19.6 Of Nibbāna as Morally Good (KV19.6)

Controverted Point: That the element (or sphere) of Nibbāna is good.

Theravādin: Do you imply that it has a mental object, involving a mental process of adverting, reflecting, coordinating, attending, willing, desiring, aiming? Is not rather the opposite true?

These things we can predicate of all morally good mental states—of disinterestedness, love, intelligence, faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, understanding. But if we cannot predicate them of Nibbāna, then is the element of Nibbāna not rightly called morally good.

Andhaka: But is not the element of Nibbāna faultless? If so—and you do assent—then it, not being immoral, is moral.

The Points of Controversy, an English translation of the Pali Abhidhamma Kathāvatthu. Translated by Shwe Zan Aung and C.A.F. Rhys Davids. First published by Pali Text Society, 1915.

This SuttaCentral edition was prepared by Manfred Wierich and Ven. Vimala and proofread by Josephine Tobin. Some changes were introduced:

Abbreviations, i.e., those of cited works and the participants in the controversies, were expanded.

Cross-references were linked.

Some typographic changes were introduced, among others, i.e.: the phonetic symbol “ŋ” was changed to the Pāli diacritical letter “ṃ”, “ô” to “o”, single quotes to double quotes, and “:—” to “:”.

Letter-spacing with fixed spaces was replaced with bold font.

The corrigenda were merged into the text. Some could not be resolved, though.

This electronic version is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC 3.0) as found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

All copyright is owned by the Pali Text Society. See also the statement under http://www.palitext.com/ → Publications → Copyright Announcement. For non-commercial use only.