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Nirvana - 5 dictionary results

nir⋅va⋅na

[nir-vah-nuh, -van-uh, ner-]
–noun
1. (often initial capital letter) Pali, nibbana. Buddhism. freedom from the endless cycle of personal reincarnations, with their consequent suffering, as a result of the extinction of individual passion, hatred, and delusion: attained by the Arhat as his goal but postponed by the Bodhisattva.
2. (often initial capital letter) Hinduism. salvation through the union of Atman with Brahma; moksha.
3. a place or state characterized by freedom from or oblivion to pain, worry, and the external world.

Origin:
1830–40; < Skt nirvāṇa


nir⋅va⋅nic, adjective
nir·va·na   (nîr-vä'nə, nər-)   
n.  
  1. often Nirvana
    1. Buddhism The ineffable ultimate in which one has attained disinterested wisdom and compassion.
    2. Hinduism Emancipation from ignorance and the extinction of all attachment.
  2. An ideal condition of rest, harmony, stability, or joy.

[Sanskrit nirvāṇam, a blowing out, extinction, nirvana : nis-, nir-, out, away + vāti, it blows; see wē- in Indo-European roots.]

Nirvana

Nir*va"na\, n. [Skr. nirv[=a][.n]a.] In the Buddhist system of religion, the final emancipation of the soul from transmigration, and consequently a beatific enfrachisement from the evils of wordly existence, as by annihilation or absorption into the divine. See Buddhism.

nirvana [(neer-vah-nuh, nur-vah-nuh)]

In Buddhism, the highest state of consciousness, in which the soul is freed from all desires and attachments. Nirvana is sometimes inaccurately used as a synonym for heaven or paradise.


nirvana 
1836, from Skt. nirvana-s "extinction, disappearance" (of the individual soul into the universal), lit. "to blow out, a blowing out" ("not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw;" a literal Latinization would be de-spiration), from nis-, nir- "out" + va "to blow" (see wind (n.)).
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