..續本文上一頁ond the experience of the senses. “It is just because there is no sense-experience that Nibbaana is hap­piness,” said the Venerable Saariputta.

　　Thus only by holding fast to the negative aspect of Nibbaana will it be possible to approach the subject intel­ligently. Yet that is not the real approach. This should be done not by understanding but by realizing.

　　For the sake, however, of encouragement in the quest for truth, we have also the means of an intellectual ap­proach which has no further meaning and importance though, than that of a map to a traveller in an unknown land. There, like here, all names are new and strange, but can be identified at each stage of progress till the goal is reached. From the outset we must be prepared, however, to leave behind our own mode of thinking, like the travel­ler his home. And though travelling on the map only and by reading books can be highly interesting and can be done in an easy chair at home, yet it cannot be compared with the actual journey, even if that would involve much fatigue and discomfort. What then shall we say about the actual attainment

　　But here already we have to leave alone our compar­ison, and at once the language becomes unfamiliar, for “though there is a road, there is no traveller” (maggamatthi, gaamako na vijjati).

　　That Nibbaana is, is beyond doubt; for where there is the thesis of a process; there must be also the anti-thesis of no-more-proceeding. Thus with the thesis of the pro­cess of life as suffering is given also the anti-thesis of the deliverance from suffering through the ending of the pro­cess of becoming—and with this we have the clearest def­inition of Nibbaana: cessation of becoming, Bhavanirodho nibbaana.m (S II 117).

　　Where becoming stands for the arising of sensations and conceptions, for rebirth and its consequences of woe and death, for impermanence and sorrow, for the arising of fear and craving, for the growth of the roots of all evil, of greed, hate and delusion, for the tightening of material and spiritual bonds—there the cessation of becoming will naturally be viewed as bliss supreme. But this bliss of the cessation of becoming can only be understood when becoming itself is understood as suffering.

　　But because becoming is thought of as desirable—­notwithstanding “birth, old age, sickness and death are like cowherds with staves in their hands, which drive beings on, and cut life short as with an axe” (Dhp Com. 135)—because there are few or none that desire absence of rebirth, cessation of becoming is not understood as bliss. In the delusion of self it is seen as annihilation; and annihilation it is—namely of the delusion of self.

　　But like a man given over to the excessive use of drugs will always take more, preferring to dream on rather than to face actuality, so the world clings to the delusion of self and considers deliverance therefrom as undesirable. In the quest for truth, however, satisfaction and beauty come last. Both being entirely subjective, they arise and disappear with the idea of self. Self is the shadow made by our own action, moving along with it, inseparable. As the shadow is longest when the sun stands lowest, to be­come smaller while the sun rises higher, so the delusion of self is greatest when the light of insight is lowest; but with the increase of insight the delusion will decrease. It is this growth of insight that will finally lead to the de­liverance from all delusion.

　　As always in Buddhism, so here in the development of insight also, the starting point is actuality. Thus the first insight required will be insight into the real nature of conditioned things (sammasana .taa.na) as having the three characteristics of impermanence, suffering and soullessness. They have …

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