Nibbana

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Nibbana by Thanissaro Bhikkhu 1996 Thanissaro Bhikkhu For free distribution only.

 

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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.

 

According to the ancient Brahmans, 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 Brahmans 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

The Buddha insists that this level is indescribable, 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.

 

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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