Nirvana is a pleasant state of coolness and
freshness that we can all touch in this very life.
By using mindfulness, concentration, and insight to transform our suffering, we can touch nirvana in the here and now. Nirvana is not some distant place in a distant future.
“Nirvana” is a word that comes from an ancient rural dialect of India. In the Buddha’s time, as in many places around the world today, rural families would cook over a small fire made from straw, dung, wood, or even rice husks. Every morning, the first thing the mother would do is light the fire to prepare breakfast for family members going out to work in the fields. She would hold her hand above the ashes from the night before, to see if they were still warm. If they were, she would only need to add some straw or twigs to rekindle the fire. But if the fire had gone out, she would find that the ashes were completely cold. After a fire has completely gone out, if you sink your hands into the ashes, it feels pleasantly cool.
The Buddha used the word “nirvana” to describe the pleasant experience of the cooling of the flames of our afflictions. Many of us are burning in the fire of our craving, fear, anxiety, despair, or regret. Our anger or jealousy, or even our ideas about death and loss, can burn us up inside. But when we transform our suffering and remove our wrong ideas, very naturally, we can touch a refreshing peace. This is nirvana.
There is an intimate connection between our suffering and nirvana. If we did not suffer, how could we recognize the peace of nirvana? Without suffering, there can be no awakening from suffering, just as without the hot coals, we cannot have the cool ashes. Suffering and awakening go together.
As we learn to handle our suffering,
we are learning to generate moments of nirvana.
Nirvana does not have to be something big, something we spend a lifetime practicing for, hoping to one day experience. Each one of us can touch small moments of nirvana every day. Suppose you’re walking barefoot and you accidentally step on a briar, and a dozen thorns pierce your foot. Immediately you lose all peace and happiness. But as soon as you’re able to remove one thorn, and then another, you begin to get some relief—you get some nirvana. And the more thorns you remove, the greater the relief and peace. In the same way, the removal of afflictions is the presence of nirvana. As you recognize, embrace, and transform your anger, fear, and despair, you start to experience nirvana.
TOUCHING NIRVANA
The Buddha taught that we can enjoy nirvana with our very body. We need our body—we need our feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness—in order to touch nirvana. We can touch it with our feet, our eyes, our hands. It is thanks to being alive with our human body that we can experience the cooling of the flames and generate moments of nirvana.
When we cool the flames of our anger and, having understood its roots, the anger transforms into compassion, this is the experience of nirvana. When we experience the peace and freedom of walking meditation, we are touching our cosmic body; we are touching nirvana. When we stop running, let go of all our worries about the future and regrets about the past, and come back to enjoy the wonders of life in the present moment, that is when we touch nirvana.
It is by getting in touch deeply with the historical dimension in the present moment that we can touch the ultimate. The two do not exist separately. As we touch our cosmic body, the world of phenomena, we get in touch with the ultimate: the realm of reality-in-itself.
When we see the world of phenomena from the perspective of the ultimate, we see that if there were no death, there could not be birth. If there were no suffering, there could not be happiness. Without mud, there could be no lotus. They depend on each other to manifest. Birth and death are just ideas at the level of the historical dimension. They are not the true nature of reality in the ultimate dimension, which transcends all ideas and notions, all signs and appearances. In the ultimate dimension of reality-in-itself, there is no birth and no death, no suffering and no happiness, no coming and no going, no good and no evil. When we can let go of all ideas and notions—including the ideas of a “self,” a “human being,” a “living being,” or a “life span”—we touch the true nature of reality in itself; we touch nirvana.
Nirvana is the ultimate dimension. It is the extinction and letting go of all notions and ideas. The concentrations on emptiness, signlessness, aimlessness, impermanence, non-craving, and letting go all help us get a breakthrough into the true nature of reality. By contemplating deeply our physical body and the realm of phenomena, we get in touch with nirvana—the true nature of the cosmos, our God body—and we experience peace, happiness, and the freedom of non-fear. We are no longer afraid of birth and death, being and nonbeing.
Just as birds enjoy soaring in the sky, and deer enjoy roaming in the woods, so do the wise ones enjoy dwelling in nirvana. We don’t have to look very far to find nirvana, because it is our true nature in this very moment. You cannot remove the ultimate from yourself.
To touch nirvana is to realize the insight of
no birth and no death in our daily life.
NIRVANA IS NOT ETERNAL DEATH
Many people mistakenly think that nirvana describes a blissful state or a place we enter after we die. We may have heard it said that “the Buddha entered nirvana after he died.” It sounds like nirvana is a place we go to after death. But this is very misleading, and it can give rise to many dangerous misunderstandings. It suggests we cannot touch nirvana when we are alive; we have to die in order to get there. But this is not at all what the Buddha taught.
Once I was on a teaching tour in Malaysia. As we drove through Kuala Lumpur we saw billboards advertising a Buddhist funeral service company calling itself Nirvana. I thought it was very unkind to the Buddha to identify nirvana with death like that. The Buddha never identified nirvana with death. Nirvana is associated with life in the here and now. One of the greatest misunderstandings of Western Buddhist scholars has been to define nirvana as a kind of “eternal death” that ends the cycle of reincarnation. This is a grave misunderstanding of the deepest meaning of nirvana. Why would millions of people follow a religion that teaches eternal death? The very idea of eternal death is still caught in notions of being and nonbeing, birth and death, but the true nature of reality transcends all these notions. It is only when we are alive that we can touch nirvana. I hope someone in Kuala Lumpur might be able to convince that funeral company to change its name.
THE ONE REALITY OF INTERBEING
With the insight of interbeing, we have seen how nothing in the world, including our bodies, exists by itself, alone. All things are mutually dependent on one another. If things were never dirty, how could they be immaculate? Without suffering, there could never be happiness, and without evil, there could never be goodness. If there were not suffering, how could we look deeply into it to give rise to understanding and love? Without suffering, how could there be insight? If there were no wrong, how could we know what right is?
We say, “God is good; God is love,” but if God is good and if God is love, does this mean God is not in those places where there is no goodness and love? This is a very big question. In the light of Buddhist teachings, we can say that the ultimate nature of reality, the true nature of God, transcends all notions, including the notions of good and evil. To say anything less is to diminish God.
In the face of devastating natural disasters in which thousands of people die, there are those who ask, “How can God, who is good, allow such suffering?”
When we hear news of wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, or hurricanes, we may feel overwhelmed by despair. It is hard to make sense of it. We don’t understand why some of us have to endure such suffering and death, but not others. The insight of emptiness can help. When a young baby, an elderly grandmother, a teenager, or a young man dies in a disaster, we feel somehow that a part of us also dies. We die with them because we don’t have a separate self, we all belong to the same human species. Insofar as we are still alive, they are also still alive in us. When we can touch this insight of no self, we are inspired to live in a such a way that they continue, beautifully, in us.
Nirvana, the ultimate nature of reality, is indeterminate; it is neutral. That is why everything in the cosmos is a wonder. The lotus is a wonder, and so too is the mud. The magnolia is a wonder, and so too is the poison oak. Ideas of good and evil are created by our mind, not by nature. When we let go of and release all these ideas, we see the true nature of reality. We cannot call an earthquake, storm, or volcano “good” or “evil.” Everything has its role to play.
So we may need to reexamine our way of seeing God. If God is only on the side of goodness, then God cannot be the ultimate reality. We cannot even say that God is the ground of all being, because if God is the ground of being, what is the ground of nonbeing? We cannot speak of God in terms of existing or not existing, being or nonbeing. Even the peace and happiness that arises from touching the ultimate comes from within us, not from the ultimate itself. The ultimate, nirvana, is not itself peace or joy, because no notion or category like “peace” or “goodness” can be applied to the ultimate. The ultimate transcends all categories.
DON’T WAIT FOR NIRVANA
When the Buddha attained enlightenment at the foot of the Bodhi tree, he was a human being, and after his enlightenment, he was still a human being, with all the suffering and afflictions that having a human body entails. The Buddha was not made of stone. He experienced feelings and emotions, pain, cold, hunger, and fatigue, just like all of us. We shouldn’t think that because we experience the suffering and afflictions of being human, we cannot touch peace, we cannot touch nirvana. Even after his enlightenment, the Buddha experienced suffering. From his teachings and stories about his life, we know that he suffered. But the key point is that he knew how to suffer. His awakening came from suffering: he knew how to make good use of his afflictions in order to experience awakening. And because of this, he suffered much less than most of us.
One breath or one step taken in mindfulness can already bring us real happiness and freedom. But as soon as we stop practicing, suffering manifests. Small moments of peace, happiness, and freedom steadily come together to create great awakening and great freedom. What more can we ask for? And yet many of us still think that as soon as we experience awakening, that’s it, we’re enlightened! We think that after that, we’ll have no more problems; we can say goodbye to suffering forever. But that’s not possible. Awakening and suffering always go together. Without the one, we can’t have the other. If we run away from our suffering, we will never be able to find awakening. So it’s okay to suffer—we just need to learn how to handle it. Awakening can be found right in the heart of our suffering. It is thanks to transforming the heat of the fire that we can touch the coolness of nirvana. The practices in this book can help you touch peace and freedom at every step along the path.