Gil Fronsdal: Nibbāna

Nibbāna (Nirvāṇa) is the ultimate good news of Theravāda Buddhism: it means complete liberation. Naturally, people want to know about the nature of nibbāna, but from the Theravada standpoint, knowing how a person is transformed in attaining nibbāna is more important than understanding what nibbāna is.

When a person is thirsty, what’s essential about water is not knowing its chemical properties but that it quenches thirst. Similarly, for someone who is suffering, what’s essential about nibbāna is not so much understanding its nature but that its attainment extinguishes suffering.

Nirvāṇa (Sanskrit) and nibbāna (Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts) mean “to go out”—like a fire—and “to cool.” Applied to the mind, it refers to extinguishing the fevers of greed, hate, and delusion, the three roots of suffering. The Buddha’s choice of this term was intimately tied to the imagery of his famous Fire Sermon. Here he said: “Everything is on fire; the eyes are on fire; sights are on fire; visual perception is on fire. . . ; the ears are on fire. . . ; the nose is on fire. . . ; the tongue is on fire. . . ; the body is on fire. . . ; the mind is on fire. . . . They are on fire with greed, hate, and delusion” (from the Mahavagga of the Theravada Vinaya).

In the Buddha’s language, the words for fuel and clinging are the same: upādāna. The Buddha understood that suffering arises from and is fueled by clinging. Removing the fuel extinguishes the suffering. Understanding how deep-rooted and subtle clinging is in our unliberated minds, we appreciate nibbāna as refreshingly cool and peaceful.

Nibbāna is the end of saṃsāra. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, neither nibbāna nor saṃsāra is a place. In attaining nibbāna, we don’t escape from one location to another. For the Buddha, saṃsāra is the process by which clinging gives rise to suffering, which, in turn, gives rise to further clinging. He understood that this self-perpetuating process continues over lifetimes as the “fuel” for rebirth, just as the fire from one burning house is carried to a neighboring house by the wind. Nibbāna is realized when the clinging of greed, hate, and delusion is brought to an end.

Some later Buddhist traditions equate nirvana and saṃsāra. However, they likely attribute very different meanings to these words than those understood by the earliest Buddhist tradition. In Theravāda teachings, saṃsāra cannot be nibbāna any more than a clenched fist can be an open hand, any more than holding a burning ember in your hand can be the same as letting it go. For the Buddha, nibbāna has quite positive associations—after all, it is a simile for ultimate freedom and awakening. At times, he used other similes to describe this state: “the blissful, the secure, the pure, the island, the shelter, the harbor, the refuge, the ultimate.”

Nibbāna does not exist as something made, shaped, or willed. It is not a “ground of being” from which phenomena are born. Instead, nibbāna involves a complete absence of suffering, sometimes experienced as an awareness which is not dependent on anything, even itself.  People who fully realize it are said to be “unestablished”— i.e., free from any clinging that would fix them to any point in space or time.

Realizing nibbāna is like taking a dip in a refreshing pond. A quick dip, and we are slightly refreshed. With a long soak, we are thoroughly refreshed. Even the first brief dip into nibbāna is a powerful lesson in the possibility of great happiness, freedom, and peace not dependent on the conditions of the world. As long as someone believes happiness can only be found through the right conditions, it makes sense to cling to those conditions—even knowing full well that all conditioned phenomena are subject to change. But when there is a direct, visceral experience of an alternative, the enchantment that fuels this clinging lessens dramatically.

The function of nibbāna is to diminish and finally end all tendency to cling. In Theravāda Buddhism, the desire to walk the path to nibbāna has an honored place. Once that desire is fulfilled, it naturally subsides, and the mind clings to nothing, not even to nibbāna itself.

From a Buddhist perspective, walking the path toward the complete ending of clinging and suffering is the noblest thing a person can do. It opens the fist of the mind and allows a person to care for the world with a gift-bestowing heart.