Enlightenment: awakening in Buddhism, Zen and mysticism

What does the word enlightenment mean?

The English word “enlightenment” translates the Sanskrit and Pali word bodhi. Its root, budh, means “to wake up, to become aware”, so bodhi literally means “awakening”, and the Buddha is “the Awakened One”. Many teachers today prefer the word “awakening” for exactly this reason. Both images hold true, though: the traditions speak of waking from a long dream and of a light that suddenly reveals what was always right here.

In the traditions, enlightenment is not a piece of information you can read in a book. It is a direct seeing of the nature of reality: what the “self” really is, why we suffer, and how that suffering ends. In Buddhism this seeing extinguishes the three poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance, and with them it stops the wheel of samsara. Hinduism calls it moksha or self-knowledge, classical yoga calls it kaivalya, Zen calls it satori and kensho, Christian mysticism speaks of illumination and union with God, and Sufism of fana, the passing away of the self in God.

It helps to keep two meanings apart. In European history, “the Enlightenment” (the 18th century) means the age of reason and science; Immanuel Kant defined it in 1784 as humanity's emergence from its self-incurred immaturity. The spiritual traditions are talking about something quite different: not about reason, but about an awakening beyond thought.

How the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi tree

Siddhartha Gautama was born into a royal family at Lumbini, in present-day Nepal. The traditional story tells that after seeing an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic, he left the palace and spent six years searching for a way out of suffering. He studied with two renowned meditation teachers and reached deep states of absorption, but realised that they came to an end. He then starved his body for years until he looked like a skeleton, and saw that this was not the way either. Accepting a bowl of milk rice from a young woman named Sujata, he chose the middle way between indulgence and self-torment.

By the Neranjara river, at the place now called Bodh Gaya, he sat down under a fig tree (Ficus religiosa) and vowed not to rise until he had awakened. In the Pali Canon (MN 36) the Buddha himself describes how during that night he gained three kinds of knowledge:

Before that, the story goes, he was assailed by Mara, the god of desire and death, who sent his daughters, his armies and his doubts. Siddhartha did not argue. He simply touched the earth with his right hand, calling on it to bear witness. This gesture, the bhūmisparśa mudrā, is still one of the most common poses of Buddha statues across Asia.

The Dhammapada (verses 153–154) records the words the Buddha is said to have spoken on awakening: through many births he had wandered, seeking the builder of the house; now the house-builder is seen and will build no more, for the rafters are broken and the ridge-pole shattered. The house-builder is craving, and the house is the endless round of new births.

The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002, and the Bodhi tree that grows beside it descends from a cutting of the original. In Japan, the day of the Buddha's enlightenment, Rōhatsu, is celebrated on 8 December, and Zen monasteries mark the week before it with an intensive retreat in which monks sleep very little. In Theravada countries the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and passing are remembered together at Vesak, on the full moon of May.

Enlightenment across the traditions

Each of the great traditions has its own word for enlightenment, its own path towards it and its own picture of what remains afterwards. The table shows where they meet and where they part.

Unlike Vedanta, Buddhism does not teach an eternal soul that comes to know itself. The Buddha spoke of anatta, not-self: the awakened person sees that there never was any unchanging “I”. Vedanta says the opposite: the true Self exists and is everything. Yet both agree that after awakening, the small, anxious “me” that always wants something no longer runs a person's life.

The four stages of awakening in Theravada

Early Buddhism describes enlightenment not as a single flash but as a path with four clear stages. At each, certain fetters (saṃyojana) are cut, ten in all.

The Mahayana traditions widened the goal. Their ideal is not only to leave the wheel oneself but to become a bodhisattva: a being who vows to awaken for the sake of all living beings and does not enter final peace while others still suffer. This aspiration is called bodhicitta, “the mind of awakening”.

The ten ox-herding pictures: a map of awakening

Zen has one of the most beautiful maps of the path to enlightenment. In the 12th century the Chinese master Kuoan Shiyuan (Kakuan in Japanese) drew ten pictures of a herdsman searching for an ox, and accompanied each one with a short poem. The ox stands for the true nature of mind; the herdsman is the person who seeks it.

The most important lesson of the pictures is the last one. Enlightenment here does not end in an empty circle or in rising above the world. It ends in the marketplace: a person comes back to ordinary life, but no longer as its prisoner.

Sudden or gradual? Huineng's poem

In Chinese Chan (Zen) of the 7th and 8th centuries a famous debate arose over whether awakening comes suddenly or step by step. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch tells how the Fifth Patriarch, Hongren, asked his students to write a verse showing their understanding. The senior monk Shenxiu wrote that the body is the Bodhi tree and the mind a bright mirror stand, which must be wiped constantly so that no dust can settle on it.

Huineng, an illiterate kitchen worker, asked someone to write down his reply: Bodhi originally has no tree, the bright mirror has no stand; fundamentally there is not a single thing, so where could dust alight? Hongren secretly handed Huineng the patriarch's robe and bowl. From then on, the Southern school of Zen has taught sudden awakening: the nature of mind is already pure and needs not to be cleaned but to be seen.

In Japanese Zen this current continued in the Rinzai line, with its koans, and in the Soto line founded by Dōgen (1200–1253). Dōgen taught that practice and enlightenment are not two: sitting in zazen is already the expression of Buddha nature. His essay “Genjōkōan” (1233) contains his best-known lines: to study the Buddha way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be actualised by the ten thousand things.

What the teachers taught about enlightenment

Samadhi, satori and enlightenment: what is the difference?

These words are often used interchangeably, though in the traditions they mean different things. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, samadhi is the eighth limb of yoga, a state of deep absorption in which the observer and the object observed merge. It can be with an object (samprajñāta) or without one (asamprajñāta), and its highest form leads to kaivalya, liberation.

In Zen, satori is a sudden flash of awakening, while kensho means “seeing one's nature”. Zen masters stress that the first kensho is only a beginning: after it comes a long time of “riding the ox home”. Hakuin (1686–1769) counted several great satori and countless small ones in his own life. Final enlightenment in Buddhism, by contrast, means there is no going back: craving and ignorance are extinguished for good.

How the traditions describe an enlightened person

Interestingly, the traditions rarely describe the enlightened as miracle workers. Far more often they describe a simple, calm and very alive human being. A Zen saying puts it this way: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. What changes is not the activity but who is doing it.

• Peace without a reason. The texts speak of a peace that does not depend on circumstances: it stays in success and in failure.
• Compassion. The Buddhist tradition says that true wisdom and compassion are like the two wings of a bird: neither flies without the other.
• Simplicity. Ramana Maharshi wore only a loincloth all his life and said that silence was his highest teaching.
• The search is over. In the last ox-herding picture the person no longer looks for anything, and so is free to give.

In Hinduism such a person is called a jivanmukta, “one liberated while still alive”. They go on living in the body until their past karma is spent, just as a potter's wheel keeps turning for a while after the potter has stopped pushing it.

Practices that lead towards enlightenment

All the traditions agree that enlightenment cannot be manufactured, but the ground can be prepared for it. These are the practices teachers mention most often.

Zazen: just sitting

The Soto Zen practice of shikantaza means “just sitting”: back upright, eyes half open, not trying to attain anything and not pushing thoughts away. Dōgen said that such sitting is already the expression of enlightenment, not a means of reaching it.

Vipassana: seeing things as they are

Theravada insight meditation trains attention to follow the breath, bodily sensations, feelings and thoughts until three marks are clearly seen: everything passes, nothing can finally satisfy, and there is nothing that could be called an unchanging “I”.

Self-enquiry

Ramana Maharshi's method: when a thought arises, do not follow it, but ask “to whom has it arisen?” The answer is “to me”, and then comes “who am I?” Attention is turned back to the very sense of “I” until, as Ramana said, it dissolves in its source.

The koan

In Rinzai Zen a student receives a koan, such as “Mu” or “What was your original face before your parents were born?”, and carries it everywhere until the mind, unable to solve it with logic, stops grasping and opens.

Cultivating compassion

In the Mahayana, enlightenment without compassion is considered incomplete. Loving-kindness (mettā) meditation, offering good wishes to yourself, to those close to you, to strangers, to difficult people and to all beings, softens the heart and loosens the sense of separateness.

Contemplative prayer

Christian mystics repeated a short prayer or a single word while resting quietly in God's presence. The 14th-century English work The Cloud of Unknowing advised taking one short word, such as “God” or “love”, and using it to bring attention back from thoughts into silence again and again.