The Conception of Buddhist Nirvana c8.1

c8.1

In the VI-V century B C at the time immediately preceding the rise of Buddhism, India was seething with philosophic speculation A great variety of views and systems were springing up and actively propagated among the different classes of its population¹ Materialistic doctrines, denying every survival of the individual after death and every retribution for his moral or immoral deeds were widely spread. The orthodox Brahmanical community was also divided. A part of it stuck to the old sacrificial religion which promised to its votaries the reward of a blissful existence in a celestial paradise Another part of it favoured, from an early date, a monistic view of the universe, and interpreted the reward of supreme bliss as the dissolution of the personality in an impersonal all-embracing Absolute. Later on some Brahmanical circles developed the idea of an eternal individual soul¹ which after having been bound up in many existences would return to its genuine condition of a pure spirit as a reward for accumulated merit.