c. 1815.—"... the state of Niban, which is the most perfect of all states. This consists in an almost perpetual extacy, in which those who attain it are not only free from troubles and miseries of life, from death, illness and old age, but are abstracted from all sensation; they have no longer either a thought or a desire."—Sangermano, Burmese Empire, p. 6.
1858.—"... Transience, Pain, and Unreality ... these are the characters of all existence, and the only true good is exemption from these in the attainment of nirwāna, whether that be, as in the view of the Brahmin or the theistic Buddhist, absorption into the supreme essence; or whether it be, as many have thought, absolute nothingness; or whether it be, as Mr. Hodgson quaintly phrases it, the ubi or the modus in which the infinitely attenuated elements of all things exist, in this last and highest state of abstraction from all particular modifications such as our senses and understandings are cognisant of."—Yule, Mission to Ava, 236.
" "When from between the sál trees at Kusinára he passed into nirwána, he (Buddha) ceased, as the extinguished fire ceases."—Ibid. 239.
1869.—"What Bishop Bigandet and others represent as the popular view of the Nirvâna, in contradistinction to that of the Buddhist divines, was, in my opinion, the conception of Buddha and his disciples. It represented the entrance of the soul into rest, a subduing of all wishes and desires, indifference to joy and pain, to good and evil, an absorption of the soul into itself, and a freedom from the circle of existences from birth to death, and from death to a new birth. This is still the meaning which educated people attach to it, whilst Nirvâna suggests rather a kind of Mohammedan Paradise or of blissful Elysian fields to the minds of the larger masses."—Prof. Max Müller, Lecture on Buddhistic Nihilism, in Trübner's Or. Record, Oct. 16.
1875.—"Nibbānam. Extinction; destruction; annihilation; annihilation of being, Nirvāṇa; annihilation of human passion, Arhatship or final sanctification.... In Trübner's Record for July, 1870, I first propounded a theory which meets all the difficulties of the question, namely, that the word Nirvāṇa is used to designate two different things, the state of blissful sanctification called Arhatship, and the annihilation of existence in which Arhatship ends."—Childers, Pali Dictionary, pp. 265-266.
" "But at length reunion with the universal intellect takes place; Nirwana is reached, oblivion is attained ... the state in which we were before we were born."—Draper, Conflict, &c., 122.
1879.—
"And how—in fulness of the times—it fell
That Buddha died ...
And how a thousand thousand crores since then