Nirvana

The word

Nirvana means blowing out, as of a flame. What is extinguished is not a person or a soul but the fires the tradition names as greed, hatred and delusion, and with them the craving that sustains rebirth.

The image is precise and has been misread in both directions. It does not mean annihilation of a self, since Buddhist doctrine denies there was a permanent self to annihilate; nor does it mean the survival of a person in a blissful state, since that would reinstate what the teaching denies.

Two aspects

The tradition distinguishes nirvana with remainder — attained in life, when the defilements are extinguished but the body and its results continue — from nirvana without remainder, at the death of one who has attained it, when the process of rebirth does not continue.

The Buddha is presented as having lived some forty-five years in the first condition, teaching.

Description by negation

The canon is consistent in declining to describe nirvana positively. It is called unborn, unmade, unconditioned; the unbinding; the deathless; the cessation. Asked whether one who has attained it exists after death, does not exist, both or neither, the Buddha is reported to have set the question aside as improperly framed — comparing it to asking in which direction a fire has gone when it goes out.

This refusal is deliberate rather than evasive. Any positive description would assimilate the unconditioned to conditioned categories, which is precisely the error the teaching identifies.

Later developments

Mahayana traditions developed the position that nirvana and samsara are not ultimately distinct, and that the bodhisattva declines final nirvana in order to work for the liberation of all beings. Some traditions speak of non-abiding nirvana, established in neither samsara nor a withdrawn cessation. These are substantial developments, but they proceed by reinterpreting the term rather than replacing it.