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Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta (1 of 4)

Thank you so much for that very kind introduction, Rob. I'm coming to you here from Harris Park, which is on the land of the Burramattagal people of the Dharug Nation in western Sydney. As is the custom in Australia, we pay respects to the elders past, present, and emerging, and we acknowledge their unceded custodianship of the land upon which I sit.

Just for a bit of background for those of you who are not aware, Australia is one of the few colonized countries where there is no treaty or arrangement with Indigenous people whatsoever, and they're not acknowledged in our constitution. We are trying to change that, and there is a movement this year called the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which is intended to provide acknowledgment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within our Constitution and to give them an advisory voice in our federal government. So if you're interested to look at that, Google the Uluru Statement from the Heart. I've been one of the Buddhist representatives who have been supporting that movement.

It's wonderful to be here and just glancing at some of our old friends, older than ever in fact. Ayya Tathāloka, venerables from Aranya Bodhi, Susan Pembroke—how are you going, Susan?—and a number of others who've crossed paths in this strange journey along the Dharma highway. Oh, and some closer to home as well. Ayya Suvīrā, good to see you here.

Is there anyone here who does not have any familiarity with the suttas? If this is your initiation into the suttas—if you are, as it were, sutta virgins—then please notify or put your hand up on Zoom or something like that, just so I can double-check, because I don't want to leave anyone behind. Okay, so I'm just checking, or you can leave a comment in the chat. Okay, looks like most people have some kind of background. Good.

Introduction to the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta

For the next four weeks, we're going to be discussing the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta. The Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta is, of course, the narrative of the end of the Buddha's life, his final journey towards his parinibbāṇa^[1]. We are right now in the month of May, which is the month of Vesākha^[2], which is celebrated by the Buddhist community as the birth, awakening, and death of the Buddha. I come here as a historical scholar to harsh your buzz and to let you know that unfortunately, the Buddha didn't actually die in May. The evidence of the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta suggests rather that he died probably in December or January. Sorry about that, but in any case, as we know, we celebrate it as a symbolic day.

I'm going to be reading from my translation of the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta, which is available on SuttaCentral. The link I just sent you has the notes available. These will give you some annotations which I've recently started doing as a project for the suttas to explain my translations and hopefully give some clarity and historical background as to what's going on.

I'll also be reading from a book. SuttaCentral has recently started publishing translations as books. We'll be rolling this feature out gradually over time, and so you can order these from the SuttaCentral website, and they're nice. I always think—and many studies support this—that if you want to read meaningfully and in depth, then paper is always the best medium. Screens are great for looking something up or doing a bit of research, but if you want to really sit with a sutta contemplatively, nothing beats paper.

The Opening Narrative

Let's begin. I'm going to start by reading a short passage from the sutta, and then we can discuss that and see how far we go.

"So I have heard. At one time the Buddha was staying near Rājagaha on the Vulture's Peak mountain. Now at that time King Ajātasattu wanted to invade the Vajjis. He declared: 'I shall wipe out these Vajjis, so mighty and powerful! I shall destroy them, and lay ruin and devastation upon them!'"

"And then King Ajātasattu said to Vassakāra, the Brahman minister of Magadha: 'Please, Brahman, go to the Buddha, and in my name bow with your head to his feet. Ask him if he is healthy and well, nimble, strong, and living comfortably. And then say: "Sir, King Ajātasattu of Magadha wants to invade the Vajjis. He says: 'I shall wipe out these Vajjis, so mighty and powerful! I shall destroy them, and lay ruin and devastation upon them!'" Remember well how the Buddha answers, and tell it to me, for the Realized Ones say nothing that is not so.'"

So this is the introduction to the Mahāparinibbāṇa. It's quite dramatic. Compared to most sutta openings—you know, "One time the Buddha was staying in Sāvatthī and then he spoke to the monks," which is pretty mundane stuff—here we begin with this highly charged opening and a lot of assumed historical knowledge and context behind it.

This already lets us know a number of the features of the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta. One feature is that it was composed by a very careful and intelligent literary mind. This is how you engage someone in a narrative: you begin with something dramatic that creates tension and requires a resolution. There's a tension here in the historical sense: what did Ajātasattu^[3] do? Did he in fact invade the Vajjis^[4]? But there's also a narrative tension: how is the Buddha going to respond to this kind of thing?

We're immediately propelled into a narrative in a way that is very unusual in early Buddhist literature. Most suttas don't propel you into a narrative like that at all. Some do, but it's fairly rare. This immediately prompts the question: what's going on, why is it formed like this, who is behind it, and what significance does this have for the wider themes of the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta?

The sutta is obviously very long. It's about as long as a short novel, and I won't even attempt to read or discuss all of the teachings in there. But what I will try to do in this short series of talks is to introduce a few perspectives, highlight a few passages, and try to give some background and context to help us understand what's going on with a bit more depth and a bit more color.

Perspectives on the Text

We can look at the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta from a number of perspectives. We can look at it purely as a piece of history, as a journalistic account, a diary if you will, of the Buddha's last days: he went to this place, did this, then went to that place and did that, leading up to the time of his death.

We can also see it as a compilation of Dhamma teachings. At different places, the Buddha was giving different kinds of teachings, so it gives us a summary of those teachings, but it also suggests what were the things that were most important for the Buddha to convey in his final days. This gives us some doctrinal content.

In addition to that, we can also look at this from a literary perspective. As I already suggested, the sutta has quite a sophisticated literary hand behind it. There is somebody who's guiding the sequence of events—what we call the gati of events—what comes after another, what propels the narrative.

This leads us to the next perspective, which is a very interesting and possibly unique perspective within the early suttas: the authorial subtext. Within this entire narrative, the Buddha is accompanied by Venerable Ānanda^[5]. We know from Buddhist tradition that Ānanda was the leading monk who helped to assemble these scriptures after the Buddha died, organize them, and set the Sangha up to continue the legacy of the Buddha. But at the same time, Ānanda is a character in the narrative.

I think the authorial hand here, the person who decided to begin the narrative of the end of the Buddha's life with this incredibly dramatic statement by King Ajātasattu, the person who put it together in this kind of way, I believe was Venerable Ānanda. In the days after the passing of his great master, he devoted himself to creating this narrative as a way of ensuring the legacy of his master. That is, of course, not to say that every detail in the sutta was exactly historical, or that every detail was composed by Ānanda personally. There are significant differences between the different versions, and the intertextuality of the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta is actually incredibly complex. Clearly it was under development for a period of time, but I think the primary text was put together by Venerable Ānanda. This means that when we see him, he's telling his own story, together with his own vulnerabilities and fears, which are encoded in the narrative in ways either quite subtly or, in some cases, quite openly.

Another perspective that we can bring to the text is the vast intertextuality of this particular narrative. There is a whole cycle of suttas which I call the Mahāparinibbāṇa cycle that draws on this sutta, tells related events, is sometimes extracted from this sutta and expanded, and which relates to this particular text in all kinds of ways. There's a huge chunk of early Buddhist literature that stems from these last days of the Buddha's life.

The Historical Context of War

To come back to the opening passage, Ajātasattu of Magadha wants to attack the Vajjis. What's going on here? Let me introduce you to the characters that we've heard about so far.

King Ajātasattu was the son of Bimbisāra^[6], one of the great kings of that era. He had been previously corrupted by Devadatta^[7] and seduced into killing his own father. The narrative of his confession of that crime is told in the Sāmaññaphala Sutta. This opening must be some time after the Sāmaññaphala Sutta, not that long after, a few years maybe. It seems that even though he had repented from his crime of patricide, he was still a bit of a character, and his conversion to Buddhism was perhaps not as complete as we might have liked it to be.

Why does he want to invade the Vajjis? The sutta doesn't tell us, but the commentary tells us that it originated from a trade dispute about controlling the trade on the Ganges River. Magadha's empire bounded the Ganges on the south side, while the Vajjis bounded the Ganges on the north side, so they shared some ports and transit points. Regardless of the details of that specific thing, the general idea is surely true that Ajātasattu and the Magadhan empire wanted to control the Ganges and the trade routes along it.

I don't know if any of you saw in the news recently, but a few people have been reporting finding a Buddha image in Egypt dated from about the third century. What we're seeing in the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta is the beginnings of the expansionism that, about a hundred years later, resulted in the great Mauryan Empire of Chandragupta^[8], who met with and formed an alliance with Alexander and then opened up the trade route through to Rome and the West. There's a connection between the events we're seeing here in the Mahāparinibbāṇa and that Buddha image which was found in Egypt all those hundreds of years later.

Why was Ajātasattu asking for the Buddha's advice? Interesting question. The text doesn't really tell us except it says that the Realized Ones, the Tathāgatas^[9], don't say anything that is not true. Remember that in Ajātasattu's previous encounter with the Buddha, he confessed his crime of murdering his father. This is a very touchy moment. When a king confesses a violent crime to you, it's dodgy. You have to be very careful about the words you choose. When that happened, the Buddha was very straightforward with Ajātasattu. He agreed with him: "Yes, you did this, it was a great crime." He didn't try to negate it or butter him up. He acknowledged it and then said, "Now let us try to move on."

I believe it was Ajātasattu's experience at that time that showed him that the Buddha was somebody he could rely on to give him honest feedback. We know that it is one of the great traps for a king, a dictator, or any leader when they stop listening to people, and when the people around them are too scared to give them honest advice. I think that Ajātasattu, for all his flaws, was aware of this, and so he wanted to seek some feedback from the Buddha.

This story initiates a journey towards the end of the Buddha's life, but there is something more to it as well. In a wider sense, it's not just the end of the Buddha; it's the end of the world that the Buddha had known. In this period of time, around a decade before or after this, we see conflict erupting between the Vajjis and the Magadhans. A little bit earlier there had been a war between the Kosalans and the Magadhans, another war between the Kosalans and the Sakyans, a war between the Sakyans and the Koliyans, and a war between the Mallians and the Kosalans. It's probably quicker to list the people who weren't fighting each other.

During most of the Buddha's lifetime, it was fairly peaceful and stable in that region of northern India. Clearly, that peace was breaking down, and there were economic and social factors underlying this. That entire world that we see depicted in the suttas—where the Buddha was in Kosala, or at Sāvatthī, or traveling to the Vajjian Republic or the Mallian Republic—all of those different republics were gone within a few decades of the Buddha's passing away. Everything was changed, and the entirety of northern India became dominated by a single empire.

What that meant for the Buddhists of that time is that they were faced with this great, gaping abyss of uncertainty. Not just the uncertainty of the Buddha's passing away, but the uncertainty of what life was going to be like. Is this the ending of the world? When you see the dissolution of a particular social order, it is not at all assured that there's going to be another social order that comes afterwards. Sometimes the social order disappears and everything falls apart into chaos.

We know from our perspective that the Buddhist community not only survived but thrived and received the patronage of King Ashoka and others. But they didn't know that. This undercurrent of fear about what's going to happen to them, what's going to happen to the Buddhist community, and what's going to happen to the Dhamma, informs the entire narrative arc of the Mahāparinibbāṇa.

Vassakāra Meets the Buddha

Vassakāra replied, he had the finest carriages harnessed. Then he mounted a fine carriage, along with other fine carriages, and set out from Rājagaha for the Vulture's Peak mountain. He went by carriage as far as the terrain allowed, then descended and approached the Buddha on foot and exchanged greetings with him. When the greetings and polite conversation were over, he sat down to one side and said to the Buddha:

"Master Gautama, King Ajātasattu bows with his head to your feet. He asks if you're healthy and nimble, strong and living comfortably. Master Gautama, King Ajātasattu wants to invade the Vajjis. He has declared: 'I shall wipe out these Vajjis, so mighty and powerful! I shall destroy them, and lay ruin and devastation upon them!'"

Just a quick note here on the form of address. When Vassakāra^[10] addresses the Buddha, he refers to him as "Master Gautama," which is a respectful but not reverential term of address. I think Vassakāra was a follower of the Buddha at the time, but not necessarily a really committed follower just yet.

There's been some discussion about the word Gautama, which is a bit of an unusual term of address because the Buddha was a khattiya, an aristocrat, and Gautama is the name of a brahmanical lineage. There's been a degree of speculation about why the Buddha is referred to with a brahmanical clan name. It seems the reason is that it was the custom that when a ruler from an aristocratic clan was anointed, they took the name of their brahmanical family chaplain, the purohita. During the ceremony of anointing, their status as a khattiya was suspended, and they temporarily became a Brahman in the lineage of their purohita, and afterwards, they would continue to be referred to by that name. The Sakyans had a family priest whose lineage was the Gautama clan, and we'll see later on that some of the other khattiya clans were likewise referred to by brahmanical names like [unintelligible].

Now at that time Venerable Ānanda was standing behind the Buddha, fanning him. The Buddha said to him:

"Ānanda, have you heard that the Vajjis meet frequently and have many meetings?"

"I have heard that, sir."

"As long as the Vajjis meet frequently and have many meetings, they can expect growth, not decline. Have you heard that the Vajjis meet in harmony, leave in harmony, and carry on their business in harmony?"

"I have heard that, sir."

"As long as they do so, they can expect growth and not decline. Have you heard that the Vajjis don't make new decrees or abolish existing decrees, but proceed having undertaken the traditional Vajjian principles as they have been decreed?"

"I have heard that, sir."

"As long as they don't make new decrees or abolish existing decrees, but proceed having undertaken the traditional Vajjian principles, they can expect growth. Have you heard that the Vajjis honor, respect, esteem, and venerate Vajjian elders and think them worth listening to?"

"I have heard that, sir."

"As long as they honor, respect, esteem, and venerate Vajjian elders and think them worth listening to, they can expect growth, not decline. Ānanda, have you heard that the Vajjis don't rape or abduct women or girls from their families and force them to live with them?"

"I have heard that, sir."

"As long as they don't rape or abduct women or girls from their families and force them to live with them, they can expect growth, not decline. Have you heard that the Vajjis honor, respect, esteem, and venerate the Vajjian shrines, whether inner or outer, not neglecting the proper spirit offerings that were given and made in the past?"

"I have heard that, sir."

"As long as they do so, they can expect growth and not decline. Have you heard that the Vajjis organize proper protection, shelter, and security for perfected ones, so that more perfected ones might come to the realm and those already here may live in comfort?"

"I have heard that, sir."

"As long as they organize proper shelter, protection, and security, then they can expect growth, not decline."

Then the Buddha said to Vassakāra the Brahman:

"This one time I was staying near Vesālī at the Sārandada woodland shrine. There I taught the Vajjis these seven principles that prevent decline. As long as these seven principles that prevent decline last among the Vajjis, and as long as the Vajjis are seen following them, they can expect growth, not decline."

When the Buddha had spoken, Vassakāra said to him:

"Master Gautama, if the Vajjis follow even a single one of these principles, they can expect growth and not decline, how much more so all seven! King Ajātasattu cannot defeat the Vajjis in war unless by bribery or by sowing dissension. Well, Master Gautama, I must go. I have many duties and much to do."

"Please, Brahman, go at your convenience."

Then Vassakāra the Brahman, having approved and agreed with what the Buddha said, got up from his seat and left.

The Seven Principles of Non-Decline

So these are the seven principles of non-decline. The Buddha then goes on to teach seven similar principles of non-decline for the monks. But first of all, let me just go back over those seven and briefly discuss what is going on here.

The Vajjis were what you might describe as an aristocratic republic. They were governed by the councils of the leading clans within the republic. It wasn't a full democracy in the sense of having universal enfranchisement, but the leading clans would elect a ruler or a council of rulers for a period of time. So it was a kind of semi-democratic system.

These meetings that the Buddha is referring to here were basically town hall meetings. Part of the life of a democracy is that people should get together and talk about things. If we're going to be making decisions as a community, then we need a level of commitment and involvement from the people who are part of that community, who are going to sacrifice some of their time to go and have meetings. Nobody really likes going to meetings, but it is a part of what makes a country or a spiritual community possible.

An important part of the meeting is not just that the meetings happen, but also that the meetings are carried out in harmony. I'm sure as we're all aware that isn't always the case. Sometimes you go to these meetings and everyone just yells at each other. This is not really productive, and it makes us feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with even the thought of taking part in a meeting. If we want good people to actually play a role in their civic society, it's critical that society be carried out in a manner that is civil, kind, and polite, and which respects the voices of people who have come to attend.

The next principle says that the Vajjis shouldn't make new decrees or abolish existing decrees. The Pali word for decree here is paññatta, what has been laid down. How we interpret this isn't immediately obvious. Does it mean that the Vajjis can't make new laws? It seems a bit weird. Why do you meet if you can't legislate? What I think it means is that the decrees are something a bit like a constitution. The Vajjian Republic had been founded some centuries earlier as a union of smaller republics of different clans. You had to unite these different families with different ideals, values, and traditions to work together on a common process for a common outcome. It was very successful in doing that. I think these "traditional Vajjian principles" refer to the underlying principles upon which the republic was formed. It doesn't mean that they couldn't make new laws or respond to new situations, but it did mean that they didn't arbitrarily abandon the foundational principles of their republic.

Next, the Vajjis honor, respect, esteem, and venerate Vajjian elders and think them worth listening to. One word that is not found there is "obey." They should listen to what the elders say and treat them with respect, but there is a fine line between respecting elders and blindly obeying them. We find this in the monastic Vinaya^[11] as well. Senior monastics are regarded as people whose advice should be listened to, but at the same time, we don't have the power to command the Sangha. If the Sangha makes a decision that goes against what we want, then that's okay, that's just how it goes sometimes.

Then there is an explicit injunction against sexual violence and for the protection of women. I think it's really remarkable that the Buddha regarded the protection of women against violence as being one of the foundational principles of the establishment of a republic. We know that today women are still subject to violence in many harrowing ways, and that one of the signs of what we would consider to be a civilized government is that it provides adequate protection for the rights of women. Sometimes we have a sense of conceit in our modern world, thinking we've made progress, and people make excuses like, "Oh, that was the 80s, that was a different time." But we can see in the Buddhist scriptures that this need for protection was very much the case even two and a half thousand years ago. There is a rule in the Vinaya for the monks called the Aniyata rule, which essentially says that if a trustworthy laywoman makes an accusation of sexual misconduct against a monk, the monk should be investigated and treated according to the accusation by the woman herself. This is an explicit and very clear injunction that women should be listened to and believed.

The next principle is that the Vajjis should esteem the Vajjian shrines and make the proper spirit offerings. The Buddha wasn't an animist—he didn't believe that by making offerings to shrines you'd go to heaven. However, the Buddha endorsed and practiced a positive relationship with the beliefs, customs, and religious practices around him. He didn't have the acidic reductionism we see in some secularist approaches today. He cultivated a positive and healthy relationship with the spirituality of the time, though obviously he rejected extreme or harmful practices like animal sacrifice. If it was a matter of offering a bit of rice to a tree shrine, the Buddha didn't see any harm in that. This is about maintaining connections with the world around us—with people's beliefs, customs, and with nature. In some later Indian treatises on how society was to be organized, they said that each village should be associated with three forests: the wilderness forest (Mahāvana), the extractive forest (pāribhogikavana [word?]) where you went for timber, and the spiritual grove (Tapovana) where wandering ascetics would stay. This reflects an idea that we live in a mutually connective relationship with the environment around us, and that caring for natural places is part of our spiritual duty.

Finally, the Vajjis would organize proper protection and shelter for the perfected ones (arahants) so they can come and live in the realm. In that ancient Indian civilization, providing shelter for spiritual seekers, wanderers, and practitioners was regarded as part of the obligations of civil society. It still is today in some ways. I live in Harris Park, known as Little India in Sydney. When I go for almsround, people from all different backgrounds—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs—will give alms. It's a beautiful custom and one of the lovely things about being part of this community.

Vassakāra then remarks that King Ajātasattu cannot beat the Vajjis in war unless by bribery or by sowing dissension. The Pali word for bribery here is upalāpana. Upa is "close," lapana is "to speak." It sounds like it should mean whispering things in people's ears or sowing dissension, which is how a lot of people have translated it. But in fact, upalāpana is used throughout the suttas in the sense of giving someone something in order to get something you want from them—in other words, bribery.

We know that following this time, the Vajjian Republic did in fact fall, and the Magadhan empire swallowed them up. That doesn't mean the Vajjian model was a failure; it lasted for hundreds of years, longer than the Magadhan empire did, and it was very economically prosperous. The Buddha didn't openly endorse any particular political model. He worked with both the aristocratic republics and the absolute monarchies of Kosala and Magadha. But he tried to encourage whoever was running those models to do so in line with Dhamma—with principle, truth, fairness, and justice.

Adapting Principles for the Sangha

We can also see that what the Buddha does right away after this is pick up his bags and walk north, out of the Magadhan kingdom and to the Vajjian Republic. This is a kind of comment about where the Buddha's sympathies lie. Ultimately he was to walk through the Vajjian Republic and die in the neighboring Mallian Republic. I can't help but wonder if he was walking home to the Sakyan Republic and then didn't quite make it.

The Buddha then adapted those Vajjian rules for the Buddhist Sangha.

"So go, Ānanda, gather all the mendicants staying in the vicinity of Rājagaha together in the assembly hall."

...He taught the seven principles for the Sangha.

The Sangha should meet frequently and have many meetings. This refers specifically to the Uposatha^[12] meeting, the fortnightly recitation of the monastic rules. They should carry on their business in harmony. There are rules and procedures aimed at ensuring that even when divisive issues are talked about in a meeting of the Sangha, it is done in a spirit of goodwill and good faith, and issues are resolved satisfactorily before the meeting finishes.

The mendicants shouldn't make new decrees or abolish existing decrees, but undertake and follow the training rules. This refers to the sikkhāpada^[13], the Pātimokkha^[14] rules for the bhikkhus and bhikkhunīs^[15]. These rules evolved gradually because of actual incidents. When a new case arose, the Buddha would modify the original rule. The Buddha was quite happy to make those changes himself, however, he did not allow the Sangha to make changes to those rules. It seems that from this point, the rules would be essentially frozen at the time of the Buddha's death. The fact that the letter of the rules is frozen doesn't mean that the Vinaya as a text and a practice was frozen. The Vinayapiṭaka evolved and developed over two or three hundred years. If we compare the Vinayas from different traditions, the rules themselves are overwhelmingly the same, but the explanations and interpretations of those rules are often different. The tradition works not by changing the rules, but by changing the interpretation and practice of the rules according to different conditions.

The Buddha wraps up this section by giving a Dhamma talk at Vulture's Peak. This teaching is found eight times throughout the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta itself:

"Such is ethics (sīla), such is immersion (samādhi), such is wisdom (paññā)^[16]. When immersion is imbued with ethics, it's very fruitful and beneficial. When wisdom is imbued with immersion, it's very fruitful and beneficial. When the mind is imbued with wisdom, it is rightly freed from the defilements; namely, the defilements of sensuality, desire to be reborn, and ignorance."

One of the fundamental things being emphasized here is that it's not just the fact of sīla, samādhi, and paññā, but that these things are imbued with each other. They come together as a great whole, and that is when they are of great fruit and benefit. These days, there is sometimes a tendency to think of meditation or mindfulness as a mind hack, rather than as part of spiritual and psychological growth. People ask, "Can you meditate without having sīla?" Of course you can, but the Buddha didn't say that it would be of great fruit and great benefit. It can act as a kind of placebo, giving you short-term relief without addressing the real problems, which can ultimately make people lose faith in meditation altogether.

Questions and Answers

"I was wondering with this kind of ceremonial greeting, it seemed to me it could be almost like mettā phrases: nimble, living comfortably. Does that make any sense? It just struck me as very mettā-esque."

That is a very interesting question. I had not thought of that, but you may be onto something. Let's look at the Pali of these words.

• Healthy is appābādha, literally "of few afflictions."
• Appātaṅka is of a similar kind of meaning.
• Lahuṭṭhāna is an interesting one. I've translated that as "nimble," probably after previous translators. Literally it means "standing lightly."
• Bala is strong.
• Phāsuvihāra means living comfortably or living at ease.

They are polite phrases, the niceties of the time. I don't think there's a direct correlation with the teachings on mettā, but obviously it's a kindly introduction.

"Someone doesn't understand what's meant here by immersion."

Immersion is my translation of the Pali word samādhi. You'll usually see it translated as "concentration," which I don't really like because it suggests a kind of effortfulness. "Concentration" means you have to force yourself to pay attention to something that is inherently boring. Nobody says to you, "Concentrate!" when you're watching a great movie, because you're naturally immersed in that experience. To be immersed in samādhi is to be drawn into that experience.

The word samādhi in Pali is very similar in application to the word jhāna^[17], which we usually translate as "absorption." Interestingly, both words have a dual meaning. On the one hand, they have a psychological sense of being focused or withdrawn. To samādahati in that sense is to gather or withdraw, like a tortoise drawing its limbs inside its shell. But samādahati also means to ignite or kindle a flame. So jhāna means both absorption and the blazing illumination of a flame. We could translate them as immersion and absorption, or as incandescence and illumination. Both meanings are present.

Translating samādhi is difficult. Some say, "Just leave it in the Pali," but the word has many different meanings in different traditions. In Thai, it can mean "concentrate your attention" or just "meditate." In Hindu culture, it's used for the final absorption of the soul with Brahman. In Vipassanā traditions, they use khaṇika samādhi for momentary mindfulness. If we just use the word samādhi, people from different backgrounds will read entirely different meanings into it. This is why leaving things in the original language doesn't solve the problem of ambiguity in translation.