For a while, perhaps, even the Buddha may have had a fleeting wish for a companion who could understand more fully what was in his mind, as he felt his life ebbing away, because just at this point, Mara, his shadow-self, appeared. “Let the Tathagata achieve his parinibbana now,” Mara whispered seductively. Why go on? He deserved his final rest; there was no point in further struggle. For the last time, the Buddha repelled Mara. He would not enter the bliss of his Final Nibbana until his mission was complete and he was certain that the Order and the holy life were properly established. But, he added, that would be very soon: “In three months time,” he told Mara, “the Tathagata will attain his parinibbana.” It was then, the scriptures tell us, at the Capala Shrine in Vesali, that the Buddha consciously and deliberately “abandoned the will to live.” It was a decision that reverberated throughout the cosmos. The world of men was shaken by an earthquake, which made even Ananda realize that something momentous was afoot, and in the heavens a solemn drum began to beat. It was too late, the Buddha told the now contrite Ananda, for his attendant to beg him to live on. He must now speak to the Sangha and bid his monks a formal farewell. In the great painted hall of the Vesali arama, he spoke to all the bhikkhus who were residing in the neighborhood. He had nothing new to tell them. “I have only taught you things that I have experienced fully for myself,” he said. He had taken nothing on trust and they too must make the Dhamma a reality for themselves. They must thoroughly learn all the truths he had imparted, make them, by means of meditation, a living experience, so that they too knew them with the “direct knowledge” of a yogin. Above all, they must live for others. The holy life had not been devised simply to benefit the enlightened, and Nibbana was not a prize which any bhikkhu could selfishly keep to himself. They must live the Dhamma “for the sake of the people, for the welfare and happiness of the multitude, out of compassion for the whole world, and for the good and well-being of gods and men.”

The next morning, after the Buddha and Ananda had begged for their food in the town, the Buddha turned round and gazed for a long time at Vesali; it was the last time that he would ever see it. They then took the path to the village of Bhandagama. From this point, the Buddha’s wanderings seemed to be heading off the map of the civilized world. After he had stayed for a while in Bhandagama, instructing the bhikkhus there, the Buddha traveled with Ananda slowly northward, through the villages of Hatthigama, Ambagama, Jambugama and Bhoganagama (all of which have disappeared without trace) until he arrived at Pava, where he lodged in the grove belonging to one Cunda, the son of a goldsmith. Cunda did homage to the Buddha, listened attentively to his instruction and then invited him to an excellent dinner, which included some sukaramaddava (“pigs’ soft food”). Nobody is quite sure what this dish really was: some of the commentaries say that it was succulent pork already on sale in the market (the Buddha never ate the flesh of an animal that had been killed especially for him); others argue that it was either a form of minced pork or a dish of the truffle mushrooms enjoyed by pigs. Some maintain that it was a special elixir, which Cunda, who was afraid that the Buddha would die and attain his parinibbana that day, believed would prolong his life indefinitely. At all events, the Buddha insisted on eating the sukaramaddava and told the bhikkhus to eat the other food on the table. When he had finished, he told Cunda to bury what was left, since nobody-not even a god-could digest it. This could simply be an adverse appraisal of Cunda’s culinary skills, but some modern scholars have suggested that the Buddha realized that the sukkaramaddava had been poisoned: they see the loneliness of the Buddha’s end and the remoteness of the location as a sign of a distance between the Buddha and the Sangha and believe that, like the two old kings, he too died a violent death.

The Pali texts, however, do not even consider this appalling possibility. The Buddha’s request that Cunda bury the food was strange, but he had been ill for some time and expected to die shortly. That night he began to vomit blood and was gripped by a violent pain, but yet again he mastered his illness and set off with Ananda to Kusinara. He was now in the republic of Malla, whose inhabitants do not seem to have been interested in the Buddha’s ideas. The texts tell us that he was accompanied by the usual retinue of monks, but apart from Ananda, no senior member of the Order was with him. On his way to Kusinara, the Buddha became tired and asked for some water. Even though the stream was stagnant and muddy, the water became clear as soon as Ananda approached it with the Buddha’s bowl. The scriptures emphasize such incidents to mitigate the bleak solitude of these last days. We hear that on the final leg of his journey, the Buddha converted a passing Mallian, who, fittingly, had been a follower of his old teacher, Alara Kalama. This man was so impressed by the quality of the Buddha’s concentration that he made the Triple Refuge on the spot and presented the Buddha and Ananda with two robes made of cloth of gold. But when the Buddha put his on, Ananda exclaimed that it looked quite dull beside the brightness of his skin: the Buddha explained that this was a sign that he would very shortly-when he reached Kusinara-achieve his Final Nibbana. A little later, he told Ananda that nobody should blame Cunda for his death: it was an act of great merit to give a Buddha his last almsfood before he attained his parinibbana.

What was this parinibbana? Was it simply an extinction? And if so, why was this Nothingness regarded as such a glorious achievement? How would this “final” Nibbana differ from the peace that the Buddha had attained under the bodhi tree? The word nibbana, it will be recalled, means “cooling off” or “going out,” like a flame. The term for the attainment of Nibbana in this life in the texts is saupadi-sesa. An Arahant had extinguished the fires of craving, hatred and ignorance, but he still had a “residue” (sesa) of “fuel” (upadi) as long as he lived in the body, used his senses and mind, and experienced emotions. There was a potential for a further conflagration. But when an Arahant died, these khandha could never be ignited again, and could not feed the flame of a new existence. The Arahant was, therefore, free from samsara and could be absorbed wholly into the peace and immunity of Nibbana.

But what did that mean? We have seen that the Buddha always refused to define Nibbana, because we have no terms that are adequate for this experience that transcends the reach of the senses and the mind. Like those monotheists who preferred to speak of God in negative terms, the Buddha sometimes preferred to explain what Nibbana was not. It was, he told his disciples, a state

where there is neither earth nor water, light nor air; neither infinity or space; it is not infinity of reason but nor is it an absolute void… it is neither this world or another world; it is both sun and moon.

That did not mean that it was really “nothing”; we have seen that it became a Buddhist heresy to claim that an Arahant ceased to exist in Nibbana. But it was an existence beyond the self, and blissful because there was no selfishness. Those of us who are unenlightened, and whose horizons are still constricted by egotism, cannot imagine this state. But those who had achieved the death of the ego knew that selflessness was not a void. When the Buddha tried to give his disciples a hint of what this peaceful Eden in the heart of the psyche was like, he mixed negative with positive terms. Nibbana was, he said, “the extinction of greed, hatred and delusion”; it was the Third Noble Truth; it was “Taintless,” “Unweakening,” “Undisintegrating,” “Inviolable,” “Non-distress,” “Non-affliction,” and “Unhostility.” All these epithets emphasized that Nibbana canceled out everything that we find intolerable in life. It was not a state of annihilation: it was “Deathless.” But there were positive things that could be said of Nibbana too: it was “the Truth,” “the Subtle,” “the Other Shore,” “the Everlasting,” “Peace,” “the Superior Goal,” “Safety,” “Purity, Freedom, Independence, the Island, the Shelter, the Harbor, the Refuge, the Beyond.” It was the supreme good of humans and gods alike, an incomprehensible Peace, and an utterly safe refuge. Many of these images are reminiscent of words that monotheists have used to describe God.