Philosophy of the Buddhist Path 101: establishing the end of the Path at the beginning, or, how to argue about the Buddhist Final Good

This talk will present an argument about the existence and the nature of the Final Good (niḥśreyasa in Sanskrit, summum bonum in Latin) as conceived along the lines of Buddhist philosophy. The Buddhist tradition has considered that its main problem is suffering and the remedy to it is what it calls nirvāṇa. A serious engagement with Buddhist philosophy cannot abstain from an honest confrontation with the concept of nirvāṇa, since, considered to be the keystone of the system and the end of the path, it both grounds and is the horizon of the very significance of philosophical activity. In this talk, I will proceed both historically and analytically to show that one can make an argument about the nature and the existence of the Final Good as nirvāṇā by guarding against two pitfalls: to conceive nirvāṇa either as immanent or transcendent. In other terms, the talk will elaborate philosophically a concept appearing rather later in the Buddhist tradition, that of the “unsituated nirvāṇa” (apratiṣṭhāna-nirvāṇa), which is said to be situated neither in existence nor beyond existence. The implicit argument of the talk is that only such clarification and determination of the Final Good can be the prolegomenon to the possibility of Buddhist philosophy.