Parinirvāṇa Day Reflections
Today is Parinirvāṇa Day, the annual remembrance of the death of Siddhārtha Gautama, the “historical Buddha”.
The story of the Buddha’s death is recorded in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and the Pāli Canon’s Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (both are readable in full, here for the Mahāyāna version and here for the Pāli version) — I won’t go into the story here, but I’ll post the final words of the Buddha in the Pāli sutta, as I previously shared on Mastodon:
Then the Blessed One addressed the monks, “Now, then, monks, I exhort you: All fabrications are subject to ending & decay. Reach consummation through heedfulness.” That was the Tathāgata’s last statement.
Thinking about “ending & decay” reminded me of Chris Lizama’s recent post about a zen kōan, where a fox says that they used to be a monk, but fell into five hundred lifetimes of being reborn as a fox after saying that awakened people do not experience cause and effect. The fox asks the monk Baizhang for a “turning word” to take him out of this cycle, to which Baizhang says: “Don’t ignore cause and effect.”
Parinirvāṇa teaches us that even the Buddha — one who is, for lack of a better phrase, “at one” with cause and effect — is still subject to it. The body of the Buddha was born, lived, got old, and died. The materiality of the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa, culminating in the end of a body’s functioning, is a reminder that the process of passing away is something that will happen to us too, even if we were to be literally the Buddha.
However, passing away is something that we can come to perceive in an entirely new way. It’s the “parinirvāṇa” sūtra, not the “death of the Buddha” sūtra. It is the story of someone not being reborn, rather than the story of someone dying.
I have no way of knowing what it was that Siddhārtha Gautama, the noble one of the Śākya clan, experienced as those body functionings changed so radically that he stopped communicating with the assembled monks. But part of following the Dharma is understanding that the parinirvāṇa event was somehow different from a usual passing away. It was the visible, sensory total representation of something that happened years prior with the Buddha’s awakening, and a moment that capped the time-and-space bound aspects of the Buddha’s teaching. To understand what the parinirvāṇa was would be to deeply understand the Dharma itself.
Entering the stream does not give us immortality, but instead such an intimate and deep understanding of mortality, that death becomes something else entirely.
南無阿弥陀仏
namu amida butsu
Peace,
⭕