The topic I wish to address belongs, at least at first sight, to the class of questions on which the Buddha preferred to remain silent. As he warned in the famous simile of the wounded man addressed to Malunkyaputta, we might die before obtaining a satisfactory answer. Indeed, if I were simply to ask, “What becomes of the Tathāgata after death?”, the Buddha would undoubtedly have set the question aside. My concern, however, is somewhat different, and I believe it deserves our attention because it has generated considerable debate, both in the past and today. It concerns the nature of consciousness and the nature of nibbāna, the ultimate goal of all Buddhists. I shall begin by outlining, in broad terms, three major schools of thought.
The first maintains that there exists a pure, luminous, unconditioned consciousness, without surface, which ultimately coincides with nibbāna itself. Its advantage is that it provides an account of the experience of nibbāna both before and after death. Its drawback is that it postulates the existence of an unconditioned consciousness, something the Buddha consistently denied. In effect, it reintroduces a permanent consciousness bearing a striking resemblance to the Vedāntic Self (Sat-Cit-Ānanda), a view the Buddha explicitly rejected in his second discourse on non-self. I shall refer to this as the eternalist position.
The second school takes the opposite view. Since all consciousness is impermanent, it is necessarily conditioned. Consequently, there can be no unconditioned consciousness identical with nibbāna. Furthermore, because nibbāna is understood as the cessation of all processes and all phenomena, it is interpreted as sheer nothingness. The strength of this position is its fidelity to the canonical teaching concerning the impermanent nature of consciousness. Its weakness is that it leads to an extreme metaphysical position absent from the Buddha’s teaching, namely the notion of absolute nothingness. Moreover, it leaves unanswered the original question: who, if anyone, can experience nibbāna after the dissolution of the aggregates? I shall call this the annihilationist position.
The third school likewise rejects the possibility of an unconditioned consciousness but also refuses to identify nibbāna with nothingness. Instead, it regards nibbāna as the unconditioned element (dhātu), the ultimate reality. Yet acknowledging the reality of nibbāna does not imply that it either possesses consciousness or is itself consciousness. Thus, this position agrees with the previous one concerning the nature of consciousness as conditioned and impermanent, while differing radically concerning the nature of nibbāna. Its strength is that it remains faithful to the Buddha’s teaching while avoiding nihilism. Its weakness, however, is that it too fails to answer the question of how a fully awakened being can experience nibbāna after death. How can nibbāna be described as the supreme bliss if, once the goal has been attained, there is no one left to experience it? Can an unexperienced bliss still meaningfully be called bliss? I shall refer to this as the realist position, since it regards nibbāna as a genuine reality.
Let us begin with the question of the experience of nibbāna. The issue presents no difficulty with regard to nibbāna “with residue” (sa-upādisesa-nibbāna), that is, the realization of nibbāna during this very life. Consciousness does not have to be unconditioned in order to experience the unconditioned, just as the lotus does not have to be the sun in order to bloom beneath its rays. The Buddha and all arahants realize nibbāna during their lifetime and thereby experience supreme happiness.
The real difficulty arises only with nibbāna “without residue” (anupādisesa-nibbāna), that is, after the death of the fully awakened one. According to the realist position, nibbāna is certainly not nothingness, yet the awakened individual is definitively extinguished at death. This leads to an apparent paradox: the awakened one, who realized nibbāna during his life, no longer experiences it after death.
This difficulty may be approached in three different ways. The first is to question the very notion of personal identity. To what extent is an individual truly real if he is constantly dying and being reborn from one moment to the next? According to the Pāli Canon, no one literally comes into being or passes away; only physical and mental processes arise and cease. As the Visuddhimagga states, strictly speaking, no one realizes nibbāna. The realization of nibbāna is not the acquisition by a subject of a supreme spiritual object. Rather, it is the dissolution of the very subject that seeks it.
The second approach concerns the nature of time. The realization attained by the Buddha during his lifetime is complete, perfect, definitive, boundless, and absolute. His death neither subtracts from nor adds anything to that realization, because, at the level of ultimate reality, time itself does not exist.
Finally, we may consider the solution proposed by the Venerable Sāriputta. According to this interpretation, supreme bliss consists precisely in the absence of all feeling. The individual self is merely a limitation imposed upon the infinite, a point expressed by Spinoza in the celebrated dictum omnes determinatio est negatio. After the death of the fully awakened one, nothing remains but nibbāna itself. This final hypothesis reconciles the annihilationist understanding of consciousness as conditioned with the realist affirmation of the reality of nibbāna.
Yet what of our initial question, which undoubtedly lies at the root of all the others? To experience nibbāna, to realize it, consciousness is required. As we have seen, this presents no problem during the lifetime of the awakened one. But if consciousness, like the other aggregates, ceases altogether at death, how can the fully awakened being enjoy the supreme bliss of the unconditioned (paramaṃ sukhaṃ)?
The most straightforward answer would be that there is simply no one left to enjoy it. This would imply that nibbāna is radically transcendent. At this point we must return to the Buddha’s warning, which reminds us of the limits of human understanding. His teaching is, if not skeptical, at least profoundly apophatic. What a fully awakened being is, and what—if anything—can be said of its condition after death, lies infinitely beyond our cognitive capacities. We cannot truly conceive it, much less express it.
What we can affirm is this: so long as we are alive, the path leading to nibbāna remains open to us. The realization of nibbāna is already possible from the moment of stream-entry. In other words, genuine happiness is accessible here and now. Is that not, in itself, wonderful news?
Our concern with the afterlife probably reveals a subtle form of existential anxiety in the face of death, but it also betrays an incomplete understanding of the Buddha’s teaching on non-self. It reflects our thirst for continued existence and our compulsive attachment to ourselves. Does one who abides in supreme bliss concern himself with what comes afterward? Nibbāna is here and now, or it is nowhere.
In conclusion, I would like to quote the words of one of the great sages of ancient Greece, Epicurus. Within a Buddhist context, these words are meaningful only with regard to the fully awakened one, since all others remain subject to rebirth:
"Death, the most terrifying of evils, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. Therefore, death means nothing either to the living or to the dead, since it has no concern with the former, and the latter no longer exist. Yet the multitude at one moment flee death as the greatest of evils, and at another long for it as the end of the evils of life. The wise man neither rejects life nor fears the cessation of life. For life does not burden him, nor does he think that there is any evil in no longer living » (Letter to Menaces).
Alain Durel
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