What Is Enlightenment?

“Enlightenment” has an absolute quality about it, as though it describes a steady state,

something not subject to time and space or the vagaries of human life. We imagine that once over that threshold, there’s no going back. In Buddhist terms, the way things really are is enlightenment, and our experience of the way things really are is also (the same) enlightenment. It is the vast and awe-inspiring nature of the universe itself, and it is the way each of us thinks, feels, and acts when we’re aware of and participating in that vast enlightenment manifesting as us. It’s not transcendent of our ordinary way of being; it’s more like we’ve been living in two dimensions, and now there are three. Strawberries still taste like strawberries and harsh words are still harsh, but now we’re aware of how everything interper­meates everything else, and that even the most difficult things are lit from within by the same undivided light.

For one woman, this revelation began with what she called the dark side of the moon, when she saw the light in the most broken places inside us, the places from which we’re capable of caus­ing great harm; as someone in a helping profes­sion dealing with the effects of that harm, she found this painful to accept. Then the bright side of the moon appeared, illuminating the great joys of her life. Finally she saw that it was “all moon,” with nothing left out, a realization both shattering and healing.

This experience of nothing being left out applies to ourselves as well. A thousand years ago, a Japanese woman wrote:

Watching the moon
at dawn,
solitary, mid-sky,
I knew myself completely:
no part left out.
—Izumi Shikibu

The sense of exile falls away as we experi­ence how everything interpermeates everything else. Great Ancestor Ma of China assured his students that “for countless eons not a single being has fallen out of the deep meditation of the universe.” The self that once seemed so inevitable and so separate becomes fluid, able to participate in the constant flow of circumstances.

In contrast to enlightenment, awakening feels more like an unfolding process, which might explain why over time the ways of referring to it differentiated and proliferated: liberation, seeing one’s true nature, being purified and per­fected, attaining the Way, opening the wisdom eye, undergoing the Great Death, and becoming intimate, to name just a few. There’s a sense of a path of awakening we’re walking from first breath to last, and probably before and after that, too. It has stages and aspects, sudden leaps forward and devastating stumbles. While what we awaken to is the same for all of us, how we awaken and express that awakening in our lives is endlessly idiosyncratic and gives the world its texture and delight.

Which isn’t to say that enlightenment and awakening are different things; they’re just dif­ferent ways of looking at the same thing. The poet Anna Akhmatova spoke of the wave that rises in us to meet the great wave of fate coming toward us. Perhaps enlightenment is that which comes toward us, a previously unimaginable grace, while awakening is that which arises inside us, to prepare for and meet the grace. In that moment of meeting, we know the two waves as rising from the same ocean.

Enlightenment is transpersonal. For Western­ers especially, it’s important to keep remembering that awakening is something different from the projects of self-improvement and self-actualiza­tion we’re used to; it’s not about being a better self but about discovering our true self, which is another thing entirely. One of the puzzlements of the Way is that some people can seem to have substantial, even operatic, openings and still behave like jerks. This is important because it speaks to the nature of awakening: having an enlightening revelation isn’t the same thing as being enlightened; we have to let the revelation stain and dye us completely, in the exact midst of our everyday lives. We have to let life teach us how to embody the revelation.

Post-revelation, some people may believe that awakening is about them, when in fact it’s the least about-you thing that’s ever happened. And it’s simultaneously the truest thing about you that’s ever happened. Discovering how both these things could be so, and their implications for the way we live our lives, are what the paths of awakening are for.

Because it’s transpersonal, enlightenment isn’t something that can be obtained, like the ultimate killer app. Neither can it be attained, like a skill or an understanding to be harnessed to the pur­poses of the self. In some Buddhist traditions, enlightenment is seen as a kind of fundamental property of the universe, a vast unifying principle that appears in an almost infinite variety of forms. Enlightenment is autonomous, existing before there were humans, or anything else, to experience it.

Nagarjuna, the great Indian philosopher of the second and third centuries, expressed it this way:

When buddhas don’t appear
And their followers are gone,
The wisdom of awakening
Bursts forth by itself.

—from Verses from the Center,
translated by Stephen Batchelor

This view of enlightenment was personified in Prajnaparamita, mother of buddhas, who holds the universe’s awakening, regardless of whether there are buddhas or Buddhist teachings in a particular era. We could play with the thought that this has some relationship to the contempo­rary theory that consciousness, or its ancestor proto-consciousness, was from the beginning a fundamental feature of the universe, existing at the subatomic level and eventually emerging into matter as the universe became more complex.

From this perspective, the process of awaken­ing is less a matter of actualization and more a matter of “truing,” of becoming aware of the way things already are. Rather than developing an enhanced and therefore more solidified self, we dissolve into something that existed before we did. We become aware of our continuity with enlightenment, which is none other than the uni­verse itself.

This has been called our original face, what we “look” like when we step back into the moment before the world of our thoughts and feelings comes into existence. While Westerners generally speak ofhaving a dream, in some South Asian cultures you’re seen by a dream. It’s a bit like that: We become aware that the universe has always seen us in our truest form, and now we’re aware of what that is.

Trying to describe all this is pretty much a fool’s errand, which is why people have always enlisted poems and paintings and offers of cups of tea as invitations to see the original face of something before our judgments and opinions about it kick in. Rilke once said with apprecia­tion that Cezanne painted not “I like this” but “Here it is.” The enlightening revelation is “Here it is” writ large and complete, but it happens by way of the most commonplace moments. In the old stories it was the tok of a stone hitting bam­boo or the sudden appearance of cherry blossoms across a ravine; today it might be hearing an ad on the radio or seeing a crumpled beer can on a forest path. “There is another world,” Paul Eluard said, “and it is inside this one.” The key to seeing that other world seems to be letting something, anything, speak to us without inter­rupting it with our habits of exile....

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