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Nibbana
Thanissaro
Bhikkhu
Copyright © 1997 Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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We all know what happens
when a fire goes out. The flames die down and the fire is gone for
good. So when we first learn that the name for the goal of Buddhist
practice, nibbana (nirvana), literally means the extinguishing of a
fire, it's hard to imagine a deadlier image for a spiritual goal:
utter annihilation. It turns out, though, that this reading of the
concept is a mistake in translation, not so much of a word as of an
image. What did an extinguished fire represent to the Indians of the
Buddha's day? Anything but annihilation.
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According to the ancient
Brahmins, when a fire was extinguished it went into a state of
latency. Rather than ceasing to exist, it became dormant and in that
state -- unbound from any particular fuel -- it became diffused
throughout the cosmos. When the Buddha used the image to explain
nibbana to the Indian Brahmins of his day, he bypassed the question of
whether an extinguished fire continues to exist or not, and focused
instead on the impossibility of defining a fire that doesn't burn:
thus his statement that the person who has gone totally "out" can't be
described.
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However, when teaching his
own disciples, the Buddha used nibbana more as an image of freedom.
Apparently, all Indians at the time saw burning fire as agitated,
dependent, and trapped, both clinging and being stuck to its fuel as
it burned. To ignite a fire, one had to "seize" it. When fire let go
of its fuel, it was "freed," released from its agitation, dependence,
and entrapment -- calm and unconfined. This is why Pali poetry
repeatedly uses the image of extinguished fire as a metaphor for
freedom. In fact, this metaphor is part of a pattern of fire imagery
that involves two other related terms as well. Upadana, or clinging,
also refers to the sustenance a fire takes from its fuel. Khandha
means not only one of the five "heaps" (form, feeling, perception,
thought processes, and consciousness) that define all conditioned
experience, but also the trunk of a tree. Just as fire goes out when
it stops clinging and taking sustenance from wood, so the mind is
freed when it stops clinging to the khandhas.
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Thus the image underlying
nibbana is one of freedom. The Pali commentaries support this point by
tracing the word nibbana to its verbal root, which means "unbinding."
What kind of unbinding? The texts describe two levels. One is the
unbinding in this lifetime, symbolized by a fire that has gone out but
whose embers are still warm. This stands for the enlightened arahant,
who is conscious of sights and sounds, sensitive to pleasure and pain,
but freed from passion, aversion, and delusion. The second level of
unbinding, symbolized by a fire so totally out that its embers have
grown cold, is what the arahant experiences after this life. All input
from the senses cools away and he/she is totally freed from even the
subtlest stresses and limitations of existence in space and time.
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The Buddha insists that
this level is indescribably, even in terms of existence or
nonexistence, because words work only for things that have limits. All
he really says about it -- apart from images and metaphors -- is that
one can have foretastes of the experience in this lifetime, and that
it's the ultimate happiness, something truly worth knowing.
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So the next time you watch
a fire going out, see it not as a case of annihilation, but as a
lesson in how freedom is to be found in letting go.
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Source:
http://world.std.com/~metta/lib/modern/nibbana.html
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