Nirvana and Parinirvana

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 9 pages

Laid out as a two-column table so that each claim faces its explanation. Nirvana is absolute being and the threshold to Parinirvana, absolute perfection; and the first thing the file establishes is that it is no annihilation. The analogy offered is that to see annihilation in Nirvana amounts to saying of a man in sound dreamless sleep — sleep that leaves no impression on the physical memory because the sleeper's higher Self is in its original state of absolute consciousness during those hours — that he too is annihilated. Even that comparison, she adds, answers only to the most material side of the question, since reabsorption is not a dreamless sleep but absolute existence, an unconditioned unity, and a state which human language is hopelessly inadequate to describe.

Parinirvana is then defined as absolute non-being, which is equivalent to absolute being or Be-ness — the state reached by the human Monad at the end of the great cycle, and the same as Parinishpanna. The distinction the file exists to draw is that the two are successive rather than synonymous, Nirvana being the threshold of the other; and a third term is introduced to qualify both, since Parinirvana without Paramartha is said to be no bliss at all. The closing pages carry the argument that sooner or later all that now seemingly exists will be so in reality.

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