Conclusion to part 1: modes of thought, modes of tradition

Summary

The last proposition in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” is not without a certain pomposity, and so Ernest Gellner's somewhat uncharitable observation that the original sentence in German can be sung to the tune of Good King Wenceslas is not inappropriate, albeit philosophically irrelevant. More directly pertinent is an observation made by a contemporary of the early Wittgenstein, the mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey: “What you can't say you can't say, and you can't whistle it either.” What you can't say about nirvana you can't say, and you can't picture it by means of imagery either. In both the Tractatus and Buddhism, the ineffable is brought into being as an aspect of the effable. Inexpressible, timeless nirvana is a moment in the Buddhist textualization of time, the explicit or implicit closure-marker in its discourse of felicity. It is the motionless and ungraspable horizon, the limit-condition which makes of the Pali imaginaire a coherent whole. From within Buddhist ideology, one would need to add the proviso that nirvana exists beyond any historically specific imaginaire – the Dispensation (sāsana) of any Buddha – which points toward it; it is the object of Path-consciousness, a reality which can be attained by the Path.