Resources for Nehan-e (Nirvana Day)

from Sutra of the Buddha’s Last Teaching

 “Monks, you must not be sad or anxious. Even if I were to stay in this world for a whole kalpa, people who meet must in the end leave each other. It is impossible that a meeting has no end. The Dharma which benefits oneself as well as others is perfectly complete. There would be no benefit from my staying longer in this world. I have already liberated all people and celestial beings that I should liberate. Even for the people who are not yet liberated, I have sown the seeds of liberation. From this time on, my disciples, repeatedly practice this and the Dharma body of the Tathagata will survive and never perish. Therefore, you must know that everything in the world is impermanent. All the people who have met each other must in the end depart from each other. Do not be worried about anything. This is the real condition of the world. You must make pure and relentless effort to achieve liberation, and dispel the darkness of ignorance with the light of wisdom. The world is in truth fragile; there is nothing which is permanent. I will cast off my body just as if it were a disease. This condition, temporarily called a body, must be abandoned. It will submerge in the sea of old age, sickness, birth and death. A wise man is extremely happy to get rid of it, just as a man would kill a robber.

“Monks, you must always seek earnestly for the Way. All worldly things, whether movable or immovable, are subject to destruction and decay. Stop thinking for awhile. Stop talking, too, for time is slipping away and I am about to enter Parinirvana. These are my final words.”

Translation by Shibuya Koun and Daigaku Rummé

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Taking inspiration from a traditional Nehan-e

Here at Sanshin we do an observance that's much simplified from the traditional ceremony, something that’s appropriate for who and where we are, but because Nehan-e or Nirvana Day is one of the sanbukki (three Buddha days), it’s a really important occasion within Soto Zen.  Nirvana Day is the observance of the death of the Buddha’s physical body and his entering Nirvana, and right from the beginning that poses a conundrum for us.  He had already entered Nirvana with his experience of awakening under the bodhi tree.  He already fully knew that samsara and nirvana aren’t separate, so there was nowhere for him to go.  He continued to live out his karma in his physical body, that collection of five skandhas, until age of 80, and we call this nirvana with remainder -- he still had a physical form.

Parinirvana is the final death, or “complete blowing out,” of a Buddha or enlightened being.  It’s the end of the physical body and the cycle of rebirth in the six realms of samsara.  This is complete liberation from suffering, and we call it nirvana without remainder -- there’s no longer a physical form.  Thus in early (Theravada) teachings, one moves from nirvana with remainder -- awakening in one's lifetime -- to nirvana without remainder, leaving the physical realms of samsara, - and not being reborn into suffering ever again.

The Mahayana view is a little different; Soto Zen is under the umbrella of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, so for us, parinirvana is not just complete extinction.  We can see it as the the ultimate realization of the Buddha’s eternal, unchanging nature.  This is the Dharmakaya, the dharma body of Buddha.  It’s not that nirvana with a body is somehow less than perfect and nirvana without a body is the real thing.  It would be easy to think that with a body we still have all the delusion and three poisons of human form, so somehow we have to completely reject that condition and die in order to “achieve” nirvana.  Instead, what Dogen and other ancestors tell us is that without getting rid of delusion, we’re still already in nirvana because nirvana is the world of reality in which we’re living here and now.  Dogen says in Shoji (Birth-Death) that “if you can understand that birth and death are Nirvana itself, there is not only no necessity to avoid them but also nothing to search for that is called Nirvana.”

Nirvana with a body is where we all are now, and there’s also the body of buddha that is simply the dharma, the way the world functions.  This dharma body of Buddha, the dharmakaya, is still here even though his body hasn’t been in the physical world for 2600 years.  In the Samyutta Nikaya, someone says to the Buddha that he’s wanted to come to see him for a long time but he hasn’t been well enough.  The Buddha says that it doesn’t mean anything just to come and look at his physical body.  “One who sees the Dhamma sees me; one who sees me sees the Dhamma.”  We don’t need to go anywhere else to find buddha or the dharma or nirvana; it’s all right here.  In fact, one of the eko for the traditional Nirvana Day ceremony starts with:

The pure body of the dharma realm fundamentally has no emerging or disappearing.
The power of the vow of great compassion is manifest throughout the goings and comings of birth and death.

In the training temple, February 15 is the official Nirvana Day, but preparations start on February 1.  For two weeks, the evening service changes from usual texts to the Sutra of the Condensed Teachings Left by the Buddha upon his Final Nirvana and the Shariraimon, the verse of homage to Buddha's relics.  On February 14, the day before Nirvana Day, the  jikido hangs up a scroll with the image of Buddha’s parinirvana on the altar.  This kind of picture is called nehan-zu 涅槃像.  Parinirvana usually represented by Buddha reclining on his right side, with his head supported by his hand or pillows.  There are also many large and famous statues of reclining Buddhas around Asia.  The soles of the feet on major statues might show auspicious, symbols like lotus flowers or white elephants

In pictures, Buddha is lying on his right side in a grove of sala trees, and usually his head is toward the north and his face toward the west.  He's surrounded by weeping gods, humans, and animals.  These weeping characters are symbols of imperfect understanding; they’re attached to Buddha’s physical form and they don’t understand that parinirvana is liberation.  There are often serene bodhisattvas in the picture too; they represent awakening because they’re not mourning and crying.

Now, here’s an interesting diversion.  When we sleep in sodo in the training temple, we’re supposed to sleep in this same way, on the right side; it's known as the lion’s pose or nirvana pose and it's supposed to recreate or embody Buddha’s final rest.  Of course, we’re supposed to be keeping zazen mind all the time, even when sleeping.  The gatha we say before going to sleep is:

Going to sleep this night
I vow with all beings
To calm all things
Making the mind clear and pure

This reclining posture is supposed to help us stay connected to Buddha’s mind and keep our minds clear and pure.

Also on the day before Nirvana Day, the abbot and ino prepare a formal statement to be read during the ceremony and everyone hears a final reading of the Last Teaching Sutra.  On the day itself, there’s a highly choreographed ceremony with many kinds of offerings, there are cymbals and drums, everyone burns incense and does sets of 9 bows.  We chant the Ten Names of Buddha and a text called Great Buddha’s Ushnisha Heroic March Dharani of the Ten Thousand Practices, and we do that while circumambulating.

We have three forms of chanting in this tradition: sitting, standing and circumabulating, or walking around the hall.  Originally this walking was done around a stupa or an image of the Buddha, but now we do it by making a circle with serpentine bends in front of a buddha on an altar.  It’s usually four rows of people, two on each side, but it could be more and more complicated if ther are more people.  There are bells for when to start and stop walking, and you have to watch where you are, monitor how close you are to the people around you, not step on the edges of the tatami, and stop at your own place again, all while chanting.  We do this for big ancestor memorials and other important occasions.

The Great Buddha’s Ushnisha Heroic March Dharani of the Ten Thousand Practices comes from the Shurangama Sutra.  In the course of history there has been debate over whether or not it’s an authentic Indian sutra or whether it’s Chinese.  Dogen thought it was not authentically Indian, but he commented on it and quoted from it anyway, with the idea that if our ancestors continued to teach it, then that alone made it the real dharma.  The sutra covers a lot of ground, but a few of the main themes are the need to engage in sitting practice and to keep the precepts, not just to study, and also how to deal with delusion and the stuff that comes up during meditation, all this being the road map for the heroic march toward buddhahood and awakening.

The sutra was supposed to have come from above the crown on the great Buddha’s head, and this is where the ushnisha comes in.  In early Indian art the Buddha’s ushnisha looks like a topknot bun of his hair, and by the time we get to Soto Zen, it’s usually a smooth, rounded bump on his head.  Sometimes there’s a jewel in the center.  It’s one of the 32 special physical characteristics of a Buddha and it represents wisdom or awakening.  Sometimes this sort of figure is positioned as a reminder that Buddha’s physical form is a manifestation of awakening, beyond simply being a human body, and we put this form on altars as a reminder of the direction of our practice.  There’s an esoteric interpretation of the ushnisha in which it’s personified as a deity on its own, and it gets described as a crown, the crowning power of Buddha’s wisdom.

To return to the ceremony, at the end of the chanting and the circumambulation, we dedicate the merit to Shakyamuni on his nirvana day, and then there’s a final long statement, one small section of which is:

The faint moon that eternally resides over Vulture Peak has a subtle brightness that glimmers from afar.
The flowers that remain on the two trees of nirvana have a lingering aroma that is still fragrant.
The salvation that is the eternal ease of nirvana extends down to the present.
The efficacy of the true aspect of the unconditioned reaches into the future.

These are four images that make the point that even though the physical Shakyamuni is gone, Buddha is still here because we’re practicing and the dharma is still doing what it does.

The faint moon that eternally resides over Vulture Peak has a subtle brightness that glimmers from afar.

The moon is often a symbol of awakening, and Vulture Peak was the site of the famous story in which Buddha holds up a flower and doesn’t say anything, and Mahakashyapa smiles.  This is the first transmission of the dharma.  It’s not conveyed by anything Buddha says; it’s a direct experience of reality within the shared awakening of these two practitioners.  This is the faint moon over Vulture Peak, and it’s still shining because that transmission has continued down to us here today.

The flowers that remain on the two trees of nirvana have a lingering aroma that is still fragrant.

Buddha passed away under two sala trees near the town of Kushinagara.  The sala is important flowering tree in the Buddhist tradition because Queen Maya held onto a sala branch for support during Siddhartha’s birth, and that loop is closed when he dies under same kind of tree.  Not only the flowers but also the resin is fragrant; it's used to make incense, and that lingering aroma is still fragrant because the effect of Buddha’s life and death are still here.

The salvation that is the eternal ease of nirvana extends down to the present.

It’s important that the statement says the eternal ease of nirvana -- eternal rather than permanent.  Everything is changing, our physical bodies, our activities, our understanding, and yet we can still experience the eternal ease of nirvana.  Nirvana isn’t a state, or something we achieve and then own permanently.  Even though the dharma is functioning and moving continuously, the ease of Nirvana is eternal.  When Shakyamuni experienced awakening under the bodhi tree, he was liberated from suffering during the rest of his physical life, and when his body died, he was no less within nirvana, and that’s same nirvana we swim around in today just like our zazen is Buddha’s zazen.  His life story still resonates with us and we still identify with Buddha because we’re all doing the same practice and living within the same space.

The efficacy of the true aspect of the unconditioned reaches into the future.

"Efficacy" is an interesting word choice here; it usually has to do with producing a desired result.  We can perhaps understand it here as total dynamic functioning.  The reality of emptiness isn’t bounded by time or space.  The reality of Buddha’s awakening and practice, and the reality of his understanding of dharma, reaches into the future because there’s nothing outside of this moment.  We can relate this to the way our immediate ancestors talk about zazen.  Zazen is good for nothing because if there was something we were going to get from it, that reward would come in some time and place that isn’t here and now, and there isn’t anything separate from here and now.  We can connect zazen and total dynamic functioning and say that the efficacy of zazen, like the efficacy of emptiness, isn’t about producing a desired result; it’s simply about functioning according to the dharma, or the laws of the universe.

The statement goes on to say that this continuing effect is the reason for coming together to make offerings, and that we do that not as individuals but as part of this continuous universal functioning.  There’s a line that says: Person by person, with different mouths but a unified sound, we perform this buddha rite, chanting [the darani].  The kanji for unified sound here is dou on 同音.  Dou is equal or the same; on is sound.  It means doing something in unison, speaking with one voice.  When we do this ceremony and chant for Buddha, we’re not really separate from him and we’re not really separate from each other.  We’re all just functioning together across time and space.

New nehanzu (image of Buddha's parinirvana) at Zenshuji in Los Angeles   LEARN MORE