"The Unborn", "The Deathless" ,"The Unconditioned": Translating epithets for nibbāna

[Sunyo]

I recently wrote a few words about it on this forum.

Translating Nibbana as extinguishment

I do not agree with Ven Bodhi that nibbana is hard to translate. To me the problem seems to be that we put the word on a pedestal it doesn’t deserve. You read any book on buddhism, and what does it say the goal is? Nibbana. But in the suttas one finds terms like cessation (nirodha) and ending (khaya) much more often. I guess they outnumber nibbana at least ten to one. Standard phrases for enlightenment often don’t mention it. Eg. “Nibbindaṃ virajjati; virāgā vimuccati. Vimuttasmiṃ vimuttamiti ñ…

Translating Nibbana as extinguishment

Well, having quickly read the passage you quoted (it’s in the foreword to the MN translation) it seems Venerable Bodhi has a view I do not share. He writes “that Nibbana is merely the destruction of the defilements and the extinction of existence cannot stand up under scrutiny.” But the clearest definitions of Nibbana are saying exactly those things he says it is not. I’ve quoted the passages before. Nibbana at enlightenment is the ending of the defilements, Nibbana at death is the cessation of …

Translating Nibbana as extinguishment

Hi @cdpatton, Yes, it’s English. Not Pali. But that’s my point. In Pali both asoka and ajata are adjectives that describe nibbana. That is, they describe what is absent (a-) in nibbana, describing what nibbana is not. They do not describe what nibbana IS. But then translating that as Unborn, potentially turns the absence of “born” into a presence of “the Unborn”. Just like deathless (amata, also derived from a verb in Pali) means the absence of death, not the Undeath! (literally it’s non-died…