Similar accounts occur in many other passages with variations in the number of stages described.  We must not therefore insist on the details as essential.  But in all cases the process is marked by mental activity.  The meditations of Indian recluses are often described as self-hypnotism, and I shall say something on this point elsewhere, but it is clear that in giving the above account the Buddha did not contemplate any mental condition in which the mind ceases to be active or master of itself.  When, at the beginning, the monk sits down to meditate it is “with intelligence alert and intent”:  in the last stage he has the sense of freedom, of duty done, and of knowledge immediate and unbounded, which sees the whole world spread below like a clear pool in which every fish and pebble is visible.

6

With this stage he attains Nirvana[488], the best known word and the most difficult to explain in all the vocabulary of Buddhism.

It is perhaps used more by western students than by oriental believers and it belongs to the same department of religious language as the word saint.  For most Christians there is something presumptuous in trying to be a saint or in defining the precise form of bliss enjoyed by saints in heaven and it is the same with nirvana.  Yet no one denies that sanctity and nirvana are religious ideals.  In a passage already quoted[489], Gotama described how in attaining Buddhahood he sought and arrived at the incomparable security of nirvana in which there is no birth, age, sickness, death, pain or defilement.  This, confirmed by many other statements, shows that nirvana is a state attainable in this existence and compatible with a life of intellectual and physical exertion such as he himself led.  The original meaning is the state of peace and happiness in which the fires of lust, hatred and stupidity are extinguished and the participle nibbuto apparently derived from the same root had passed into popular language in the sense of happy[490].  Two forms of nirvana are distinguished.  The first is upadi-sesa-nibbanam[491] or nirvana in which the skandhas remain, although passion is destroyed.  This state is also called arhatship, the condition of an arhat, meaning originally a worthy or venerable man, and the person enjoying it is alive.  The idea that the emancipated saint who has attained the goal still lingers in the world, though no longer of the world, and teaches others, is common to all Indian religions.  With the death of an arhat comes the state known as an-upadi-sesa-nibbanam in which no skandhas remain.  It is also called Parinibbanam and this word and the participle parinibbuto are frequently used with special reference to the death of the Buddha[492].  The difference between the two forms of nirvana is important though the second is only the continuation of the first.  Nirvana in this life admits of approximate definition:  it is the goal of the religious life, though only the elect can even enter the struggle.  Nirvana after death is not a goal in the same sense.  The correct doctrine is rather that death is indifferent to one who has obtained nirvana and the difficulty of defining his nature after death does not mean that he has been striving for something inexplicable and illusory.