| Chapter 1: | The Pāli Nikāyas |
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Samaṇas of other sects might speak thus: “The ascetic Gotama speaks of the cessation of cognition and feeling, and he maintains that it is included in happiness. What is that? How is that?” When samaṇas of other sects speak thus, Ānanda, they should be told: “The Blessed One, friends, does not describe a state as included in happiness only with reference to pleasant feeling. Whatever felt or unfelt happiness is found, the Tathāgata describes whatever is without suffering as happiness.” (SN IV.228)
The Buddha seems to be saying here that because the attainment of cessation is without feeling, it has an unfelt happiness to it, but a happiness nevertheless and a supreme one at that. That it is nothing less than nibbāna’s happiness is seen in that it is said to be “without suffering.”
Paul Griffiths pointed out yet another sutta, the Bahuvedanīya Sutta of the MN, which speaks of the path entirely in terms of the samatha path’s jhānas and samāpattis as well. As the discussion proceeds through stages, each one is said to bring more happiness and be more excellent than its predecessor. The path culminates in nirodha-samāpatti, apparently presented as the epitome of the path to liberation. As Griffith put it, “this sutta provides a representative instance of the use of attainment of cessation as the culminating point of a tightly structured series of enstatic practices; in this instance there is no attempt to introduce any thought or practice from the knowledge/power/immortality complex of soteriological thought. The discourse provides instead a coherent presentation of the enstatic complex of thought and practice, and moreover a presentation which appears, prima facie, to consider the attainment of cessation as the ultimate soteriological goal of the practicing Buddhist.”12
Perhaps the most explicit statement that the attainment of cessation of cognition and feeling is nibbāna itself comes from Buddhaghosa’s VsM. This is rather surprising, given that the text is most celebrated for its synthesizing of diverse religious practices into a coherent single