Letter to a Christian Friend: Answering the Unanswerable Questions

A Christian friend recently asked me a series of interesting questions related to the issues regarding death, the afterlife, and Nirvana. I will summarize them as follows:

• Do you believe in life after death? What do you think it is like?
• Where is Siddhartha Gautama now?
• If you have realized the state of “no self,” what is it like? How does that feel?
• The texts say Gautama Buddha entered nirvana. From your perspective, is nirvana a state of being? Would you describe it as an existence of “no self” in another form?

The following are my answers to him. Hopefully, my readers who are cultural Christians will also find them helpful:

Existence Without Self

First, in all these questions, there’s still the assumption of a solid “self.” For example: Where is Siddhartha Gautama now? or What’s the experience of no self? In Buddhism, the very notion of an enduring self is questioned. In fact, the Buddha taught that the self is not a permanent essence but rather a mental and social construct — a convenient designation we use for daily life. The “Chariot Simile” in the Pali Canon explains this: just as a chariot is only a name for a collection of parts, “Ken” or “Buddha” is simply…