r
fire may be said to be annihilated in the sense that it is impossible to
reconstitute it by repeating the same process of burning, the reason is
not so much that we cannot get the same flames as that we cannot burn
the same fuel twice. But so long as there is continuous combustion in
the same fireplace or pile of fuel, we speak of the same fire although
neither the flame nor the fuel remains the same. When combustion ceases,
the fire goes out in popular language. To what quarter does it go? That
question clearly does not "fit the case." But neither does it fit the
case to say that the fire is annihilated[516].

Nirvana is the cessation of a process not the annihilation of an
existence. If I take a walk, nothing is annihilated when the walk comes
to an end: a particular form of action has ceased. Strictly speaking the
case of a fire is the same: when it goes out a process ceases. For the
ordinary man nirvana is annihilation in the sense that it is the absence
of all the activities which he considers desirable. But for the arhat
(who is the only person able to judge) nirvana after death, as compared
with nirvana in life, may be quiescence and suspension of activity, only
that such phrases seem to imply that activity is the right and normal
condition, quiescence being negative and unnatural, whereas for an arhat
these values are reversed.

We may use too the parallel metaphor of water. A wave cannot become an
immortal personality. It may have an indefinitely long existence as it
moves across the ocean, although both its shape and substance are
constantly changing, and when it breaks against an obstacle the
resultant motion may form new waves. And if a wave ceases to struggle
for individual existence and differentiation from the surrounding sea,
it cannot be said to exist any more as a wave. Yet neither the water
which was its substance nor the motion which impelled it have been
annihilated. It is not even quite correct to say that it has been merged
in the sea. A drop of water added to a larger liquid mass is merged. The
wave simply ceases to be active and differentiated.

In the Samyutta-Nikaya[517] the Buddha's statement that the saint after
death is deep and immeasurable like the ocean is expanded by significant
illustration of the mathematician's inability to number the sand or
express the sea in terms of liquid measure. It is in fact implied that
if we cannot say _he is_, this is only because that word cannot prop