Bodhi (Chinese: 菩提/覺), according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit and Pali: ‘awakening,’ ‘enlightenment,'” which are often used synonymously.
So, what is enlightenment?
According to the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, in the Astasahasrika-Prajnaparamita-Sutra (Chinese: 道行般若波羅蜜經), the Buddha defines enlightenment as “thought of enlightenment is no thought since in its essential original nature thought is transparently luminous.”
In other words, according to the Buddha, enlightenment is a state of “no thought” mind. Of course, “no thought” does not mean that enlightenment is achieved upon a person’s death when their encephalogram shows a straight line. Instead, “no thought” refers to a quiescent, inactive state of mind that does not allow thinking. Therefore, those who claim that “What exactly constituted the Buddha’s awakening is unknown” and then offer their own versions of enlightenment without any direct sūtra quotations not only lack a solid understanding of Buddhism, but also twist the Buddha’s teachings so severely that they make Buddhism unrecognizable.
To understand the significance of enlightenment in Buddhism, we recall from the last post that a Buddha is “one who has awakened from the deep sleep of (unenlightenment) and opened his consciousness to encompass all objects of knowledge.”
In other words, enlightenment matters because it allows one to become a Buddha by “opening his consciousness to encompass all objects of knowledge.”
To understand the significance of opening one’s consciousness and why it allows one to encompass all objects of knowledge, we start with Samadhi.
Samadhi (Chinese: 三昧/三摩地), according to The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, is “a nondualistic state of consciousness in which the consciousness of the experiencing ‘subject’ becomes one with the experienced ‘ object ‘–thus is only experiential content. This state of consciousness is often referred to as ‘one-pointedness of mind’ this expression, however, is misleading because it calls up the image of “concentration” on one point on which the mind is “directed.” However, Samadhi is neither a straining concentration on one point nor is the mind directed from here (subject) to there (object), which would be a dualistic mode of experience.”
So, the significance of “opening one’s consciousness” is that it allows the enlightened individual, serving as the “experiencing subject,” to form “a nondualistic state of consciousness” with the ‘experienced object’ to access its ‘experiential content.'”
So, what are the “experienced object” and “experiential content?”
“Experienced object” refers to Citta, which, as a quiescent mentality, is itself a “no thought” mind and, therefore, an enlightened mind, per the Buddha’s definition. In other words, the “experiencing subject” and the “experienced object” can become a “nondualistic state of consciousness” only when both are enlightened.
“Experiential contents” are, by definition, contents that can be experienced. Contents that can be experienced are the same as “all objects of knowledge that can be encompassed“: both refer to the empirical facts that senses can sense.
Indeed, sensing empirical facts of the universe is what eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and bodily parts do. However, as we will discuss in detail in Post 12 on Inference: How Humanity Knows What Humanity Knows, and Post 18 on Direct Perception: How Buddha Knows What He Knows, sensing not only requires an active mind but also distorts the empirical facts sensed.
So, a quiescent and an enlightened mind matter because they allow the enlightened individual to bypass the active mind and “open his consciousness” to form a “nondualistic state of consciousness” to perceive the “experiential contents” of Citta directly, without distortion. A detailed discussion of direct perception is available in Post 18, named “Direct Perception: How Buddha Knows What He Knows.”
Dr. Max Planck was a 1918 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics and the originator of quantum theory.
After a lifetime of studying quantum mechanics, he understood the limits of science, as he said:
Dr. Planck was right. As discussed in Post 33 on The Four Ways of Understanding Reality, humans are indeed part of the mystery humanity has struggled to understand: the mystery of “What Exists?” Therefore, to understand it, humans must also be part of it. This is indeed what Buddhas’ direct perception needs. By forming “a nondualistic state of consciousness” with the enlightened mind of Citta, the enlightened individual becomes part of the cosmos, enabling him to perceive its “experiential contents” directly, and allowing him to “encompass all objects of knowledge” and become a Buddha.
Since there are different degrees of “encompassing all objects of knowledge,” enlightenment comes in different levels as well. When one encompasses “all objects of knowledge,” one reaches the highest level of enlightenment known in Romanized Sanskrit as annutara-samyak-sambodhi (Chinese: 無上正等正覺/阿耨多羅三藐三菩提), which, according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit, ‘usurpassed (annuttara), complete (samyak) and perfect enlightenment (Bodhi).'”
When an enlightened individual reaches the highest level of enlightenment, they become a Tathāgata, of which Shakyamuni Buddha is one.
Tathāgata (Chinese: 如來), according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit and Pali, lit., one who has thus come/gone.” “A secondary denotation of the term is to understand ‘things as they are.'” The translation of Tathāgata in Chinese is a “thus come one (Chinese: 如來).”
In other words, a Tathāgata understands “things as they are.” In contemporary terms, understanding “things as they are” means to understand “What Exists?”
Buddhism.
According to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Buddhadharma (Chinese: 佛法), meaning “the teachings of Buddha,” is “one of the closest Indian equivalents to what in English is called Buddhism.”
Without a doubt, Buddhism should be recognized as the Buddha’s teachings. However, unlike all other forms of education in the world, Buddhism is unique because it solves the mystery of “What Exists?” that no other form of education in the world since the pre-Socratic era can solve. Furthermore, Buddhism is unique in that the Buddha gains knowledge of “What Exists?” by “opening his consciousness to encompass all objects of knowledge.” This is fundamentally why Buddhism should not be categorized as a religion, a philosophy, or a science, even though science and Buddhism complement each other.
However, Shakyamuni Buddha is not only a teacher; he is also like an honest reporter, reporting back what he actually experienced with a grand soteriological mission: to show how living beings can liberate themselves from existential suffering.
In the Diamond Sūtra, “one of the most influential Mahāyāna sūtras in East Asia, and it is particularly prominent within the Chan (or Zen) tradition, along with the Heart Sūtra,” Buddha promises that he, like all the Tathāgatas before him, would be “a speaker of the truth, a speaker of veracity, a speaker of thusness, a non-deceptive speaker, and an un-contradictory speaker (Chinese: 如來是真語者，實語者，如語者, 不誑語者, 不異語者).”
The fact that enlightenment is verifiable, as discussed in Posts 25 and 26, should be a significant step toward having faith in the Buddha’s teachings.
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