Buddhists affirm nirvana, literally a blowing out, as the extinction of the craving, aversion, and delusion that drive suffering, and thus the end of the round of rebirth. It is the third of the Four Noble Truths, the cessation the whole path aims to realize. Early Buddhist texts distinguish two senses of the term: nirvana with remainder (sopadisesa), attained by an awakened person such as the Buddha at the moment of enlightenment, who continues to live in a physical body still subject to sensation and eventual death, and final nirvana without remainder (parinirvana), reached only at that person's death, when no further rebirth follows.
On the question of what, if anything, becomes of an awakened being after parinirvana, the earliest texts record the Buddha declining to answer directly. Among a set of questions later tradition calls the avyakata, the unanswered or undetermined questions, whether the Tathagata exists, does not exist, both, or neither after death was one the Buddha reportedly set aside as not conducive to the goal of liberation, comparing the question to a man shot with an arrow who insists on learning the archer's identity before allowing the wound to be treated. The tradition has generally read this reticence as intentional, describing nirvana more by what it is not than by any positive claim about a further existence.