... liberates the vital. To make a vāda or gospel of sorrow is dangerous because sorrow if indulged becomes a habit, sticks and few things, if once they stick, can be more sticky. Buddhist Nirvana The Buddhist Nirvana and the Adwaitin's Moksha are the same thing. It corresponds to a realisation in which one does not feel oneself any longer as an individual with such a name or such a form, but an ...
... suffering of the world is there, but it fades into a bliss of spiritual peace or ecstasy beyond the sorrow line. Buddha's teaching laid heavy stress on the sorrow and impermanence of things, but the Buddhist Nirvana won by the heroic spirit of moral self-conquest and calm wisdom is a state of ineffable calm and joy, open not only to a few like the Christian heavens, but to all, and very different from the ...
... practical problems. When people make an effort to do Yoga, and especially a Yoga like Sri Aurobindo's whose ultimate aim is not to pass into a beatific beyond (whether the Vedantic Liberation, the Buddhist Nirvana, the Vaishnava Bliss-world, the Zoroastrian or Christian Heaven, the Muslim Paradise), there has to be an organised collective life with a certain minimum of rules. An extreme tolerance is attempted ...
... mystics, an irreducible imperfection in our members that compels us ultimately to drop them and look for the end of our soul's journey in a plane that is not terrestrial - a Vedantic Brahmaloka, a Buddhist Nirvana, a Vaishnavite Gokula or Heaven. Sri Aurobindo says that if the universe is meant to be the Divine's manifestation, there must lie in the bosom of the Spirit the secret of the universe's fulfilment ...
... well in Paris, who in her letter had predicted that Mother would be “murdered by her own disciples.” That letter must still exist in the Ashram archives. The plateaux of Tibet may prefer Buddhist Nirvana, but Mother, just like the little man who writes these words, wanted things to change and Earth to be freed forever from this reign of Falsehood and of Death. * The nightmare. It was ...
... experience of Nirvana. This Nirvana is the negation of all that the mind can affirm as the Being but it is only a gate of entry into the Absolute. From this Nirvana you can either take up the negative or the affirmative path. By the negative you reach the Non-Being or what the Gita calls anirdeshyam (the Indeterminate). This Non-Being is the Buddhists Nirvana or Chinese Tao. The Buddhists consider it... the Void, while to the Taoists this void, contains everything. Again, this Nirvana is not the same as the Brahmanirvana of the Gita. By following the affirmative path you arrive at the Supermind and pass through it to the Sachchidananda. In my own case, I passed to the supermind from a Nirvana which was not of the Buddhist type but a state of mere being with the most indispensable positive element... realisation, there are three aspects of Brahmana—Atman or self, Purusha or Soul, Ishwara or God. The Adwaitins negate both Purusha and Ishwara and arrive at the unity of the Atman and Brahman. The Buddhists negate all the three aspects and arrive at Non-Being. ...
... before he could do it for others. SATYENDRA: Tibetan Buddhists say, "Nirvana is only a stage." SRI AUROBINDO (surprised) : Is that so? PURANI: In Buddhism they have two paths: knowledge and devotion. They consider Buddha an Avatar. SRI AUROBINDO: It is the Mahayana path that goes through devotion. But isn't it a fact that all Buddhists utter: Buddham saranam gacchami, dharmam saranam gacchami... Buddha himself couldn't have said it, for he said that one to do everything by one's own effort. SATYENDRA: It is said that Buddha turned back from the gate Nirvana. SRI AUROBINDO: I thought it was Amitabha Buddha who refused to enter Nirvana. He is venerated very deeply in Japan. Modern European scholars are now trying to prove that Budddha's life-story was a later invention. PURANI: The Tibetan... at all. You know about the various signs by which he has to be recognised? SATYENDRA: Is Zen Buddhism alive in Japan? SRI AUROBINDO: Oh yes. Lady Batesman is going there to study it. The Zen Buddhists have a very severe discipline. PURANI: I am told that in Lamas the meditation is very rigorous and the monks are thrashed for breaking the discipline. SRI AUROBINDO: We might also begin that ...
... first sight to be incompatible with works and we get the repeated use of the word Nirvana to describe the status to which the Yogin arrives. The mark of this status is the supreme peace of a calm self extinction, śāntiṁ nirvāṇa-paramām , and, as if to make it quite clear that it is not the Buddhist's Nirvana in a blissful negation of being, but the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect... the Kshara. We are accustomed indeed to regard Nirvana and any kind of existence and action in the world as incompatible and we might be inclined to argue that the use of the word is by itself sufficient and decides the question. But if we look closely at Buddhism, we shall doubt whether the absolute incompatibility really existed even for the Buddhists; and if we look closely at the Gita, we shall... laya, mokṣa ? Is that withdrawal necessary before we can enter into Nirvana, or is Nirvana, as the context seems to suggest, a state which can exist simultaneously with world-consciousness and even in its own way include it? Apparently the latter, for in the succeeding verse the Gita goes on to say, Page 236 "Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman, they in whom the stains of sin are effaced and the ...
... substantial.... What it [this experience] brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. 118 Sri Aurobindo had gone straight into what the Buddhists call Nirvana, what the Hindus call the Silent Brahman or That; the Tao of the Chinese; the Transcendent, the Absolute, or the Impersonal of the Westerners. He had reached that famous "liberation" (mukti)... as one enters Nirvana; one merely opens a passageway and goes out. Sri Aurobindo had not gone beyond the mental plane when he experienced Nirvana: I myself had my experience of Nirvana and silence in the Brahman long before there was any knowledge of the overhead spiritual planes. 120 It is after ascending to higher, superconscious planes that he had experiences superior to Nirvana, where the i... Aurobindo's first discovery. Nirvana cannot be at once the ending of the Path with nothing beyond to explore... it is the end of the lower Path through the lower Nature and the beginning of the Higher Evolution. 121 From another perspective, we might also ask ourselves if the goal of evolution is really to get out of it, as is believed by the followers of Nirvana and of all the religions that ...
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