Moksha, the Final Liberation

A small flame moved slowly through the darkness of the main hall.

An elderly monk was lighting candles for the evening chant. He held one candle that was already burning, and he carried its flame to each unlit candle in turn, from left to right along the altar. Incense smoke curled gently up toward the ceiling. In a corner of the room, a wooden drum began to tap softly, and behind him the voices of the other monks rose quietly in chant.

A child stood beside a family member, eyes fixed on the flame.

It was dusk at a pagoda in Hue. The sun had slipped behind the tiled roofs, and the shrine hall was beginning to glow by candlelight. Hue is one of the largest centers of Buddhism in Vietnam. Some of its pagodas, such as Từ Đàm Pagoda, date back to the late 17th century. In places like this, the evening chant is the steady breath of each day. It is never showy and never loud. It is quiet and warm, like a burning candle.

The child watched the monk pass the fire from one candle to the next. It was the same flame. But now it was in many places at once. Each new flame lit up without another going out.

In a very small voice, so as not to break the stillness of the shrine hall, the child asked, "Teacher, is this flame different from that one?"

The monk paused. He looked at the child and smiled. It was the smile of someone who had heard that question for a very long time and still found it interesting. He did not answer right away.

He went on lighting the last few candles. Then he sat down beside the child, while the chanting still hummed softly behind them.

"The flame is one," the monk said. "It passes along, but it is never divided. The candle receives it and holds it, yet the first source of light is not lost, and it does not grow any smaller."

The child nodded, then looked at the candles burning on the altar. Then came the next question, the one the child had perhaps been holding since the start. "Then when the flame goes out, where does it go?"

That question was not one the child had thought up alone.

Many centuries ago, a question very close to it came up in a Pali text called the Milindapanha. Pali is the language of the Theravada Buddhist scriptures. In the text, the monk Nagasena asks King Milinda whether a flame that has gone out can be pointed to as being here or there. The king answers that it cannot, because the flame has ceased. It has simply stopped burning. The conditions that kept it burning have come to an end. The flame is no longer bound to its fuel.

The monk did not tell the child that the flame had disappeared.

"A flame was never only a flame," he said. "It is heat. It is light. It is the movement of air and wax. When a candle burns all the way down, its warmth does not vanish into nothing. It becomes part of the warmth in this room. It becomes part of the air we are all breathing. It has touched everything around it and left a part of itself behind."

The monk looked around the shrine hall, now glowing bright.

"The flame does not go anywhere. The conditions that tied it to one single candle have ended. That is all. It is not a loss. It is freedom."

Vietnamese has a word that holds both of those ideas together: giải thoát.

The monk explained it slowly. "Giải" means to untie, to loosen what has been tightly bound. "Thoát" means to slip out, to be held no longer. Put together, the word means to be untied and to slip away free. Hindu philosophy calls this moksha, from the Sanskrit root "muc," which means to let go, to set free.

The child looked back at the candles on the altar, lips moving softly, as if trying out each word.

The monk went on. "Buddhism has a related idea, which it calls Niết Bàn, or nirvana. Two traditions, two languages, but the Vietnamese have one word that embraces both: giải thoát."

The child looked at the candles. "So nirvana is not death?"

The monk gently shook his head.

In Sanskrit, the word nirvana at its root means the putting out of a fire. But it is not a sad going out, like a flame that has simply run out of fuel. It is the putting out of three fires within: greed, hatred and delusion. Buddhists teach that when those three fires go out, what remains is not darkness. It is a peace that nothing stirs. It is light no longer clouded by smoke.

In Buddhist teaching, nirvana is not nothingness. Nor is it happiness in the ordinary, everyday sense. It is a state bound by no conditions, like a flame that is no longer tied to its candle and yet has not vanished.

The monk spoke gently to the child. "Moksha and nirvana are not about darkness. They are about waking from a dream in which you believed you were only one single candle. When you wake, you see that the warmth never belonged to one candle alone. It always belonged to the whole room."

The monk looked up.

"A Hindu teaching says that atman, the deepest self of each person, is in truth Brahman, the source of the universe. It is like a candle going out. Its warmth is not lost. It becomes the warmth of the whole room."

The chanting behind them had grown louder, clearer and steadier. Candlelight from the altar spread across the whole shrine hall, warm and golden.

The monk stood up to join the other monks in the chant. But before he turned away, he gave the child a small candle, already lit from the flame on the altar.

The child held the candle in both hands. Its warmth soaked into the small palms.

The monk said only one more thing, very softly. "Warmth has no end, my child."

The evening chant began. The whole family sat down in the shrine hall, lit evenly now by dozens of candles. Every one of them came from the single first flame the monk had carried in. Incense smoke mingled with the air.

The child held on to the candle, never taking their eyes off the small flame flickering in front of them.

Outside the pagoda gate, the sky above Hue was changing color. It was no longer the afternoon sun. It was not yet night. It hung in between. The light no longer came from the sun but from the candles within, and the sky took on the color of a flame settling down, very gently.