Nibbana is Better than You Think (long extract)

"The Buddha said that he taught just suffering and the end of suffering. Suffering is the problem he focused on and he proposed to solve it. First he was able to solve that problem inside himself. Then he taught other people to solve it within themselves.

It seems fairly simple. You look at all the suffering in the world, and it’s obvious that it’d be really good that people not have to suffer. You see war, famine, induced war, induced famine. The things that happen in even just the human world are pretty bad, and there are realms where it gets a lot worse. So, any teaching that offers an end to suffering would seem to be something that would appeal to everyone.

Yet when the Buddha talks about the implications of what it means to put an end to suffering, when he talks about nibbāna, a lot of people say it doesn’t sound all that appealing.

Years back, when I gave my first study weekend here in California, the topic was the four noble truths. You get to the third truth before you get to the fourth. The third truth is the end of suffering. We talked about it a bit and then we talked about the fourth truth, and finally we got to the right concentration in the fourth truth: pleasure and rapture throughout the body. A number of people said, “The path sounds better than the goal.”

That’s because we’re on this side of the path. In other words, we haven’t completed it yet. We haven’t reached the end. The Buddha asks you to reserve judgment because you’re looking at things through distorted eyes.

We live in a world where there’s always suffering, so our minds are active, doing what we can to get away from suffering. We keep on doing a cost-benefit analysis. You put in an effort: Will it be worth it? We feel that if it’s worth it, it has meaning.

But in nibbana, there’s no activity. There’s no doing at all, no need to do anything at all. So, there’s no act of balancing the effort against the goal. Questions of meaning become meaningless. Listening to that from our side of things, it doesn’t sound all that attractive.

But as the Buddha said, if you think that there’s anything negative about the experience of nibbāna, that would be wrong view. So, reserve judgment. Take it for granted that the ability to put an end to suffering would be a good thing. An incredibly good thing."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Nibbana Is Better than You Think"

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