Tuesday 24 February 2004

Pic of the day: The ancient Greeks and the Norse as well imagined the afterlife as a bleak, barren, shadowy existence. Even then, they could not imagine ceasing to exist entirely. (Illustration from Morrowind.)

Nirvana or Hell?

It seems ironic, that a failed Christian and a successful Buddhist should be so similar. But they are. In fact they are so similar that I sometimes start to wonder which of them I would be.

The heart of the irony is the observation that the ultimate goal of the Buddhist, Nirvana, is in truth oblivion: Total and eternal nonexistence. The same fate seems to be reserved for Yahweh's enemies, if my reading of the Bible proves correct. I know there are some who think the God of the Bible wants to torture his enemies forever. But from what I can glean, their dishonor is eternal but their suffering brief. (In fact, the Bible is so vague on this that I have to count on a majority vote of the verses that deal with this matter.) "The wages of sin are death" to use the most constant formula. Only God has immortality in himself.

The goal of the Christian, and presumably the observant Jew as well, is to live forever with God. Now in the interest of religious harmony you may say that this is the true meaning of Nirvana too. But it isn't. In Hinduism, life with the deity is certainly a popular option, more so perhaps than simply being reborn into another life like this one. But Buddhism is not Hinduism. The ethical life of the Buddhist is not an attempt to impress a higher being or qualify for some reward in the afterlife. Rather its goal is to remove all debt to the world of flesh, to extinguish the very desire for this life.

***

The Buddhist accepts death. He does not cling to a hope of rescue and some happy joyful life after this one. In this, he is much like the apostate Christian who has not given up faith, only hope. The fallen soul has no illusion of a life after death. Like his eastern counterpart, that is what he fears: To wake up and find that death was not the end, that he will have to suffer the consequences of his life here. What he hopes for, as the best alternative of those available, is final death. To be extinguished, to go into the final darkness, to fall asleep and never wake.

And seeing this goal before him, he dispassionately prepares for just such an end. To ease the final transition, to make his last time free from mental anguish, he unties the knots that bind him to this world. Greed and desire, of course, which makes the soul burn with longing for life in this world. But also the more benign attachments, from romance to patriotism to craftsmanship. All things that make it hard to say goodbye to this world and those in it, and all things that make others suffer when we leave. Reason dictates that we better prepare ourselves and those around us for the upcoming end of our life here.

But why would they minimize suffering if they get no reward for it in the afterlife? Because it is the right thing to do. Remember, none of these worship a god who enjoys to see people suffer. Suffering happens, at least according to Buddhism (and common sense, if only it were common) because people expect better from life than they get. That is suffering as in discontentment, not as in pain. Pain is a physical sensation like the rest, but one we don't like. But there are many things we don't like, and there are many things we like but don't get. All this makes people suffer needlessly, because they expect more from life. But the one thing life is sure to give you is death. Once you have accepted that, you have pretty much accepted anything it can throw at you.

The apostate Christian and the Buddhist, then, both accept the reality of death, while most don't. The two of them don't worship death with poems and morbid imagery or enjoy thinking and talking about it. But like night follows day, death follows life, and they live with it. Their death is a final death, and end to all they have been. Oblivion. Annihilation. The world will go on for a time yet, and whatever they have contributed to it will stay for that time. But memories die, species go extinct – yes, even our own – and in the end even the stars die. Nothing we build will last forever. Our personal oblivion is followed by the general oblivion. Everything is transient. Everything is subject to decay.

When all is said and done, we die. Otherwise we would say and do more.

Buddhism, then, is an elaborate body of knowledge and practice to prepare the godless for annihilation. I suppose that's as good as you get, if you don't want to live forever. Or if you want to but cannot.