Samsara is Nirvana
Had you ever seen the image of the burning monk on the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut Rage Against the Machine (1992) then you may have a pretty good idea of what the Buddhist notion of nirvana looks like.
Because I grew up in a Christian household I had always misunderstood nirvana as a kind of heaven: a transcendent realm of bliss and beatitude. On the contrary, nirvana is not heavenly at all whatsoever but is rather radically immanent; like, for example, being literally on fire. Not that you need to set yourself on fire to attain nirvana, but then again, we are all on fire to one degree or another, are we not?
Anyways, the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in protest of the Christian persecution of Buddhists in Vietnam in 1963 and produced an image that would shock the world. How, exactly, did he have the equanimity to burn himself alive? How could he burn up with such poise?
From the experience I’ve had of the powers of meditation, it seems to me—and I can only speculate—that in his meditation Thích Quảng Đức is not turning down the sensation of burning, but rather turning it up to eleven. If, for example, pleasure and pain are the fundamental binary by which the precocious ego begins to organize itself, then should one find oneself beneath or beyond the pleasure principle then pleasure itself becomes indistinguishable from pain; sensation can become the burning body in its truest sense, without predicate, without ideas and without understanding; and not dissociative either but rather super-associative to the point where there is no relation between yourself and the flames.
It’s the no-relation of pure identity, like in the Borges essay:
Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
The Mahayana Tradition of Buddhism has long maintained that nirvana is not the release from samsara—the interminable grinding of the world—but rather nirvana is this grinding, nirvana is samsara. Were we to put this in crass western philosophical terms we might say that that which is most transcendent and ideal, most otherworldly, most alien and cosmic, is in fact, precisely that which is the most earthly, material and immanent. The unheimlich becomes heimlich again and vice versa.
It is no coincidence that the psychoanalyst places masochism under the star of the nirvana principle, nor, moreover, that the trend of the infamous death drive is expressed by this same nirvana of old. Nirvana may drive us to death, it is true, but it is the death of the self and never the subject.
Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation, June 11 1963
