The parinirvana is the Buddha's death scene, and it is deliberately ordinary: he is eighty, he is ill after a meal, he lies down between two trees, he asks three times whether anyone has a last question, and no one does. His final words are an instruction, not a consolation — all conditioned things decay, work out your salvation with diligence. The tradition preserves the mundane details (his back hurt; he asked for water) because a teaching built on impermanence cannot exempt its own teacher from it.