What Is Nirvana? The Goal of Buddhism Explained
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The word means blowing out, as a flame is blown out, and the Buddha used it for the end of the fire he said every person is burning with: the fire of craving, of hatred and of delusion, which keeps the mind restless, keeps the person acting, and keeps them being reborn into a life that will contain suffering. Nirvana is what is left when the fire goes out. Asked what that was like, whether a person who reached it existed after death or did not, the Buddha declined to say, and the refusal is part of the teaching.
The problem it answers
Buddhism begins from a diagnosis. Life as ordinarily lived involves dukkha, a word usually translated as suffering and better rendered as unsatisfactoriness, the ache of a wheel that does not run true; it arises because people crave, for pleasure, for continued existence, for things to be other than they are; and because craving drives action and action has consequences, karma, the craving mind is reborn again and again in a cycle, samsara, with no beginning and no natural end. The third of the Four Noble Truths is that the cycle can be stopped, by stopping the craving, and the stopping is nirvana. It is not a place, not a heaven and not a reward; it is a state, or the absence of one.
What goes out
The texts describe nirvana mostly by what it is not: the end of greed, hatred and delusion, the three poisons; the end of the sense of a fixed self, which Buddhism holds to be an illusion assembled from passing states; the end of karma, since a person without craving acts without generating the consequences that bind; and the end of rebirth. What does not go out, in the accounts of the Buddha's own life, is the person. He reached nirvana at 35 under a tree at Bodh Gaya and lived and taught for another 45 years, eating, walking, arguing and being ill, and the tradition distinguishes that state, nirvana with a remainder, the body and its sensations still running, from the final nirvana at death, when nothing remained to be reborn. The distinctions:
- •Nirvana in life: the extinction of craving and delusion while the body continues, the state of an arhat or a Buddha
- •Final nirvana, parinirvana: at the death of such a person, the end of the cycle, with no rebirth
- •The unanswered questions: whether the enlightened person exists after death, does not, both, or neither, which the Buddha set aside as not conducive to the goal
- •The Mahayana view: nirvana and samsara are not two places but one reality seen with and without delusion, and the bodhisattva postpones final nirvana to help all beings reach it
Why he would not describe it
A monk called Malunkyaputta threatened to leave the order unless the Buddha answered the metaphysical questions, and the Buddha replied with the parable of the arrow: a man shot with a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows the caste of the archer and the wood of the shaft will die with his questions unanswered. Nirvana, the Buddha said, is to be realised, not described, and description in the terms of existence and non-existence, which belong to the world of craving, would mislead. The texts do use positive words for it, the deathless, the unconditioned, the secure, the peaceful, the island, the far shore, and the philosophers of the schools argued for centuries about whether it was a real state or merely an absence; the Theravada tradition inclines to treat it as an unconditioned reality, the only one, and the Madhyamaka school of Nagarjuna as empty of any nature at all, like everything else.
How it is reached
The path is the fourth truth, the Eightfold Path, and it is gradual: ethical conduct, right speech, action and livelihood, that stops generating harm; meditation, right effort, mindfulness and concentration, that calms and trains the mind until it can see clearly; and wisdom, right view and intention, the direct seeing that all things are impermanent, unsatisfactory and without self, which loosens the craving at its root. The tradition describes stages, the stream-enterer who has glimpsed it and will be reborn at most seven more times, the once-returner, the non-returner, and the arhat, the worthy one, who has finished. Zen holds that it can be seen suddenly, in a moment of insight, and then must be lived into; Pure Land Buddhism holds that in a degenerate age one cannot reach it by effort and relies on the vow of the Buddha Amitabha to be reborn in his land, from which nirvana is easy. All agree that it is the end of the problem and not a solution within it.
The word elsewhere
Nirvana is a Hindu term as well, used in the Bhagavad Gita for absorption into Brahman, and the Jains use it for the liberated soul's ascent; the Buddhist sense, extinction without a soul to be liberated, is the distinctive one. In English it arrived in the nineteenth century, when scholars translating the Pali texts argued about whether it meant annihilation, which Victorian readers found horrifying, or bliss, which they found more congenial, and the word has since drifted into meaning any state of perfect happiness, which is close to the opposite of a term for the end of wanting. The grunge band took it for the same reason the advertisers do, and the Buddha's answer to Malunkyaputta stands: the thing is not the word.
The takeaway
Nirvana, blowing out, is the Buddhist goal: the extinction of craving, hatred and delusion and with them of the karma that drives rebirth, reached in life by the Buddha and the arhats and completed at their death when nothing remains to be reborn. The Buddha refused to say whether the liberated exist afterwards, calling the question a distraction from the arrow in the flesh, and the path to it is the ethical, meditative and wise conduct of the Eightfold Path, gradual in most traditions and sudden in Zen.