Nirvana and Prajna

May 22, 2005

: (Sanskrit) Often translated as bliss, etymologically it means to blow out or extinguish, as when a fire ceases to draw any fuel and goes out. The Buddha used the term referring to life's goal, that is, ceasing to produce the causes of suffering, ceasing to be in ignorance, delusion, or illusion. What is extinguished here is "the boundaries of the finite self" (Huston Smith). The last fuel of private, clinging desires, of the fretting of a separate self, "have been completely consumed and everything which restricts the boundless life has died" (Smith). What is left is the bliss of the boundless life itself. Nirvana can also refer to the total extinction of phenomena, as experienced at death. Alternately, before death, one might attain such an emptying of the cycles of desires and aversions as to enjoy a state of perfect freedom and tranquility.

Boundless and free is the sky of samadhi, bright the full moon of wisdom, truly is anything missing now? Nirvana is here, before your eyes, this very place is the Lotus Land, this very body the Buddha. ~Hakuin

prajna - Often translated as "wisdom," prajna has to do with an experiential understanding or realization of something rather specific: that all things are empty of any inherent separate identity, and that each "thing" exists only as a set of relations to everything else. In this "emptiness of separate selfhood" all things are one. Thomas Merton, the Christian mystic/contemplative/poet, commented well: "Prajna, therefore, is not attained when one reaches a deeper interior center in one's self. It does not consist in "abiding" in a secret mystical point in one's own being, but in abiding nowhere in particular, neither in self nor out of self. It does not consist in self-realization whatever. In a word, prajna is not self-realization, but realization pure and simple, beyond subject and object. In such realization, evidently "emptiness" is no longer opposed to "fullness," but emptiness and fullness are One. Zero equals infinity."

http://www.yakrider.com/Buddha/Zen/zen_terms.htm