Kammas are said to be of three kinds, of body, speech and mind (kayika, vacika and manasika).  The root of this kamma is however volition (cetana) and the states associated with it [Footnote ref 2].  If a man wishing to kill animals goes out into the forest in search of them, but cannot get any of them there even after a long search, his misconduct is not a bodily one, for he could not actually commit the deed with his body.  So if he gives an order for committing a similar misdeed, and if it is not actually carried out with the body, it would be a misdeed by speech (vacika) and not by the body.  But the merest bad thought or ill will alone whether carried into effect or not would be a kamma of the mind (manasika) [Footnote ref 3].  But the mental kamma must be present as the root of all bodily and vocal kammas, for if this is absent, as in the case of an arhat, there cannot be any kammas at all for him.

Kammas are divided from the point of view of effects into four classes, viz. (1) those which are bad and produce impurity, (2) those which are good and productive of purity, (3) those which are partly good and partly bad and thus productive of both purity and impurity, (4) those which are neither good nor bad and productive neither of purity nor of impurity, but which contribute to the destruction of kammas [Footnote ref 4].

Final extinction of sorrow (nibbana) takes place as the natural result of the destruction of desires.  Scholars of Buddhism have tried to discover the meaning of this ultimate happening, and various interpretations have been offered.  Professor De la Vallee Poussin has pointed out that in the Pali texts Nibbana has sometimes been represented as a happy state, as pure annihilation, as an inconceivable existence or as a changeless state [Footnote ref 5].

_______________________________________________________

___________________

[Footnote 1:  See Kathavatthu and Warren’s Buddhism in Translations, pp, 221 ff.]

[Footnote 2:  Atthasalini, p. 88.]

[Footnote 3:  See Atthasalini, p. 90.]

[Footnote 4:  See Atthasalini, p. 89.]

[Footnote 5:  Prof.  De la Vallae Poussin’s article in the E.  R.E. on Nirva@na.  See also Cullavagga, IX. i. 4; Mrs Rhys Davids’s Psalms of the early Buddhists, I. and II., Introduction, p. xxxvii; Digha, II. 15; Udana, VIII.; Sa@myutta, III. 109.]

109

Mr Schrader, in discussing Nibbana in Pali Text Society Journal, 1905, says that the Buddha held that those who sought to become identified after death with the soul of the world as infinite space (akasa) or consciousness (vinnana) attained to a state in which they had a corresponding feeling of infiniteness without having really lost their individuality.  This latter interpretation of Nibbana seems to me