🌿 Before the Buddha’s Nirvana
🌾 From Idealism to Realism
In the previous essay,
I raised a simple but unsettling question ❓
Have we come to read the Three Buddha Days — birth, awakening, and nirvana —
as a kind of success story?
This time,
I would like to take just one small step forward 🚶♂️
and look again at these three moments
from a different angle.
Rather than seeing them as stages of ascent ⬆️,
what if we read them as a return to realism 🍂?
🌱 Birth — Beginning in Reality
The Buddha’s birth 🌸
was not the arrival of a perfected being descending from elsewhere.
It was the beginning of a life
fully subject to aging, illness, and death.
Birth means vulnerability.
It means dependence.
It means conditions we do not choose.
In this sense,
the Buddha’s path did not begin with ideals,
but with reality itself.
🌄 Awakening — Letting Go of Ideals
The Buddha did not understand the limits of idealism
as an abstract philosophy.
He experienced those limits in his own body.
Life as a prince 👑
and life as an ascetic practicing extreme austerities 🪨
were both expressions of the same belief:
“If I live like this, liberation must follow.”
Yet neither the ideal of pleasure
nor the ideal of self-denial
brought an end to suffering.
Through this complete impasse,
the Buddha seems to have realized something simple and severe.
🥕 Even if a carrot is right in front of you,
you cannot eat it
unless you pull it toward yourself.
Ideals promise something that will be given.
Reality does not.
To live is to reach out —
here and now.
Seen this way,
awakening was not the achievement of a higher ideal ✨,
nor the discovery of a final answer.
It was the point at which
the attempt to overcome reality through ideals
was entirely abandoned.
That is why, after awakening,
the Buddha continued to walk 🚶♂️,
to teach 🗣️,
and to listen 🌍
for decades afterward.
Nothing had been “completed.”
Reality had not been replaced.
Reality remained —
as reality.
🌾 Nirvana — No Exception
And then, nirvana.
If awakening was realization,
nirvana was where that realization
was never betrayed.
Even the awakened Buddha
grew old 👴,
fell ill 🤒,
and died ⚰️.
There was no exception clause.
No spiritual loophole.
No final transcendence.
If we insist on using the word completion,
it can only mean this:
nothing extra was added.
No promise of permanence.
No ideal ending.
No exemption from death.
🍃 Reading the Three Buddha Days Again
Seen in this light,
the Three Buddha Days are not milestones of progress 📈.
They trace a single, consistent posture:
not leaving reality behind.
Birth 🌱 — life begins within conditions
Awakening 🌄 — ideals are released
Nirvana 🌾 — reality is not denied
This is not a story of ascent.
It is a story of staying.
🌍 A Quiet Resonance Today
This is only my personal way of reading these events 🙏,
but it seems to me that
we are not consciously choosing to move
from idealism to realism.
Rather,
many people are beginning to feel —
almost unconsciously —
that idealism can no longer carry the weight of reality.
We are not trying to abandon ideals.
We are not deliberately choosing realism.
We simply sense, in our bodies,
that something no longer works.
In this sense,
our quiet discomfort today
may be resonating with
the impasse the Buddha himself experienced.
Seen this way,
the Buddha’s nirvana is not a distant religious doctrine,
but a sober and compassionate realism 🕯️
standing quietly before us.
In the third and final piece ✍️,
I will step away from reflection
and offer a Dharma talk 🛕
on the occasion of the Nirvana ceremony.
For now,
it may be enough
to sit with this question 🍃:
What would it mean
to live
without adding ideals
where reality already stands? 🌙