Thanks for this essay, Bhante.
Just to provide some extra sources, Venerable Ṭhānissaro was not the first with such ideas. Although his work is much more detailed than both of them combined, Otto Schrader (1908, On The Problem of Nirvāṇa, p167f) and Erich Frauwallner (1953, History of Indian Philosophy, p178) propose similar ideas.
Some scholars have responded critically to these ideas before:
- Soonil Hwang - Metaphor And Literalism In Buddhism (p50, p152)
- Abraham Vélez de Cea - The Silence of the Buddha and the Questions About the Tathāgata After Death (p138)
- Steven Collins - Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities (p219)
To me, the most convincing argument they make is the one that draws a parallel between the two types of extinguishment. The Buddha used the metaphor of the extinguished fire for the total, remainderless ending of greed, hatred, and delusion. It doesn’t make sense that he would use the same metaphor in what is effectively the complete opposite sense for the extinguishment at the death of an enlightened being, where it is supposed to reflect some kind of continuation of the “unbound” mind. This was also my initial reaction when I first read Mind Like Fire Unbound many years ago. In other words, we aren’t taught to “unbind” greed, hatred, and delusion, just like we aren’t taught to “unbind” all feelings/existence, which is said to be extinguished at death (e.g. in Iti44).
In Buddhism as Philosophy, Mark Siderits explains the metaphor (for extinguishment at death) in a more satisfying way. Referencing the Buddha’s question to Vacchagotta in MN72, he says:
When a fire has exhausted its fuel, we say that it’s gone. Where has it gone? The question makes no sense. For the extinguished fire to have gone somewhere, it would have to continue to exist. The question presupposes that the fire continues to exist. […]
[W]e are talking as if there is one enduring thing, the fire, that first consists of flames from kindling, then later consists of flames from logs, then still later consists of flames from new logs. This should tell us that ‘fire’ is a convenient designator for a causal series of flames (just as ‘the one light that shone all night’ was really a causal series of lamp flames). And this in turn means that no statement using the word ‘fire’ can be ultimately true (or ultimately false). […]
When we apply this analysis to the case of the arhat after death, it becomes clear why the Buddha can reject all four possibilities [he still exists, no longer exists, both, or neither] without implying that nirvana is an ineffable state. The word ‘arhat’ is a convenient designator, just like ‘fire’. So nothing we say about the arhat can be ultimately true. The only ultimately true statement about the situation will be one that describes the skandhas in the causal series. It is, for instance, true that at a certain point (which we conventionally call ‘the death of the arhat’) the nama skandhas existing at that moment do not give rise to successor nama skandhas. Does this mean that the arhat is annihilated - that nirvāṇa means the utter extinction of the enlightened person? No. There is no such thing as the arhat, so it lacks meaning to say that the arhat is annihilated. And for exactly the same reason, it lacks meaning to say that the arhat attains an ineffable state after death.
The matter of whether there is a self or not is quite aptly addressed by Sean M. Smith’s The Negation of Self in Indian Buddhist Philosophy. He doesn’t bring up the Āgamas, though, which in some instances directly say “there is no self” (MA6, MA62).