What is the concept of Nirvana in Buddhism?

One of Buddha's most important teachings was his theory of the Middle Way. For Buddha, the Middle Way was a spiritual path of salvation, winding between the extreme asceticism and the unrestrained sensuality he had known while a Hindu. To describe his Middle Way, Buddha offered four main principles, which have come to be called the Four Noble Truths:

Suffering is universal. Buddha taught that the very act of living involves suffering from birth until death. Even death brings no relief, however, because of the cycle of rebirth, suffering and death. Salvation (nirvana) is to be released from this unending cycle of suffering. The cause of suffering is craving (selfish desire). People remain in this endless cycle, because they are too attached to their health, wealth, status and physical comfort. This is because they are ignorant of the nature of reality and they fall victim to what Buddha called tanha (attachment, desire). The cure for suffering is to overcome ignorance and eliminate craving. Since to live is to suffer and suffering is caused by craving, if a person could remove craving from his or her life, suffering would end. Suppress craving by following the Middle Way ‑ the Noble Eightfold Path. First, Buddha isolated the cause, tanha, humanity's inability to escape from the squirrel cage of death and rebirth. Next he worked out a system called the Eightfold Path by which a Buddhist could rid himself of tanha. The Eightfold Path consists of eight ways of right living: (1) right viewpoint, (2) right aspiration, (3) right speech, (4) right behavior, (5) right occupation, (6) right effort, (7) right mindfulness and (8) right meditation.

Buddha claimed that whoever could follow this Eightfold Path would eventually reach nirvana, a release from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. When Buddha was asked to define the state of nirvana, he replied that he had never tried to solve this question. His mission was to show man the way to escape the suffering of life, not to describe what he would find once he had been liberated.

Finally, he sat under a tree for 40 days and nights. He swore that he would not move until he found what he was searching for. During this time, Mara, the evil one, tried to make him give up his quest. At the end of the 40 days, he experienced the highest degree of Godconsciousness‑nirvana‑literally, the "blowing out" of the flame of desire and the negation of suffering. Through this experience, Gautama felt he had found "salvation." From then on, he was known as Buddha or the "enlightened one."

After his life‑changing experience, Gautama Buddha went back to the world of man. He began to preach and teach about the meaning of life and his way to nirvana. Soon he founded the Sangha, an order of monks. By the time Gautama Buddha died, 4S years later, many thousands had adopted his teachings.'

In some ways, Buddhism is similar to the Hinduism from which it evolved. In other ways, it is quite different, and many of Buddha's teachings were rejected as heresies by the dominant teachers of Hinduism, the Brahmin priests. For example, Buddha denied that the Vedas and the Upanishads were divine writings, saying they were of no help in finding the way to nirvana. He also denied that man has an atman (soul), which is part of the Brahman (world soul), and that the present world is maya (unreal).

But this sleep applies to the body, and the things of this restless world only; it is to this life in which men sigh and groan that the Christian sleeps. Nirvana, complete cessation of being, the highest state of felicity that Buddhism offers, belongs to that system of gross darkness and has no place in the light. Not so does God's Book speak of the state of those who have fallen asleep. “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” said God to Moses centuries after those patriarchs had passed into the life beyond this, and He is not the God of the dead, of those who do not exist, but of the living, for all live unto Him (Matt. 22; Luke 20). “Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's” (Rom. 14:8). When one falls asleep they are just as truly in the Lord's hands as they ever were, “None,” says He, “shall pluck them out of My hand.” Death may separate them from us but not from Him; He holds them in everlasting security in the hand that smashed the power of death.

But this sleep applies to the body, and the things of this restless world only; it is to this life in which men sigh and groan that the Christian sleeps. Nirvana, complete cessation of being, the highest state of felicity that Buddhism offers, belongs to that system of gross darkness and has no place in the light. Not so does God's Book speak of the state of those who have fallen asleep. "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," said God to Moses centuries after those patriarchs had passed into the life beyond this, and He is not the God of the dead, of those who do not exist, but of the living, for all live to Him (Matt. 22; Luke 20). "Whether we live, we live to the Lord; and whether we die, we die to the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's" (Rom. 14:8). When one falls asleep they are just as truly in the Lord's hands as they ever were, "None," says He, "shall pluck them out of My hand." Death may separate them from us but not from Him; He holds them in everlasting security in the hand that smashed the power of death.

Buddhism takes a wide variety of forms, but the three main kinds are Hinayana, Mahayana and Tantrism. Hinayana means "the doctrine of the lesser way," referring to the belief that, for all intents and purposes, only a fortunate few lifelong monks can find nirvana by absolutely following the way to Buddha. Since the term "lesser way" was a derogatory name given by critics, proponents of this path later changed the name to Theravada Buddhism ("way of the elders"). The best that laypeople can hope for in Theravada Buddhism is to rise to a higher level when reborn in their next life so they may become monks. The Theravada branch of Buddhism has become very wealthy through gifts of land and money for monasteries and is dominant today in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos and Kampuchea.'

Mahayana Buddhism, the doctrine of the "greater way," teaches that Buddha believed that nirvana is available to all people. Buddha originally taught that the only person who can save you is you, but Mahayana developed the idea of savior gods or Bodhisattvas.

Followers of Mahayana reasoned that Buddha had remained on the earth for 45 years when he could have gone straight to nirvana. He decided, however, to stay to save mankind and became the first and supreme Bodhisattva, a savior to mankind who can be called on by the faithful. Other Buddhist monks who achieve nirvana and become enlightened as Buddha did are also Bodhisattvas.

From all this, you can gather that Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism differ radically in their opinion of Buddha. To Theravada, Buddha was only a teacher (as Buddha himself claimed), but Mahayana has raised him to the position of a savior‑god for all people. Because of this, Mahayana Buddhism is by far the more popular. It is influential in Nepal, China, Tibet, Japan, Vietnam and Korea.'

The only modification, as far as I know, was the production, by an unknown monad of a good and an evil cause - the Bactrian and Persian faith, Zoroastrianism. Others got out of the difficulty by emanations. It was impossible for the supreme God, the monad, to have to say to matter: aeons with some, the Logos, demons, something like Zoroastrian Feroers, and the Logos, with Platonists, were resorted to by others to solve the difficulty for millions. The monad was alone, and while asleep nothing else was; if he woke, creatures appeared, but it was all Maya, illusion; when he went to sleep, they disappeared again. The true philosophy was to find it out, have done with creation, and be absorbed into universal spirit or into the one divine spirit. Modifications there might be; for hundreds of millions thought and think matter eternal, and that true philosophy, or true knowledge, is getting delivered from matter and gaining Nirvana, that is, being extinguished as a lamp goes out.

228 Is this knowledge? Spirit is far more real than matter. But God was not known nor feared - gods were, perhaps, consequently, but not God; and gods were temporary creatures, like men, and more so, and knowledge there was none. Deliverance was in knowledge - that all things were nothing. Some would make a Buddha above God, some absorb a man into God; all the rest perished or disappeared, for there was nothing really to perish. Is there nothing like this now, when there is not the fear of God? - nothing in the modern doctrine of development of species, which would tell us that all comes from a scarcely traceable worm which has left its mark upon some lower Silurian or Cambrian rock, or its analogous fellow in some more recent system, or a polypus, or a graptolith; the apparent ancestor of man being a penguin or an ape, for this is seriously the infidel system of some - opposed indeed, by others equally infidel, by some other speculation, in which definite and permanent species are recognised?

174 Again, Origen — a most attractive, interesting man, I fully admit, but whose name became the football of passion in the church — what was he? First he applied to himself literally, by mutilation, Matthew 19:12. He held that souls were born into different conditions in this world, according to their conduct in a previously existing state — a doctrine current among the heathen Egyptians, but a well-known eastern idea of Buddhists and Brahmins too. Buddha's great doctrine was, how to escape it by hearing "Bana," and absolute indifference to everything sense could feel, so as to obtain Nirvana (extinction). But Origen held — it is not my part to make him consistent — that the fall (and this was Alexandrian and Philo's doctrine already, and Platonic) was the pure soul of man coming into a body. He was not sound, though he seems sometimes to be clear, on the divinity of Christ. As to the divinity of the Holy Ghost, he was wholly unsound. As to Ammonius (the master of Heraclas the Patriarch, and others), it is disputed whether he is Christian or heathen.

Buddha did accept the Hindu teachings on reincarnation, along with karma (the soul gains merits or demerits according to how one lives his life) and dharma (the duty one has to perform according to his station in life). Buddha taught that one could be reborn as a human, an animal, a hungry ghost, a demon or even as a Hindu god. He also incorporated yoga and meditation, which were highly developed skills in Hinduism, into his teachings.

THE MIDDLE WAY AND THE EIGHTFOLD PATH

The Hinduism that Buddha rejected said that life in this world is maya (illusion); thus, suffering, which is part of this world, is also illusion. Buddha, however, proclaimed that life in this world is quite real. It involves real suffering; because of this suffering, the world must be escaped by following Buddha's Eightfold Path.

Buddha said that "to live is to suffer," and he said that the reasons for suffering were ignorance and craving. The Bible agrees that suffering is everywhere and that a good deal of suffering is due to misplaced desire, but at the core, the Bible provides a very different explanation for suffering. The Bible explains that the entire world "groans" and that all men suffer because of sin (see Romans 8:18‑23). All of us have put our own personal desires ahead of God's. All of us are sinners by choice. We decide to live our lives independently of God and His laws (see Isaiah. 53:6).

Buddha observed that suffering comes from craving‑desire or attachment of any kind. For Buddha, all desire was bad and had to be eradicated. The Bible, however, teaches that, while there are bad desires, there are also good ones. For example, we are encouraged to have great desire for God, His glory in our lives and for His kingdom (see Ps. 27:4; Matt. 6:33).