Philosophy 438 Indian Buddhist Philosophy Buddhist Views of the ...

80
original terminology, two nibbana properties). The first is the nibbana experienced
by a person who has attained the goal and is still alive. This
is described metaphorically as the extinguishing of passion, aversion, and
delusion. The second is the nibbana after death. The simile for these two
states is the distinction between a fire that has gone out but whose embers
are still warm, and one so totally out that its embers are cold. The Buddha
used the views of fire current in his day in somewhat different ways
when discussing these two levels of nibbana, and so we must consider them
separately.
To understand the implications of nibbana in the present life, it is necessary
to know something of the way in which fire is described in the Pali
Canon. There, fire is said to be caused by the excitation or agitation of the
heat property. To continue burning, it must have sustenance (upadana). Its
relationship to its sustenance is one of clinging, dependence, and entrapment.
When it goes out, the heat property is no longer agitated, and the
fire is said to be freed. Thus the metaphor of nibbana in this case would
have implications of calming together with release from dependencies, attachments,
and bondage. This in turn suggests that of all the attempts to
describe the etymology of the word nibbana, the closest is the one Buddhaghosa
proposed in The Path of Purification: Un- (nir) + binding (vana):
Unbinding.
To understand further what is meant by the unbinding of the mind, it
is also important to know that the word upadana—the sustenance for the
fire—also means clinging, and that according to the Buddha the mind has
four forms of clinging that keep it in bondage: clinging to sensuality, to
views, to precepts and practices, and to doctrines of the self. In each case,
the clinging is the passion and desire the mind feels for these things. To
overcome this clinging, then, the mind must see not only the drawbacks of
these four objects of clinging, but, more importantly, the drawbacks of the
act of passion and desire itself.
The mind does this by following a threefold training: virtue, concentration,
and discernment. Virtue provides the joy and freedom from remorse
that are essential for concentration. Concentration provides an internal basis
of pleasure, rapture, equanimity, and singleness of mind that are not dependent
on sensual objects, so that discernment can have the strength and
stability it needs to cut through the mind’s clingings. Discernment functions
by viewing these clingings as part of a causal chain: seeing their origin,
their passing away, their allure, the drawbacks of their results, and,
finally, emancipation from them.
Although the Canon reports cases where individuals cut through all four
forms of clinging at the same time, the more common pattern is for discernment
first to cut through sensual clinging by focusing on the inconstancy
and stressfulness of all sensory objects and on the worthlessness of any
passion or desire directed to them. Thus freed, the mind can turn its discernment
inward in a similar way to cut through its clinging to the practice
of concentration itself, as well as to views in general and notions of ’self’