‘불의 소멸’에 관한 인도적 관점과 불교적 비판

Abstract

In the early canon, the state of nirva was often explained through the image of a fire extinguished. F. Otto Schrader, in his article 'On the problem of nirva', focused on this image of a fire extinguished and insisted that, for the audience of the Buddha, the state of nirva explained through this image could not be understood as a kind of annihilation.His argument was based on the so called 'common Indian view' on fire seen in several later Upaniads. According to him, 'an expiring flame does not really go out, but returns into the primitive, pure, invisible state of fire it had before its appearance as visible fire'. Thus, the enlightened person after death does not become nothing but returns to the primitive and pure state, like the paramtman, the ultimate reality in Brahmanism'. That is to say, as a fire extinguished does not finally end its existence but goes back to its origin or latent state, the state of an enlightened person after death cannot simply be mere non-existence. However, it has not been proved that the allegedly common Indian view was already presupposed in the early canon when the metaphor of a fire extinguished was used to explain what happens to an enlightened person after death. Basically, It should be determined through the context in which this metaphor was used in the early canon. In this paper, I am dealing with this Schrader's interpretation by tracing this common Indian view back to the Upaniads, by clarifying the meaning of this metaphor in the context of Vacchagotta's unanswered questions, and by exploring later developments, especially within the Sarvstivda, the Sautrntika, and the Thervada systems.