Some of you might appreciate my complaints about why I can’t write about Nirvana without getting it wrong.
The Mahablog
Politics. Society. Group Therapy.
Some of you might appreciate my complaints about why I can’t write about Nirvana without getting it wrong.
If you have read ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ by Heinlein, he talks about the ‘map’ that language provides. Once you learn to think in a new language you inherit a new map for the culture of the new language. A translation, no matter how accurate, is an echo of the thoughts and intent of the original author.
The problem is more intense with spiritual concepts. Those of us who are not Buddist, can hear and understand ‘Buddha’ and we hear (I don’t understand) ‘nirvana’, but without the inspiration that comes from study and devotion, we can’t get it. I can’t. Am I suggesting I am not interested? Quite the opposite. The ‘Wisdom of Doubt’ enlarged my universe a bunch, and learning about issues framed from a Buddist perspective is a huge plus.
I am clicking over and reading from time to time, and learning. But I am aware it’s like reading a book about swimming, without entering the pool.
I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have to achieve to get there. Not like an enlightened state of cosmic consciousness that is earned through meditation, but more like a filtering back to whence I came. Nirvana sounds more enchanting than it probably is or is meant to be, similar to the lure of reading about mystics experiencing ecstasies, and wanting one for yourself, only to realize that you’ve already had the experience but it didn’t measure up to your expectation of an ecstasy.
I just posted a comment at about.com, but it awaits your moderate attention 🙂 I’m sort-of in agreement with Mr. Hughes above, but with Nirvana, the problem is more acute than mere language as it seems to me that the concept is not even definable within Buddhism. If you understand Nirvana, it’s because you have achieved it. The essence of the bodhisatva problem. You have to stop before you get there or you can’t explain it to others and if you have not gotten there, how can you explain it to others?
I like High Flight as a near approach.
BTW, mute your speakers before clicking on the above link, sorry, but the musical accompaniment SUCKS!
Once obtaining Buddha consciousness, is Nirvana only accessible upon death, or does it exist during life? I cannot speak of Buddhism having no training or much reading in it, but it seems to me that all things exist at once in some sense. What is accessible at any “time” is impertinent to this fact, and what may be accessed unconsciously at all times may be present before any transformation to another form.
Other religions have similar problems in describing their ‘ultimate’ experience or reality. Christianity comes up with God building you a mansion and streets of gold, Islam gives you a bunch of virgins. Pretty good if you’re a man, probably less so if you’re one of the virgins. It’s the difficulty of describing the ultimate with finite language.
Bucky makes a good point and I’m a big fan of the idea that we create our own long-run realities, bearing all consequences, and I do favor the achintya bhedÄbheda tattva.