A Buddhist Bible by Goddard Dwight

Author:Goddard, Dwight [Goddard, Dwight]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Mexico City, D. T. Suzuki, Beat Generation, Buddhism, Buddha, Tibetan Buddhism, Sangha, On the Road, Theravada, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Shingon, Nirvana, mindfulness, Enlightment, Neal Cassady, Pure Land, Mahayana, The Dharma Bums, Siddhartha Gautama, Nichiren Buddhism, Dharma, Shinnyoen, Jack Kerouac, bodhisattvas, Meditation, Tricycle The Buddhist Review, Middle way, Alan Watts, Zen, Tendai, Vajrayana, Ginsberg, Tipitaka, San Jose Library, ThreeJewels
ISBN: 9781907661457
Publisher: White Crow Books
Published: 2011-01-31T02:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Nirvana

Then said Mahamati to the Blessed One: Pray tell us about Nirvana?

The Blessed One replied: The term, Nirvana, is used with many different meanings, by different people, but these people may be divided into four groups: There are people who are suffering, or who are afraid of suffering, and who think of Nirvana; there are the philosophers who try to discriminate Nirvana; there are the class of disciples who think of Nirvana in relation to themselves; and, finally there is the Nirvana of the Buddhas.

Those who are suffering or who fear suffering, think of Nirvana as an escape and recompense. They imagine that Nirvana consists in the future annihilation of the senses and the sense-minds; they are not aware that Universal Mind and Nirvana are One, and that this life-and-death world and Nirvana are not to be separated. These ignorant ones, instead of meditating on the nothingness of Nirvana, talk of different ways of emancipation. Being ignorant of, or not understanding, the teachings of the Tathagatas, they cling to the notion of Nirvana that is outside what is seen of the mind and, thus, go on rolling themselves along with the wheel of life and death.

As to the Nirvanas discriminated by the philosophers: there really are none. Some philosophers conceive Nirvana to be found where the mind-system no more operates owing to the cessation of the elements that make up personality and its world; or is found where there is utter indifference to the objective world and its impermanency. Some conceive Nirvana to be a state where there is no recollection of the past or present, just as when a lamp is extinguished, or when a seed is burnt, or when a fire goes out; because then there is the cessation of all the substrate, which is explained by the philosophers as the non-rising of discrimination. But this is not Nirvana, because Nirvana does not consist in simple annihilation and vacuity.

Again, some philosophers explain deliverance as though it was the mere stopping of discrimination, as when the wind stops blowing, or as when one by self-effort gets rid of the dualistic view of knower and known, or gets rid of the notions of permanency and impermanency; or gets rid of the notions of good and evil; or overcomes passion by means of knowledge; —to them Nirvana is deliverance. Some, seeing in “form” the bearer of pain are alarmed by the notion of “form” and look for happiness in a world of “no-form.” Some conceive that in consideration of individuality and generality recognizable in all things inner and outer, that there is no destruction and that all beings maintain their being forever and, in this eternality, see Nirvana. Others see the eternality of things in the conception of Nirvana as the absorption of the finite-soul in Supreme Atman; or who see all things as a manifestation of the vital force of some Supreme Spirit to which all return; and some, who are especially silly, declare that there are two primary

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