Metaphor and Literalism in Buddhism: The ... - misterdanger.net

THE DOCTRINAL DEVELOPMENT OF NIRVANA
4
NIRVANA IN THE THERAVfDA
BUDDHIST TRADITION
In Chapter 3, we saw that the right interpretation of nirvana with and
without a remainder of clinging is, agreeing with its metaphorical structure,
as the cessation of all defilements during life for the former and the cessation
of the aggregates at death for the latter. In the early canon, the state of
nirvana without a remainder of clinging was often explained through the
image of a fire extinguished. In fact, we can get an early idea of this state
through one of the well known discourses concerning one of the four
unanswered questions: the state of the TathAgata after death. As its name
suggests, the early canon did not really answer this question and, as a consequence,
there have been many attempts to fill ‘the silence of the Buddha’
through clarifying this metaphor of a fire extinguished.
One of the attempts to fill this silence is through the common Indian view
on fire seen in the later UpaniLads. F. Otto Schrader, for example, tried to
interpret this state positively through clarifying this metaphor in terms of
the so-called common Indian view based on several later UpaniLads. 1 According
to him, ‘an expiring flame does not really go out, but returns into the
primitive, pure, invisible state of fire it had before its appearance as visible
fire’. 2 Thus, the enlightened person after death does not become nothing but
returns to the primitive and pure state like the paramAtman, the ultimate
reality in Brahmanism. 3
Peter Harvey has recently tried to interpret this state as something positive,
not a state of nothingness, from the DArukkhandhasutta in the AWguttaranikAya.
4 Through the fact that the monk who possesses supernormal powers
(iddhimant) can see earth, water, fire and air elements in a large log of wood
because there are these elements in the log, he drew the following conclusion:
While to a Western-educated person, an extinct fire goes nowhere
because it does not exist, the Buddha’s audience in ancient India
would generally have thought of an extinguished fire as going back
into a non-manifested state as latent heat. The simile of the extinct
fire thus suggests that the state of an enlightened person after death
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