Nirvana: the end of suffering

Buddhists affirm nirvana, literally a blowing out, as the extinction of the craving, aversion, and delusion that drive suffering, and thus the end of the round of rebirth. It is the third of the Four Noble Truths, the cessation the whole path aims to realize. Early Buddhist texts distinguish two senses of the term: nirvana with remainder (sopadisesa), attained by an awakened person such as the Buddha at the moment of enlightenment, who continues to live in a physical body still subject to sensation and eventual death, and final nirvana without remainder (parinirvana), reached only at that person's death, when no further rebirth follows.

On the question of what, if anything, becomes of an awakened being after parinirvana, the earliest texts record the Buddha declining to answer directly. Among a set of questions later tradition calls the avyakata, the unanswered or undetermined questions, whether the Tathagata exists, does not exist, both, or neither after death was one the Buddha reportedly set aside as not conducive to the goal of liberation, comparing the question to a man shot with an arrow who insists on learning the archer's identity before allowing the wound to be treated. The tradition has generally read this reticence as intentional, describing nirvana more by what it is not than by any positive claim about a further existence.

Nirvana is affirmed across the Buddhist traditions as the summit of the path, though understood with differing emphasis. Theravada Buddhism stresses the liberation of the arhat, the individual practitioner who, through direct insight, extinguishes the causes of rebirth for themselves. Mahayana Buddhism relates the goal instead to the bodhisattva ideal, in which full awakening is deliberately deferred or reoriented toward the liberation of all beings, and develops the further claim, associated especially with Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka philosophy, that nirvana and the everyday world of samsara are, when properly understood, not two separate realms but the same reality seen either through delusion or through wisdom.

This non-duality of nirvana and samsara marks one of the more striking philosophical developments beyond the earlier canonical picture, and it answers, in Mahayana's own terms, the predicament set out in the first two Noble Truths while remaining continuous with the logic of anatta, since with no fixed self to be annihilated, nirvana is described as the ceasing of the fires of clinging rather than the destruction of a person, a formula the tradition holds constant even as later schools reinterpret what, philosophically, that cessation ultimately amounts to.