What is Nibbana (Nirvana)? Is it nothingness, emptiness, or something else?
Draft: Asker
Nibbāna (Sanskrit nirvāṇa) is the complete fading away of craving, and with it of suffering and of renewed becoming. It is not non-existence, and not a trance. It should not be confused with emptiness either: in the early texts emptiness (suññatā) means that phenomena are empty of self and of what belongs to a self (SN 35.85, MN 121), while the base of nothingness (ākiñcaññāyatana) is a separate meditative attainment, itself conditioned (MN 140).
The word means going out and cooling down - the way a fire goes out when its fuel runs out. SN 43.12 defines the unconditioned (asaṅkhata) as the destruction of greed (rāga), hatred (dosa) and delusion (moha). The third noble truth gives a direct definition too: the complete fading away, giving up and letting go of that same craving which leads to renewed becoming (MN 141). This is not an object lying somewhere waiting to be found; craving - for sense pleasures, for becoming, for non-becoming - ends and does not start up again.
The suttas give nibbāna many epithets, both negative and positive: the unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned (Ud 8.3), the deathless (amata), the highest happiness, peace, the island (dīpa), the shelter (leṇa), the refuge (saraṇa) - a long list is collected in SN 43.14-43. These are epithets, not a description of a location.
Hence the usual worry: does all this amount to annihilation? When Vacchagotta asked whether a Tathāgata exists after death, the Buddha replied that none of the four alternatives applies, and compared it to a fire: once a fire has gone out for lack of fuel, asking which direction it went is meaningless (MN 72). He does not say that the Tathāgata simply vanished - he drops a badly formed question.
The canon distinguishes two elements of nibbāna (Iti 44). “With residue” (saupādisesa) is the arahant while alive: craving is exhausted, but the five sense faculties are intact and they still experience the pleasant and the painful. “Without residue” (anupādisesa) is when, after the arahant’s death, everything experienced, no longer fed by anything, grows cool. The word parinibbāna usually points to the second case, as in the account of the Buddha’s passing (DN 16), though in the early texts it is not always kept strictly apart from plain “nibbāna”.
The canon does not invite speculation about nibbāna. The Buddha compared the going out to an oil lamp that burns while oil and wick last and goes out when they are gone (MN 140), and described the liberated person’s knowledge in a dry formula repeated across the canon: birth is ended, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more coming to any state of being.
Where to read: MN 140, MN 141, MN 72; on the two elements of nibbāna, Iti 44.