DEATH AND AFTER/PART 10

 

Nirvâna.

What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvâna is to the finished cycle of Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off the "After" of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what Nirvâna is, can do aught save disfigure it in striving to describe. What it is not may be roughly, baldly stated—it is not "annihilation", it is not destruction of consciousness. Mr. A.P. Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the ideas current in the West about Nirvâna. He has been speaking of absolute consciousness, and proceeds:

We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no ordinary mind—dominated by its physical brain and brain-born intellect—can they have a living signification. All that words can convey is that Nirvâna is a sublime state of conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after all that has gone before, to turn to the various discussions which have been carried on by students of exoteric Buddhism as to whether Nirvâna does or does not mean annihilation. Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with which the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a question. Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem of the most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as these but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question whether Nirvâna is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to annihilation.

So we learn from the Secret Doctrine that the Nirvânî returns to cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that

The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves only in Nirvâna, re-emerges from it in its integrity on the day when the Great Law calls all things back into action.