“The expression does not fit the case, Gotama.  For the fire depended on fuel and when the fuel is gone it is said to be extinguished, being without nourishment.”

“In just the same way, all form by which one could predicate the existence of the saint is abandoned and uprooted like a fan palm[515], so that it will never grow up in future.  The saint who is released from what is styled form is deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom, like the great ocean.  It does not fit the case to say either that he is reborn, not reborn, both reborn and not reborn, or neither reborn nor not reborn.”  Exactly the same statement is then repeated four times the words sensation, perception, sankharas and consciousness being substituted successively for the word form.  Vaccha, we are told, was satisfied.

To appreciate properly the Buddha’s simile we must concentrate our attention on the fire.  When we apply this metaphor to annihilation, we usually think of the fuel or receptacle and our mind dwells sadly on the heap of ashes or the extinguished lamp.  But what has become of the fire?  It is hardly correct to say that it has been destroyed.  If a particular fire may be said to be annihilated in the sense that it is impossible to reconstitute it by repeating the same process of burning, the reason is not so much that we cannot get the same flames as that we cannot burn the same fuel twice.  But so long as there is continuous combustion in the same fireplace or pile of fuel, we speak of the same fire although neither the flame nor the fuel remains the same.  When combustion ceases, the fire goes out in popular language.  To what quarter does it go?  That question clearly does not “fit the case.”  But neither does it fit the case to say that the fire is annihilated[516].

Nirvana is the cessation of a process not the annihilation of an existence.  If I take a walk, nothing is annihilated when the walk comes to an end:  a particular form of action has ceased.  Strictly speaking the case of a fire is the same:  when it goes out a process ceases.  For the ordinary man nirvana is annihilation in the sense that it is the absence of all the activities which he considers desirable.  But for the arhat (who is the only person able to judge) nirvana after death, as compared with nirvana in life, may be quiescence and suspension of activity, only that such phrases seem to imply that activity is the right and normal condition, quiescence being negative and unnatural, whereas for an arhat these values are reversed.

We may use too the parallel metaphor of water.  A wave cannot become an immortal personality.  It may have an indefinitely long existence as it moves across the ocean, although both its shape and substance are constantly changing, and when it breaks against an obstacle the resultant motion may form new waves.  And if a wave ceases to struggle for individual existence and differentiation from the surrounding sea, it cannot be said to exist any more as a wave.  Yet neither the water which was its substance nor the motion which impelled it have been annihilated.  It is not even quite correct to say that it has been merged in the sea.  A drop of water added to a larger liquid mass is merged.  The wave simply ceases to be active and differentiated.