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Nirvana = Heaven?
FairyFeller
Veteran
In my practice my aim is purely to be contented to live now and that would be my idea of Nirvana but reading around the vast subject that is Buddhism and I'm reading about different paths that treat it like the Christian Heaven. A place where believers would go upon their death, practices where if a certain name is chanted regularly they would go to certain realms.
Now for me happines is now, being with my partner and seeing my loved ones but excisting in an afterlife for eternity without them (none of them are Buddhists so wouldn't be going) this would be as far from Nirvana as it could possibly be.
Now for me happines is now, being with my partner and seeing my loved ones but excisting in an afterlife for eternity without them (none of them are Buddhists so wouldn't be going) this would be as far from Nirvana as it could possibly be.
2
Comments
There is also a 'pureland' where all the karma to practice dharma sends you to a lifetime where it is ideal to practice dharma. For example you might be a natural at meditation and renunciation and find a qualified teacher.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca3/nibbana.html
Nibbana names the transcendent and singularly ineffable freedom that stands as the final goal of all the Buddha's teachings.
Defined in terms of what it is...
"This is peace, this is exquisite — the resolution of all fabrications, the relinquishment of all acquisitions, the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; Nibbana."
...and in terms of what it is not
"There is that dimension where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of neither perception nor non-perception; neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis; neither passing away nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support [mental object]. This, just this, is the end of stress."
Where water, earth, fire, & wind have no footing:
There the stars do not shine,
the sun is not visible,
the moon does not appear,
darkness is not found.
And when a sage,
a brahman through sagacity,
has known [this] for himself,
then from form & formless,
from bliss & pain,
he is freed.
This next is important with the Buddha giving a good analogy -
What happens to one who has fully realized Nibbana?
[Aggivessana Vacchagotta:] "But, Master Gotama, the monk whose mind is thus released: Where does he reappear?"
[The Buddha:] "'Reappear,' Vaccha, doesn't apply."
"In that case, Master Gotama, he does not reappear."
"'Does not reappear,' Vaccha, doesn't apply."
"...both does & does not reappear."
"...doesn't apply."
"...neither does nor does not reappear."
"...doesn't apply."
"How is it, Master Gotama, when Master Gotama is asked if the monk reappears... does not reappear... both does & does not reappear... neither does nor does not reappear, he says, '...doesn't apply' in each case. At this point, Master Gotama, I am befuddled; at this point, confused. The modicum of clarity coming to me from your earlier conversation is now obscured."
"Of course you're befuddled, Vaccha. Of course you're confused. Deep, Vaccha, is this phenomenon, hard to see, hard to realize, tranquil, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. For those with other views, other practices, other satisfactions, other aims, other teachers, it is difficult to know. That being the case, I will now put some questions to you. Answer as you see fit. What do you think, Vaccha: If a fire were burning in front of you, would you know that, 'This fire is burning in front of me'?"
"...yes..."
"And suppose someone were to ask you, Vaccha, 'This fire burning in front of you, dependent on what is it burning?' Thus asked, how would you reply?"
"...I would reply, 'This fire burning in front of me is burning dependent on grass & timber as its sustenance.'"
"If the fire burning in front of you were to go out, would you know that, 'This fire burning in front of me has gone out'?"
"...yes..."
"And suppose someone were to ask you, 'This fire that has gone out in front of you, in which direction from here has it gone? East? West? North? Or south?' Thus asked, how would you reply?"
"That doesn't apply, Master Gotama. Any fire burning dependent on a sustenance of grass and timber, being unnourished — from having consumed that sustenance and not being offered any other — is classified simply as 'out' (unbound)."
"Even so, Vaccha, any physical form by which one describing the Tathagata would describe him: That the Tathagata has abandoned, its root destroyed, made like a palmyra stump, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for future arising. Freed from the classification of form, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea. 'Reappears' doesn't apply. 'Does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Both does & does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Neither reappears nor does not reappear' doesn't apply.
"Any feeling... Any perception... Any mental fabrication...
"Any consciousness by which one describing the Tathagata would describe him: That the Tathagata has abandoned, its root destroyed, made like a palmyra stump, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for future arising. Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea."
Did you actually want the truth, reality, a genuine response? Hope so.
Christian mystics who know, 'the kingdom of heaven is within' are our brethren and sisterhood, more so than fantasy 'purelander' nibbananas . . .
If you are making this statement about Pure Land, then I suggest reading up on the theory behind the practice. By this, I mean reading works by historical scholars like Shan-tao and Tan-luan. You might also want to consider reading a modern commentary, such as "River of Fire, River of Water" by Taitetsu Unno, to get a more up to date idea of the practice. Finally, I suggest reading the Contemplation/Amitayurdhyana Sutra which goes into great detail about the effects of a variety of Pure Land practices, including name recitation.
For example, I am a collection of atoms say, some come and go - my consciousness doesnt acknowledge a sense of loss towards my atoms.
I'm with you though that if happiness is dependant on an afterlife then this may be quite far from a nirvana.
the term used in the Pali translations and in Theravada is "becoming" or "re-becoming", not even rebirth. Thanks for posting this so more people understand.
Post from Buddhism now on facebook
http://www.bhavanasociety.org/resource/buddhist_concept_of_happiness/
In the same way, Nirvana both classically described and in popular thought is "nothingness" where you go to after death if you've graduated from the prison of karma and rebirth. There is no "self" to experience anything, just a big amorphous nothing. It's the same as being unconscious and might as well be simple extinction as far as we are concerned, and that's a good thing, because without the extinction of our conscious selves what's described is sensory deprivation and again would quickly become torture.
Nirvana as a concept was dragged along into Buddhism, like the concept of karma and reincarnation or rebirth, from the religion of India where Buddhism originated and given a new twist in Buddha's dharma. Once you realize there is no "you" to be reincarnated or "you" to escape from being reincarnated, then Nirvana also stops being a goal out there.
I'm just going though life trying to live my life in the right way, trying to make the best of now and understand things, if there's something else at the end of it I'll try and understand that and try to enjoy that version of now.
Similarly karma and rebirth are central to Buddhist teaching, and the idea that they were "dragged in" is entirely speculative and not supported by the suttas.
I would say that Nirvana might be the stated goal of the monks in your temple, but it's certainly not the goal of other schools or the vast majority of lay Buddhists. If Nirvana is the end-all of Buddhism, then it's a poor religion because almost all of the Buddhists in the world are destined to fail. At least Christianity offers the surity of Heaven for all believers. How many Buddhists in your Sangha have achieved Nirvana lately? Why would I want to get involved in a religion where only the few dedicated monks at the top have a chance of getting the final reward?
So for a lot of us, the goal is instead realizing our Buddha-nature or Clear Mind, and we don't use the term Nirvana. As described by the old monks, Nirvana is an altered and permanently elevated state of consciousness, a superhuman condition. I reject that picture. Buddha-nature is your ordinary mind. It is a clear mind seeing the correct situation.
regarding Buddha-nature as far as i understand, as per Tibetian Buddhism, Buddha-nature is the inherent nature of our mind - but Buddha-nature is not ordinary mind. The ordinary mind is covered with avijja or avidya or ignorance. When this ignorance is removed with panna or pragya or wisdom, then the true nature of the mind comes shining forth, that is our Buddha-nature or our Buddhahood or our plain consciousness inside us(different words indicating the same thing).
Now I'm going to say something, and I want to SHOUT OUT from the beginning that no one should assume I'm talking about them or any specific person here. I think there are a number of people in our forum who talk a good game, but who don't remotely lead the life they espouse on here, because if they did they'd be a monk living alone in some forest over in Southeast Asia, or in a hut in the Himalayas. I'm not saying they're bad people at all, although they may be a bit deluded about the life they actually live, and they may take themselves a little too seriously.
It's like you're holding the trunk of the white elephant, I'm holding the tail, and we're trying to describe different ends of the same animal. Funny, that.
@riverflow thanks for posting that link. What is exciting to me is that idea of energy, atoms, molecules living on after you die is something I started to think about some years ago. I didn't know that Buddhism's "reincarnation" (as I understood that to be correct at that time) was actually in line with my thinking. This just further illustrates to me that I have found my home in Buddhism. I am printing it out for the future when some of my Catholic in-laws corner me about my "beliefs"...
Oh, the "Ordinary Mind" teaching is pretty much what distinguishes the entire Chan and later Zen schools of practice. You will find lots of talk about enlightenment and Buddha Nature, but due to the equally stressed teaching about emptiness, these teachings are wrapped up into what's refered to as "Ordinary Mind" teaching.
To my limited scholarship it first appeared as an expressed teaching in the Platform Sutra, notably in the story of Huineng and the dueling poems.
The story is familiar to anyone who practices Zen so bear with me if you've heard this too many times before. The sutra tells how there was an anonymous poetry contest in the temple where Huineng worked as a common laborer, being denied full monk status because of his common roots (It was a feudal society, monks at that time came from higher class families and Huineng could not even read or write). The poems were supposed to reflect the monk's understanding of the Dharma.
Anyway, the star pupil of the temple and assumed successor of the head monk wrote this and posted it on the wall:
The body is a Bodhi tree,
The mind a mirror bright
Time and again brush it clean,
And let no dust alight.
This is pretty much the picture of Enlightenment as Nirvana, as the mind wiped clean of the defilements and desires and pollutions of the world. Monks were supposed to skillfully perfect the Self through meditation and study of the Dharma until the perfection of Nirvana shines through.
When it was read to Huineng, he asked the person to write on the wall another poem of Huineng's invention:
There is no Bodhi tree,
No mirror standing bright.
If everything is void;
Where can dust alight?
And thus the great debate was summarized in two conflicting visions of the Self. If the Self is illusion, then so is both perfection and defilement. There is only mind, only Buddha Nature, and it's our insisting on confusing relative with absolute reality that gets in the way of realizing that.
Thanks for clearing that up. I got what Huineng's point was, but I didn't get the significance of the monks poem.
This isn't to say that language is bad (nor is it the sole culprit). But when we have faith in language as the be-all and end-all of understanding reality we run into brick walls of delusion and we keep running into those walls in a very painful way. We don't want things to change, because either there is something we really like right now or there's something we don't like that is approaching. So we're perpetually pushing and pulling and chasing after things that aren't even real, making ourselves miserable. That is samsara.
But if we are actually verbs, and everything we do are verbs, every thought, word spoken, and action ripples outward interacting not only with those around out immediate vicinity right now, but ever outward rippling through one person or place or thing to another--even long after the ego has gone and that specific person is long forgotten or unknown. The ego is what is not reborn, but all the actions that ripple outward coalesce into a new being. In that sense I can talk about past lives or future lives but not MY past lives or MY future lives in the sense of an ego, but rather only in the sense that those lives led to or lead from this current life that I am living right here and now. And that includes even within what we conventionally call 'my life.' There is no 'I' i the sense of an essentialised and reified ego that is unchanging-- we just call it that. We aren't separate from time, as if time were some added process mixed in with the myriad entities of the universe-- rather we *are* time itself-- everything unfolds here and now. THIS. Nirvana is right under our noses, but we are always resisting it.
But I know this is all just talk talk talk. But it is my best way of understanding it.
Excellent! It seems like a profound realization very well described.
Personally, I think it's much better to think about phenomena in Buddhism as activities, events or processes rather than things or places. The way it's presented in Theravada, samsara, literally 'wandering on,' is the potential for the arising of human [mental] suffering, while nibbana, literally 'extinguishing,' is the cessation of that potential. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu puts it, "Samsara is a process of creating places, even whole worlds, (this is called becoming) and then wandering through them (this is called birth). Nirvana is the end of this process (emphasis mine)." Nirvana is "realized only when the mind stops defining itself in terms of place ... it's realized through unestablished consciousness."
This may be a bit of nonsense, but in one of the ways I like to look at it, the teachings from the 'conventional viewpoint' (vohara-desana) explains things through subject, verb, and object whereas the teachings from the 'ultimate viewpoint' (paramattha desana) primarily explain things through verb alone, i.e., from the perspective of activities and processes.
This, I think, is incredibly difficult to see, but perhaps what happens here is that once self-identity view (sakkaya-ditthi) is removed, the duality of subject and object is also removed, thereby revealing the level of mere conditional phenomena, i.e., dependent co-arising in action. This mental process is 'seen,' ignorance [of the four noble truths] is replaced by 'knowledge and vision of things as they are' (yatha-bhuta-nana-dassana), and nibbana, then, would be the 'letting go' of what isn't self through the dispassion (viraga) invoked in seeing the inconstant (anicca) and stressful (dukkha) nature of clinging to false refuges that are neither fixed nor stable (anatta).
Nibbana isn't the unconditioned, such as a place we go, but the unconditioned (i.e., freed from greed, hatred, and delusion; freed from grasping and suffering; etc. in this very life).
Actually, the doctrine of "no soul or no self" is considered by the Buddha to be an extreme view, part of the tangle of views alongside "I have a Self". The Buddhist doctrine is one of not-Self.
Things are no-things, actions are no-actions.
Anyway, the star pupil of the temple and assumed successor of the head monk wrote this and posted it on the wall:
The body is a Bodhi tree,
The mind a mirror bright
Time and again brush it clean,
And let no dust alight.
This is pretty much the picture of Enlightenment as Nirvana, as the mind wiped clean of the defilements and desires and pollutions of the world. Monks were supposed to skillfully perfect the Self through meditation and study of the Dharma until the perfection of Nirvana shines through.
When it was read to Huineng, he asked the person to write on the wall another poem of Huineng's invention:
There is no Bodhi tree,
No mirror standing bright.
If everything is void;
Where can dust alight?
And thus the great debate was summarized in two conflicting visions of the Self. If the Self is illusion, then so is both perfection and defilement. There is only mind, only Buddha Nature, and it's our insisting on confusing relative with absolute reality that gets in the way of realizing that."
______________
Are these two conflicting visions of the Self? Or are they two levels of realisation? I would say it's the latter and see no conflict.
But for those who point out that Buddha taught perfection of the Self and reincarnation in the Suttas so obviously there is a self to be perfected, and consider No-Self to be tacking something onto the Dharma, saying their realization is incomplete is denigrating their practice. They would say you're misinterpreting what Buddha did say about emptiness (see the post above about No-self being addressed by Buddha as wrong view).
Back to the story, the author of the first poem, Shen Hsiu, went on to found and become the Patriarch of the Northern school of Chan. Huineng went on to found the Southern school of Chan. Shen Hsiu stuck to the more traditional "gradual enlightenment" practice while the Southern school focused on the sudden awakening or Satori-like realization of the Dharma that its founder experienced. So this story is the Southern Chan's version of the beginning of the debate between the two viewpoints. By the way, the Northern Chan also heavily influenced Tibetan Buddhism.
By an accident of geopolitical conflict, the Northern School was pretty much wiped out by the Chinese authorities eventually, while the Southern School escaped the court intrigue so became the Chan that made it to Japan.
I'm not sure myself as to whether it is correct to say that Buddha taught the perfection of Self (as a task) or reincarnation. My cautious suggestion and current tentative opinion would be that Self/No-self is yet another dualism to be abandoned for the middle way view. I don't read Huineng's poem as suggesting otherwise, while the first poem does seem to suggest otherwise.
Not that it would be 'wrong'. I'd see the first poem as great practice advice and the second as an expression of the truth to which such a practice will lead us. Not right and wrong, but not equally profound.
All imho of course. I can only look forward to being able to write such a profound poem as the first one, and the second will probably have to wait a few lifetimes.
The expression and transmission of the ineffable is fraught with doubts and uncertainties, until we develop confidence in our technique. All being well our experience of the void happens before we turn to dust . . .
In a nutshell...
Since the North school was pretty much wiped out later, what we have left to us is the Southern Chan's account of their founder. This includes an account of the writer of the first poem, Shen Hsiu, being secretly told by his Master that his realization wasn't complete while publically praised. This detail is considered by scholars to be almost certainly a complete fabrication on the part of the Southern Chan school to bolster their claim to the true lineage. If it was a secret meeting, how did the Southern Chan school come to know about it?
All this history, when you dig into it, helps make our Sangha come alive. Turns out those great people were just human like you and me. When it comes to questions about "What does (blank) mean in Buddhism?" it's comforting to me, knowing even the monks who passed the Dharma down to us through the centuries had the same problem giving a definitive answer and were just as prone to argue about it.
It is not necessary, as far as I know, to become a monk in order to be able to talk the talk or to walk the walk. And it seems to me that it may be impossible to take oneself even a little too seriously. And I do not believe that most Buddhists are destined to fail. The idea would mean dismissing what the Buddha says about this.
"Why would I want to get involved in a religion where only the few dedicated monks at the top have a chance of getting the final reward? "
Why indeed. Luckily Buddhism is not such a religion.
I'll happily admit to being better at talking than walking, but we cannot make this judgement of others here except by their words since we have no idea how we each live and practice. Still, words can tell us much, as they do for the two poems we've been discussing. We can see the different levels of realisation that they express without having any idea of how the two poets lived.
As for Nirvana, if we do not know of Nirvana then we do not have to believe in it. But it is worth noting that the Abidhamma pitaka describes and defines Nirvana as a phenomenon, not the elevated state of some other phenomenon.
I see no reason for Huineng and the head monk to argue about anything. One seems to have been just a little further down the path than the other. Nor do I see the need for any secret meeting between the head monk and his abbot to be held or fabrictated by the southern Chan school. The poems speak for themselves. Huineng won the prize and it is no secret that this was because his words describe a deeper realisation.
Definitive answers are difficult because often language is inadequate to the task. So I don't think we should see a failure to provide one as a sign of ignorance or uncertainty.