Nirvana

Nirvana is one of Paul Carus’s many short books on Buddhist concepts, written for a general American readership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carus was a German born American philosopher and prolific author, best remembered as the long time editor of the Open Court Publishing Company and of the journals The Open Court and The Monist. He was one of the most important early American interpreters of Asian religion and philosophy for Western readers, and his many books on Buddhism, Taoism, and comparative religion played a significant role in shaping how educated Americans first encountered these traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nirvana takes up one of the central but most often misunderstood concepts in Buddhist thought. The Sanskrit word nirvana literally means extinguishing, in the sense of blowing out a flame, and it refers in Buddhist doctrine to the cessation of the suffering, craving, and rebirth that characterize ordinary human existence. Western readers in the late nineteenth century often understood nirvana as a kind of nihilistic annihilation of consciousness, and Carus wrote his book partly to correct this misunderstanding by presenting the concept in its actual context within Buddhist philosophical and ethical thought.

Carus drew on the available translations of Buddhist texts and on his correspondence with leading Buddhist figures of his era, including Soyen Shaku and D.T. Suzuki, to develop an account of nirvana that emphasized its positive ethical and contemplative dimensions rather than the misunderstood nihilistic interpretation. His treatment is dated by modern standards. Contemporary Buddhist studies has produced much more sophisticated accounts of the concept and has substantially revised many of the framings that Carus and his Western contemporaries were working with. But for readers interested in the history of Western Buddhism, in the prehistory of the modern engagement with Asian thought, or in the wider intellectual culture of late nineteenth century America, Carus’s work remains worth knowing.

The book is short and accessible, written in the slightly formal nineteenth century philosophical style that Carus tended toward. He was not a Buddhist himself but he had a serious philosophical engagement with the religion. The text is now part of the historical record of how the West came to understand one of the central concepts of Eastern thought, and as such retains its primary source value even where the specific interpretations have been superseded.