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Death And After

By Annie Besant

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Nirvãna

What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvana is to the finished cycle of Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off the “After” of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what Nirvana is, can do aught save disfigure it in striving to describe. What it is not may be roughly, badly stated – it is not “annihilation”, it is not [Page 79] destruction of consciousness. Mr. A. P. Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the ideas current in the West about Nirvana. He has been speaking of absolute consciousness, and proceeds: 

We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no ordinary mind – dominated by its physical brain and brain-born intellect – can they have a living signification. All that words can convey is that Nirvana is a sublime state of conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after all that has gone before, to turn to the various discussions which have been carried on by students of exoteric Buddhism as to whether Nirvana does or does not mean annihilation. Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with which the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a question. Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem of the most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as these but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question whether Nirvana is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to annihilation. [ "Esoteric Buddhism", page 197, Eight Edition ]

So we learn from The Secret Doctrine that the Nirvani returns to cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that

The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves only in Nirvana, reemerges from it in its integrity on the day when the Great Law calls all things back into action.[Quoted in The Secret Doctrine, vol. ii. p. 83. The student will do well to read, for a fair presentation of the subject, G. R. S. Mead’s “Note on Nirvana” in ‘Lucifer’, for March, April, and May 1893. (Reprinted in "Theosophical Siftings")] [Page 80]