Nirvana Famous Quotes

flower (which appears in fancy) before the eye; seeking any inferior standing ground, only as (su-ni-chiio); seeking Nirvana, as a dead sleep; arriving at rest, as the dancing of the six dragons; the state of perfect equanimity, as the one true standing point; the power of endless transformation, as the trees and flowers of the four seasons;--all these things are thus great in comparison only. To hear the law of Buddha is the chief source of joy.

It is exactly these fallacious views that makespeople crave for sentiate existence and worldly pleasure. These people are the victims of ignorance; they identify the union of the five aggregates as the 'self' and regard all other things as 'not-self'; they crave for individual existence and have an aversion to death; they are drifting about from one momentary sensation to another in the whirlpool of life and death without realising the emptiness of mundane existence which is only a dream and an illusion; they commit themselves to unnecessary suffering by binding themselves to rebirth; they mistake the state of everlasting joy of Nirvana to be a mode of suffering; they are always seeking after sensual pleasures. It was for these people, victims of ignorance, that the compassionate Buddha preached the real bliss of Nirvana.

Never allow yourself this tendency for being great, famous, someone bigger than life-size – never. Life-size is perfect. To be exactly life-size, to be just ordinary, is perfectly as it should be.

Consider Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven.” Here we have a first-person narrator whose wife or lover, Lenore, has recently died. He is in his library searching through his books to find a way to make her death meaningful—or even understandable. When a raven enters the library, the narrator takes it as a sign and asks a series of increasingly desperate questions. The raven, of course, has long been a symbol for death, and the questions that the narrator asks the raven are all really questions about death. Is there a heaven? Does death come from God or the Devil? Will he ever get over her death? Will he see her again? These are likely the same things he was trying to find out from his books. But while the books may have tried to give answers, the raven—death itself—says only one word: “Nevermore.” So this is a poem that makes claims—or, more specifically, it is a poem that rejects claims. It rejects the notion that anyone can know anything about death, or what happens after death, except that a person who has died no longer exists. All that death “says” to us is “Nevermore.” If we try to go beyond this, we will eventually suffer the narrator’s fate and become insane. Many people would disagree vigorously with this premise. Some people believe that the spirits of the dead become ghosts that we can still communicate with. Others believe in heaven, hell, reincarnation, Nirvana, or some knowable final destination for the soul. I can imagine a number of different ways that one might go about rebutting Poe’s metaphysical truth claims. But it makes no difference whether or not ravens can talk. Nothing about Poe’s poem can be supported, or refuted, by scientific knowledge about the vocalization mechanisms of the Corvus corax. Nor does it matter whether or not Edgar Allen Poe ever knew anybody named Lenore, or owned a “bust of Pallas,” or did or said any of the things described in the poem. “The Raven” makes metaphysical truth claims that we can isolate and evaluate. But these claims do not depend on either the history or the science of the poem turning out to be true.

Adi Shankaracharya, who is credited with the revival of Hinduism, could fearlessly rubbish central tenets of Hindu faith with lyrical felicity. In his famous stotra, the Nirvana Shatakam, he states—Na dharmo, na chartho, na kamo, na moksha: None of the four purusharthas or goals of life in the Hindu world view have meaning. Indeed, he goes further to say—Na mantro, na teertham, na veda, na yajnah: Neither mantra, nor pilgrimage sites, nor consecrated ritual, not even the Vedas are of any value. All that matters is Chit-ananda rupam: Awareness and Bliss. In this context, he actually conflates himself with Shiva—Shivo ham, Shivo ham: I am Shiva, I am Shiva. In most other conventional religions, especially the Abrahamic faiths, this assumption of godhood would be considered blasphemy. Indeed, by contrast, we have the example of the great Sufi mystic, Al-Hallaj (858–922 CE), in Persia, almost contemporaneous with Shankaracharya, who was put to death for having had the temerity to say—Ana’l Haq: I am the Truth. In ancient Greece, Socrates, the great philosopher, in the fourth century BCE, was sentenced to be killed by drinking hemlock, accused of ‘impiety’ and for his espousal of what is now called the logic of Socrates. At that very time in India, many divergent schools of philosophy were revelling in the freedom given by their faith to explore the truth in the way they thought fit. In such a milieu, Buddhism was genuinely under threat of being assimilated within the larger diversified matrix of Hinduism; indeed, many Hindus still believe that Buddha was the last avatar of Vishnu. No wonder then, that Buddhism could flourish with much greater ease with its identity as separately preserved, outside the shores of India, than in the land where it was born. Actually, Amartya Sen is right when he writes that Sanskrit has a larger volume of agnostic or atheist writings than any other classical language. Sheldon Pollock too is strongly rebutted by other reputed Western scholars. George Cardona, also a prominent Western Sanskrit scholar, emphasises ‘the sharp critical thinking skills of early Sanskrit studies across various disciplines. … At no point in early and medieval India was there an absolute, thoughtless acceptance of tradition, even by different followers of a single tradition. … Nor are grammatical, exegetical, or logical systems made solely as maidservants to Vedic tradition.