At the time of the historical Buddha, there is reason to believe that in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, it was a widely-held view that all beings are subject to a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that only comes to an end once some form of spiritual liberation has been achieved. Both the classical Hindu and Jain religious traditions have an analogue of the Buddhist idea of nibbāna, and all three treat it as the ultimate end of human life. However, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain scholars would offer rather distinct explanations of how the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth occurs in practice, and how one ought to understand what it means to be liberated from suffering.
In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta in the Pali Canon, the Buddha describes the period of his life when he “went forth from the home life into homelessness, seeking the supreme state of sublime peace.” Of course, this “state of sublime peace” is a reference to nibbāna, which he describes at length in the discourse as “supreme security from bondage” that is
unborn, unaging, unailing, sorrowless, and deathless.
A theme of the Pali Canon that is repeated time and again is that all that is subject to birth, aging, and death is inevitably intertwined with suffering (duhkha). Indeed this is made explicit in the Ariyapariyesana Sutta. Hence one presumably needs to escape rebirth altogether if one’s suffering is to be completely extinguished. Confusingly, however, the discourse ends with a description of the moment at which the Buddha “attained supreme security from bondage, nibbāna,” and he was obviously still alive at this point. He concludes by exclaiming “My liberation is unshakable. This is my last birth. Now there is no more renewed existence.” This suggests to me that the cessation of rebirth is essential to the notion of nibbāna.
