism”) or a positive bliss. B. R. Ambedkar interpreted it as a righteous life lived here and now, free of greed and hatred.

In conversation

The fire image is the key: when a fire goes out, it makes no sense to ask in which direction it went.