What is Enlightenment?
Image of the Buddha from Mexico City Buddhist CentrePerhaps the best way to approach Enlightenment is not through concepts but through an image.
The Buddha is seated cross legged, his eyes half-closed as if he is both looking outwards and gazing inwards, and his poised, upright, alert body suggests that his mind is resting deep in meditation and dwelling on something both profound and elusive.
Images like this somehow create a pool of tranquility, drawing us in, as if they represent something in us that truly understands life. That’s the Buddha’s wisdom. The smile represents his compassion for others who are thrown about by what life brings.
Seclusion is happiness for the contented
who see the teaching they have learned.
Kindness for the world is happiness
for one who would not harm a living creature.
Dispassion for the world is happiness
for one who has gone beyond sensual pleasures.
But dispelling the conceit ‘I am’
is truly the ultimate happiness.
The Buddha, Udana
Images of the Buddha, and even qualities like wisdom, compassion or peace, go some way to evoking what Buddhism understand by Enlightenment, but in fact it is said to go beyond anything we can express in words or ideas – beyond anything we can even imagine.
Buddhists give this state a name – Nirvana – but the word means ‘blowing out’. Nirvana isn’t a place.
Another approach is saying what Nirvana isn’t. If normal consciousness is bound or fettered by craving, aversion and ignorance, Nirvana is a state of spiritual liberation that is entirely free of them.
If ordinary existence is conditioned, Nirvana is beyond conditions. It is ‘unconditioned’.
If it is a state of ignorance, Nirvana is a state of wisdom in which we recognise that the impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness of the world are transformed by that understanding.
Understanding and being transformed by this state of wisdom is often referred to as 'Awakening', another word for Enlightenment. The word 'Buddha' comes from the Pali word for Awakening, bodhi, and means something like 'One who has woken up to the nature of reality'.
Above all, Enlightenment represents the end of the Buddhist path. Buddhism teaches that it is possible for all of us to reach it. We don’t simply revere the Buddha. The aim for Buddhists is that we become Enlightened ourselves. Over the centuries, many Buddhist practitioners are believed to have reached Enlightenment by following the Buddhist path. Some of them later became famous teachers in their own right.
