It almost goes without saying that the general notion of nirvana is difficult to get a hold of. There has been, always it seems, a diversity of opinions as to its correct meaning. Some Western scholars in the past have generally put nirvana into the camp of annihilation or extinction. This, I must say, is rather odd; bordering on the laughable. I can’t imagine a Buddhist monk working hard on effecting self-extinction, short of suicide, trying to annihilate his existence—whatever that means. On the other hand, it would make more sense just to say this monk is trying to effect the extinction of all the necessary conditions that make rebirth, and with it suffering, inevitable.

It makes no sense to entertain the belief or the view that nirvana is a special kind of annihilation that ends in a state of complete oblivion, that is, absolute forgetfulness which seems to be on a par with the Western view of death. Turning this around, it is from forgetting (avidya) our immortal true nature that we are in this present samsaric pickle from which we can't escape. In light of this, the Buddha’s nirvana has to be a state that doesn’t oblivionize or extinguish us but, instead, leads us—fully awake—beyond our present dark world of samsara in which we are going around and around from one birth to another.

My own opinion, after reading Roger-Pol Droit's book, The Cult of Nothingness, is Western educated opinion about Buddhism, which includes nirvana, seems to be always heading in the direction of ‘mystical death’ in some form or other. This might be in the direction of attained nihilism in which subject-object consciousness becomes absent; or it might be a kind of felicitous death with shades of Christian resurrection; or self-forgetting. But this doesn’t come close to nirvana.

Nirvana is certainly beyond death and, to be sure, mystical death in which case the Western mind has no way to even begin to approach Buddhism on Buddhism’s own terms. This is understandable. The modern West has very little in the way of traditions comparable with Buddhism by which it might understand Buddhism’s nirvana unlike the Chinese who had Taoism (Daoism). A comparable Western tradition was put an end to around the 4th century by the Christian Church. It is only in recent memory that the West learned about Plato and Plotinus because of the domination of the so-called Dark Ages which began with the end of classical antiquity.

However, Buddhism can be understood and nirvana won if one is willing to junk the Western mindset which bids us not to look too deep within. A good dose of studying Greek philosophers from classical antiquity like Plato and Plotinus, just to name a few, are a helpful antidote, who were inspired by the Eleusinian Mysteries which in the last blog I touched upon. Nor should we sell, Indian philosophy or Chinese Taoism short either. Both are exceptional.

Modern Buddhists who stubbornly wish to stick with the current Western path, which these days it seems is headed down an agnostic highway, would do well to consider that this highway is not going in the direction of nirvana, but quite opposite. It is going nowhere. As a result, such wayfarers will never reach nirvana the timeless, nirvana as ultimate reality (paramartha satya), nirvana the eternal, the changeless, or reach nirvana the immortal (amrita). They will only reach samsara.