“The stakes are driven in and cannot be shaken,” so said the herdsman Dhaniya. “The ropes are new and well made: the cows cannot break them. Therefore if thou wilt, rain, O sky!”
“Having, like a bull, rent the ropes: having like an elephant broken through the tangle,” so said the Blessed One, “I shall no more be born to death. Therefore if thou wilt, rain, O sky!”
And he smiled as one at rest, enthroned above pain or change.
Then all at once, from a full-wombed cloud, a shower poured down, filling both land and water. And the eyes of Dhaniya were enlightened, and seeing the true riches of the empty hand and freed soul, the herdsman spoke thus, bowing at the feet of the Perfect One.
“No small gain has indeed accrued to us since we have seen the Blessed One. We take refuge in thee, O Wisest. Be thou our Master.”
“He who has cows has care with his cows,” so said the Blessed One, concluding the matter. “But he who is free of these things has not care.” So Dhaniya entered the Way of Peace, and taking the vow of the householder was at rest.
And now in this of Dhaniya is a thing much to be pondered. For it is observable that the Holy One said these words to him:
“I have passed over to Nirvana—to the Peace.” How could this be and he yet living in the world of form? What then is the Nirvana? For, since the departing of Him who has thus Attained, the ignorant have taught the heresy which Sariputta the Great rebuked in the monk Yamaka,—even that the true Nirvana is extinction, is dispersal of all that once was the man, the ego known to himself and others, he being annihilated in death as a flame blown out in vast darkness. Yet no, and again, not so, though not in words may the Truth be fully told. Yet—if a man may attempt to throw a stone at a star, this that follows may be told of the Nirvana.
They who talk of existence and non-existence are ignorant, for these are words only. There is no existence or non-existence, but in their stead reality and unreality, and in this world of form is unreality and in That World, reality. So that the unreal ego which we here believe to be the man is nothing and whether here or there has no reality but is a compound of causes which dissolve at death, while the reality of the man abides whether here or There. True it is that after death no longer can it be perceived, no longer can it be guessed by the bodily senses—the liars, the deceived, the slaves; yet in a profundity beyond all depths of all oceans it abides. The rest is silence.
Thus, the Blessed One and they who with him attained, were in life delivered from the illusion of the world of forms and seeing all as it is were glad. For the true Nirvana is an extinction—not of the eternal—but of craving, the lust of the flesh, the lust of life, and the pride of life. And when the inward fires of lust, and hatred and pride are extinguished, then that man has entered into the Nirvana whether here or there. And surely this was the Lesson of Lessons, and many a parable, many a teaching did the World-Honoured utter in all solemnity that we might know it is the self—the individual self lurking in a man like an ape in the boughs, clutching, greedy, foul, foolish, that is the cause of all evil and sorrow and of his separation from the universe of life and light that lies about him. And he must learn that this foul and foolish chatterer is dream and illusion of the senses and consciousness, for when this teaching is mastered we lift the true eyes of wisdom and look about us seeing at last that the world is wholly fair. Know this, for it is the very kernel of the nut. This is the Way of Peace, this is the Gate of the Ten Perfections whereby we also are perfect being One; this is the Nirvana, absolute in joy and bliss immortal.