The History of Buddhist Thought c18.47

c18.47

This state is described with a wealth of epithets as, “the harbour of refuge, the cool cave, the island amidst the floods, the place of bliss, emancipation, liberation, safety, the supreme, the transcendental, the uncreated, the tranquil, the home of ease, the calm, the end of suffering, the medicine for all evil, the unshaken, the ambrosia, the immaterial, the imperishable, the abiding, the further shore, the unending, the bliss of effort, the supreme joy, the ineffable, the detachment, the holy city.”¹ These are names of Nirvāṇa used by those who have realized it in this life, and in whom there is still a “substratum of existence” as we know it. What when that substratum is withdrawn? Then everything is withdrawn by which anything can be asserted. He who is released is “profound, immeasurable, hard to fathom, like the great ocean”. And if the disciples refused to assert anything, they were not agnostics or eel-wrigglers, but were merely thinking clearly and refusing to express the inexpressible. It does not fit the case to assert existence or non-existence when its object has been explained as being of quite a different kind from that about which assertion is possible.