Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c11.s3.7

c11.s3.7

This is the general aspect of Nirvāṇa, but there are indications also of a more prosaic kind of the nature of the intuitive consciousness, which is the final product of the Meditations and other exercises, and from the elaboration with which details of this state are set out in the Canon and later we would err gravely if we treated Nirvāṇa in any abstract way. It was, while life lasted, a state of extremely marked psychic powers, conferring on the saint powers of a varied, and to western ideas, incongruous kind.² The first is the power of perceiving the interrelation of consciousness and the body,³ and this leads to the second, higher fruit of the power to create a body made by,⁴ or of, mind, a conception to which we owe, it may be feared, the astral body of Spiritualism and other follies. Then he enjoys magic power (iddhi); he can multiply himself and become one again; be visible or invisible; penetrate a wall as if air, or the ground as if water; walk on water; fly like a bird in the sky; touch sun and moon, and reach in body the heaven of Brahmā. The next power is less remarkable; he can hear sounds celestial and human, far and near. Then he knows the minds of others, in all their manifold natures and conditions. Then he can remember his former births, through many an Aeon in all details and modes. Then with the heavenly eye he discerns the destinies of all persons dying and being reborn according to their deserts. Then he directs his mind to the destruction of the intoxicants of desire, becoming, ignorance, by the knowledge first of the four noble truths, and then by like knowledge of the intoxicants, their origin, their cessation, and the path. In him then is accomplished liberation from the intoxicants; ‘Rebirth has been destroyed; the higher life has been fulfilled; what had to be done has been done; after this present life there will be no beyond.’ This is the highest fruit of the life of the recluse, to see as clearly as one can in a clear pool the shells and the pebbles, and the swimming shoals of fish.