“ultimate good,” “intrinsic good,” “complete good,” or even “good.” This
might suggest that the Pāli Canon does not, in fact, address questions
about the ultimate good and that my approach has not uncovered the
Nirodha View, but has rather projected it in a culturally inappropriate
way. For that matter, it might suggest that the very project of searching
for what the Pāli Buddhist tradition has to say about the ultimate good is
importantly misguided.
In the Pāli Canon, we can identify various terms that we could
translate using the English word “good,” including, for instance, sucarita,
which is commonly translated as “good conduct,” and avyāpāda, which is
commonly translated as “good will.” Yet, to my knowledge, no Pāli Buddhist
term translates easily into English as “ultimate good;” indeed, the
only term anyone in the scholarly literature has even suggested as an
equivalent term is nibbāna (nirvāṇa).
We might take this to mean that the Pāli tradition simply lacks
the concept of an ultimate good, but I think this would be a mistake for
at least three reasons. The first is that it is not at all obvious what the
relationship is between concepts and language. If it is possible to have a
concept without being able to express it in ordinary language or without
having an ordinary language word for it, then we have some reason to
believe that the Pāli Buddhist tradition could have had the concept of
the ultimate good without ever naming the concept (Pinker). This would
explain not only why no Pāli Buddhist term translates easily into English
as “ultimate good,” but also why we cannot infer from the absence of
such a term that the Pāli tradition lacked the concept. The second reason
is that we need to be careful to distinguish between conceptions of the
ultimate good and the concept of the ultimate good. A conception of the
ultimate good is an interpretation of the concept. The Pāli Buddhist tradition
might
very
well
lack
the
kind
of
conceptions
of
the
ultimate
good
that Western scholars, in particular, might have expected, but the tradi-