Nirvana Day 2018

The Watercooler
21

I have also encountered attestation as to the opposite like on Wikipedia where it says:

Parinirvana Day, or Nirvana Day is a Mahayana Buddhist holiday celebrated in East Asia. By some it is celebrated on 8 February,[citation needed] but by most on the 15 February.[citation needed] It celebrates the day when the Buddha is said to have achieved Parinirvana, or complete Nirvana, upon the death of his physical body.[1]

That [1] citation leads to a hopefully well-researched BBC page that says:

This is a Mahayana Buddhist festival that marks the death of the Buddha. It is also known as Nirvana Day.

It’s not hard though to find parallel attestations on random Internet pages and search results that substantiate the reverse: that it is a Theravāda celebration.

It seems to be something the Internet doesn’t have an easy consensus on. From a different Wikipedia page we have an attestation of the Buddha’s birthday as a “Swānyā Punhi (स्वांया पुन्हि)” , which:

is celebrated on the full moon day of May. The festival is known by various names, Buddha Jayanti, Buddha Purnima, Vaishakh Purnima, Saga Dawa, and Vesak. Purnima means full moon day in Sanskrit. Among the Newars of Nepal, especially from the Shakya clan of Newars, it is of great importance because they consider it as a continuation of the sage of the Śākyas- the clan that Lord Buddha’s family belonged to. Thus, they celebrate the festival which is in their language known as Swānyā Punhi (स्वांया पुन्हि), the full moon day of flowers.[18] The day marks not just the birth of Shakyamuni Gautam Buddha but also the day of his Enlightenment and Mahaparinirvana.

The end has the birth-awakening-parnirvāṇa in-one-celebration/day tradition ascribed to Vajrayāna Buddhists in Nepal, practising in a tradition in cultural sprachbund other Buddhisms, chiefly those in Tibet, at least AFAIK.

The [18] leads to this. It is an archived we page that looks (?) like it might be a newspaper for the Nepalese diaspora in English?

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22

I just go to the websites of Buddhist temples and organizations to see when they observe Buddhist holidays.

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I don’t think so. The tradition that the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and parinibbāna all took place on the full moon day of Visākha is from the Pali commentaries: the Buddhavaṃsa Atthakathā in the case of his birth and numerous commentaries in the case of his enlightenment and parinibbāna.

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Thank you for sharing this. Can you please share when and where these commentaries were written?

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Apologies. What I meant to say here, was the adoption of this date in February. One of those wikipedia sources attests to Burma celebrating Pariniarvāṇa Day (with the birth-awakening-parnirvāṇa in-one-day specification from the Pāli commentaries as attested above) on May 21. Does this have to do with the Buddhist calendar having dates that seem to move around frequently when compared to the Gregorian calendar?

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As we have them now they were written in the 5th century CE, though based upon Sinhala commentaries of a somewhat earlier date. The Madhuratthavilāsinī (Buddhadatta’s commentary to the Buddhavaṃsa) was written at the Bhūtamangalagāma Vihāra in the Cola state of Southern India. Most of the others were written in the Mahāvihāra at Anurādhapura.

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Your link gives the dates for different countries in 2016. The use of the Indian lunar calendar in Theravada countries means that the date will be different every year in the Gregorian (or any other solar) calendar.

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