at Nirvana means extinction. But T.W.
Rhys Davids and others have held that it is "the destruction of malice,
passion, and delusion," and that it may be attained in this life. The
definition is quoted from comparatively recent Pali translations.[83]
Gautama, therefore, reached Nirvana forty-five years before his death.
It is claimed, however, that insomuch as it cuts off Kharma, or
re-birth, it involves entire extinction of being upon the dissolution of
the body.[84] It is held by still others that Nirvana is a return to the
original and all-pervading Boddhi-essence. This theory, which is really
a concession to the Brahmanical doctrine of absorption into the infinite
Brahma, has a wide following among the modern Buddhists in China and
Japan. It is a form of Buddhist pantheism.

As to the teaching of Gautama on this subject, Professor Max Mueller,
while admitting that the meta-physicians who followed the great teacher
plainly taught that the entire personal entity of an arhat (an
enlightened one) would become extinct upon the death of the body, yet
reasons, in his lecture on Buddhistic Nihilism, that the Buddha himself
could not have taught a doctrine so disheartening. At the same time he
quotes the learned and judicial Bishop Bigandet as declaring, after
years of study and observation in Burmah, that such is the doctrine
ascribed to the great teacher by his own disciples. Gautama is quoted as
closing one of his sermons in these words: "Mendicants, that which binds
the teacher to existence is cut off, but his body still remains. While
his body still remains he shall be seen by gods and men, but after the
termination of life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither gods nor
men shall see him." T.W. Rhys Davids expresses the doctrine of Nirvana
tersely and correctly when he says: "Utter death, with no new life to
follow, is, then, a result of, but it is not, Nirvana."[85] Professor
Oldenberg suggests, with much plausibility, that the Buddha was more
reticent in regard to the doctrine of final extinction in the later
periods of his life; that the depressing doctrine had been found a
stumbling-block, and that he came to assume an agnostic position on the
question. In his "Buddha,"[86] Professor Oldenberg, partly in answer to
the grounds taken by Professor Max Mueller in his lecture on Buddhistic
Nihilism, has very fully discussed the question whether the ego survives
in Nirvana in any sense. He claims that certain new trans