Nirvana is affirmed across the Buddhist traditions as the summit of the path, though understood with differing emphasis. Theravada Buddhism stresses the liberation of the arhat, the individual practitioner who, through direct insight, extinguishes the causes of rebirth for themselves. Mahayana Buddhism relates the goal instead to the bodhisattva ideal, in which full awakening is deliberately deferred or reoriented toward the liberation of all beings, and develops the further claim, associated especially with Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka philosophy, that nirvana and the everyday world of samsara are, when properly understood, not two separate realms but the same reality seen either through delusion or through wisdom.
This non-duality of nirvana and samsara marks one of the more striking philosophical developments beyond the earlier canonical picture, and it answers, in Mahayana's own terms, the predicament set out in the first two Noble Truths while remaining continuous with the logic of anatta, since with no fixed self to be annihilated, nirvana is described as the ceasing of the fires of clinging rather than the destruction of a person, a formula the tradition holds constant even as later schools reinterpret what, philosophically, that cessation ultimately amounts to.