NIRVANA or Nigban is the Tibetan Nyangan ; in Buddhism, final emancipation, a Buddhist idea of annihilation, or the spirit's absorption. Bunsen asserts it to mean the absence of desire in this life, inward peace ; but M. St. Hilaire, M. Eugene Burnouf, and Prof. Max Muller identify Nirvana with absolute annihilation, the pure not-being, in which there is no absorption in the higher life of the uncreated essence, no consciousness of peace and freedom from evil, but the loss of being and consciousness at once,—a blown-out candle. This doctrine is shadowed forth in the despair of Job and Jeremiah, in the deep melancholy of Eccle siastes, in the choruses of Sophocles, the Apologia of Plato, and in the soliloquy of Hamlet ; yet this has nowhere led to suicide as the path to Nirvana, but to fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and self-sacri fice. • But the doctrine was offered to people who held to the belief of a natural immortality and metempsychosis, to whom death brought no sure deliverance, but might lead to ills greater than in this world, new forms of human or, brute life more miserable than what they had passed through.
The life of self-sacrifice of Buddha, his voluntary acceptance of poverty, his proclamation of a uni versal brotherhood, and his making war on the caste system, are remarkable features of his career. But after him Brahmanism rose triumphant, and drove Buddhism into other lands, and the region of Sakya Muni's birth and labours became a place of pilgrimage to peoples from distant countries. The Nirvana of Sakya Muni, according to the Raj guru of Assam, occurred in the 18th year of Ajatra Satru, and 196 years before Chandragupta, the contemporary of Alexander, which may agree thus : 348+196=544.—Bunsen, God in Hist. i. p. 5.