Buddhism, Pali and Nirvana - What's it Mean?Contemplations - Maurice Walsh
But is there anything which has no origin and which is therefore not bound to come to an end? The answer is yes, and it is this that makes Buddhism a religion. There is in the Pali Canon a short scripture called Udana, meaning something like solemn utterance. The Pali Text Society's translation calls it 'Verses of Uplift', and here we read: There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, uncompounded (ajataip abhutam akatam asankhatam). If there were not this unborn, unbecome, unmade, uncompounded, then there would be no deliverance here visible from that which is born, become, made, compounded. But since there is this unborn, unbecome, unmade, uncompounded, therefore a deliverance is visible from that which is born, become, made, compounded.'
The sense of this passage seems to have escaped the editors of the Pali Text Society's dictionary who say that Nibbana is purely and simply an ethical state, and it is therefore not transcendental. Nothing, it seems to me, could be more transcendental, but we must resist any temptation of trying to imagine what Nirvana is like. It belongs to that aspect of the universe that even the Marxist, Professor Haldane, intuitively knew, I think, to be stranger than we can imagine. Well, I believe I have the right to call myself a Buddhist because I have faith that this is so. This perhaps necessitates a word or two about faith.
Saddha in Pali, Sraddha in Sanskrit, is not blind faith; it is reasoned confidence. I could say I am a Buddhist because I have faith in the unborn, unbecome, uncreated, uncompounded, or unconditioned, if you like. So, against all the sankharas or compounded or conditioned things of which the universe is made up, there is the unborn, unconditioned, that is, Nirvana. It is not a sankhara; it is what is called a dhamma in Pali, or a dharma in Sanskrit, a word of various meanings, but here used in an all-inclusive sense — all things, conditioned or unconditioned, are dhammas. All sankharas are dhammas, but just one dhamma is not a sankhara. This, I
believe to be the original Buddhist teaching, but I may be wrong.
One early school, the so-called Sarvastivada, or Everything-is School, maintains that there are three unconditioned dhammas — empty space and two different kinds of Nirvana. And another later school increases the number to sue. I only mention this in passing as an example of the sort of complications you find in the different schools of Buddhist philosophy.
I might also mention that some distinguished scholars have the annoying habit of translating Nirvana into English by such terms as 'freedom' and 'extinction', of which the one is utterly vague and the other terribly misleading. True, it is the extinction of greed, hatred and delusion, but it cannot be equated with total annihilation.
An important word which happens to be the same in both Pali and Sanskrit, is sarnsara. This is the phenomenal world of our daily experience in contrast to Nirvana; it can be translated literally as 'onward faring,' which is the weary round of constant change and rebirth, the cycle of all nature, including human nature; it has been called 'the weary-go-round'! The possibility of deliverance from it is, we learn, guaranteed because of the existence of Nirvana, the unborn, unbecome, uncreated, uncompounded. The purpose of Buddhist practice is to accomplish that aim. Ignoring for the moment various qualifications, we can say this is the essence of Buddhism, at least as envisaged in the Pali Canon of the Theravada school, which I would boldly call basic Buddhism. In fact, it all seems to boil down to something extremely simple. That doesn't, of course, necessarily mean easy.
I think all the different schools of Buddhism build up on this basis. In fact, I would even go further and suggest that this basic Buddhism is really the true scientific basis of all religions.
Samsara, then, is the phenomenal world of our daily experience; it is the world of all that is compounded or conditioned. It is the law of dependent origination, or as the late Edward Conze called it 'conditioned coproduction'. Everything that arises does so because of prior conditions, and changes when those conditions cease to operate.
Unlike the samsaric world, Nirvana is not subject to conditions. What we usually call 'cause and effect' is a crude oversimplification of the law of conditionally. No thing ever arises from a single cause. I sometimes think it would be better to abolish the terms 'cause' and 'causality' from the Buddhist vocabulary; they are so misleading. If we wish to use the term, however, we should at least be well aware that causation is multiple, the effect being the outcome of a host of factors, one of which may be decisive. The twenty-four conditions which are listed in the Abhidhamma include that decisive effect. The crude formulation of one of the basic principles of Buddhism is that the cause of suffering is desire, but that's not a very good way of putting it, really.
This leads on to another word which is often misunderstood, partly on account of its non-Buddhist use — karma. This is the Sanskrit form, widely known in English; the Pali form is kamma. The literal meaning is 'action', and it is sometimes used in the sense of general activity or work. But in Buddhism it has an ethical meaning. In one place it is defined as 'volition', i.e. the will to do something which is ethically either good or bad. A cardinal mistake, of course, is to suppose that karma means fate. It doesn't!
It is sometimes used for the consequences to the doer of a particular action, although the correct technical term for this in both Pali and Sanskrit is vipaka, literally 'ripening', and it is summed up in the pithy Thai saying: Do good, get good. Do evil, get evil.
The good or bad deed you did may have been in a previous life. If we've done something bad in the past, we haw to accept the consequences. If we don't want nasty consequences in the future, we'd better behave ourselves now. The principle of karma is extremely simple, though-its working out is extremely complicated. They say that only a Buddha can fully comprehend it. At least we should not equate it with fate or some kind of predestination. These just don't feature in Buddhism. Buddhism, Pali and Nirvana
