4.  Nirvana.  No doctrine of Buddhism has been so much in dispute as this.  It has been widely maintained that Nirvana means extinction.  But T.W.  Rhys Davids and others have held that it is “the destruction of malice, passion, and delusion,” and that it may be attained in this life.  The definition is quoted from comparatively recent Pali translations.[83] Gautama, therefore, reached Nirvana forty-five years before his death.  It is claimed, however, that insomuch as it cuts off Kharma, or re-birth, it involves entire extinction of being upon the dissolution of the body.[84] It is held by still others that Nirvana is a return to the original and all-pervading Boddhi-essence.  This theory, which is really a concession to the Brahmanical doctrine of absorption into the infinite Brahma, has a wide following among the modern Buddhists in China and Japan.  It is a form of Buddhist pantheism.

As to the teaching of Gautama on this subject, Professor Max Mueller, while admitting that the meta-physicians who followed the great teacher plainly taught that the entire personal entity of an arhat (an enlightened one) would become extinct upon the death of the body, yet reasons, in his lecture on Buddhistic Nihilism, that the Buddha himself could not have taught a doctrine so disheartening.  At the same time he quotes the learned and judicial Bishop Bigandet as declaring, after years of study and observation in Burmah, that such is the doctrine ascribed to the great teacher by his own disciples.  Gautama is quoted as closing one of his sermons in these words:  “Mendicants, that which binds the teacher to existence is cut off, but his body still remains.  While his body still remains he shall be seen by gods and men, but after the termination of life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither gods nor men shall see him.”  T.W.  Rhys Davids expresses the doctrine of Nirvana tersely and correctly when he says:  “Utter death, with no new life to follow, is, then, a result of, but it is not, Nirvana."[85] Professor Oldenberg suggests, with much plausibility, that the Buddha was more reticent in regard to the doctrine of final extinction in the later periods of his life; that the depressing doctrine had been found a stumbling-block, and that he came to assume an agnostic position on the question.  In his “Buddha,"[86] Professor Oldenberg, partly in answer to the grounds taken by Professor Max Mueller in his lecture on Buddhistic Nihilism, has very fully discussed the question whether the ego survives in Nirvana in any sense.  He claims that certain new translations of Pali texts have given important evidence on the subject, and he sums up with the apparent conclusion that the Buddha, moved by the depressing influence which the grim doctrine of Nirvana, in the sense of extinction, was producing upon his disciples, assumed a position of reticence as to whether the ego survives or not.  The venerable Malukya (see p. 275) is said to have plied the Master with questions.