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Bhante Sujato on nibanna, the state of enlightenment past all conditioned existence.
The arahants (Sanskrit: arhat) purify their obscurations by following the Buddha’s eightfold path of meditation, knowledge, and moral residing and obtain nibbana (Sanskrit: nirvana), the extinguishment of ego. Picture by BTWImages / istock.com
For the Buddha, enlightenment—or extra actually “awakening” (bodhi)—meant one thing quite particular. He took enlightenment from the realm of the mystics and expressed it in clear, rational, and sensible phrases: enlightenment is freedom from struggling.
The Buddha skilled the world as an online of interrelationships: between thoughts and physique, senses and perceptions, actions and penalties. He noticed that struggling arose from a trigger, particularly our personal greed, hate, and delusion.
Now, it doesn’t take a Buddha to see that extreme greed may cause struggling—anybody who’s had a hangover can verify that.
What the Buddha noticed was one thing remarkably deep, one thing he described within the Nipata Sutta as “arduous to see, nestled within the coronary heart.” He noticed that due to this “arrow of craving” we restlessly wander about from life to life, “searching for however not discovering” reduction.
In fact, struggling is just not all there’s to life, however it’s inherent in life. Curing this type or that sort of struggling was not his objective. He needed to be executed with all of it.
The important thing perception the Buddha found is that it’s doable to let go totally of the causes of struggling. Not only a bit, not only for now, however fully, without end. The place these of lesser ambitions may be happy with easing their burden, setting down a few of its weight, he noticed clear to shedding all of it.
The trail to the tip of struggling includes creating all eight elements of the noble eightfold path. When every issue matures in concord and steadiness with the others, the thoughts has the arrogance and energy to see by way of the reason for struggling and let go of it. At that second, it’s like there is part of you that you’ve got by no means seen earlier than, and it’s gone. There’s a freedom and a lightness that can not be paralleled. It doesn’t encompass something. It simply is.
The core defilements of greed, hate, and delusion lastly drop away fully on the stage of the arahant (Sanskrit: arhat), the “perfected” or “worthy” one. My first introduction to Buddhism was Ajahn Buddhadasa’s Handbook for Mankind. I keep in mind so properly how he mentioned the arahant. I had by no means heard of such a factor earlier than, and I used to be crammed with a way of surprise. How may or not it’s that an individual might be perfected and nonetheless dwell on this world? I suppose I’m nonetheless making an attempt to reply that query!
With the ending of greed, hate, and delusion, an arahant is free from struggling in a selected sense. They nonetheless expertise ache and nonetheless know the fact of the struggling of conditioned issues. However they’re freed from psychological misery, and, much more importantly, they’re free from the entrapment of rebirth. They know that that is their final life.
What lies forward for them is what we name the unconditioned state: nibbana in Pali. This can be a time period whose literal which means—”quenching” or “extinguishment”—describes the going out of a flame.
A burning flame relies on gasoline, impermanent, and painful. A flame gone out is just not depending on something. It’s cooled, stilled, at peace. For the arahant, the flames of greed, hate, and delusion are quenched, extinguished. They’re cooled, stilled, at peace. They’ve let go of conditioned existence and are freed from struggling. They’re enlightened.
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