Trends change, like all conditioned things. He notes that scholars such as the former president of the Pali Text Society, K. Oh, sorry. His enlightenment. In my own translation work I have adhered to these renderings. Yes, that is correct. Why is that? I rest my case largely on the use of imagery in the texts.
The texts speak of his attainment of sambodhi as the arising of light. Another trend has been a move away from religious imagery, such as casting divine light, toward more psychological analogies, like lucid dreaming.
But in the texts the Buddha describes his attainment as a multifaceted, comprehensive understanding, an act of penetrating the nature of reality—the nature of experience—from multiple angles.
It involved understanding the four noble truths from twelve angles, the five aggregates from twenty angles, the links of dependent origination from countless angles. Well, the attainment of sambodhi is not at all easily accessible. It takes dedicated practice over many lifetimes to attain that final state, even to attain the liberation of an arhat, much less the all-embracing knowledge of a buddha.
Throughout the 20 th century interest in Buddhism grew and accelerated in the s. One way that is evident is through the culture of science and psychotherapy. Modern researchers and psychotherapists are finding that Buddha Dharma and the practices associated with Buddhism, such as mindfulness and compassion, can help individuals realise freedom from stress, anxiety and depression.
As part of the Insight Timer community, Mal Huxter freely offers guided meditations in order to reduce the suffering of others and increase their wellbeing and happiness.
Start practicing meditation with these handpicked and popular guidances:. My own journey into Buddhism began in when I was 18 years old. Like many teenagers I was confused, anxious and out of balance. As an adult reflecting on this time I can see this imbalance was due to difficulties I had experienced in early adolescence.
Like many lost teenagers I hung out with the wrong crowd and engaged in petty crime, and used alcohol and other substances to ease my pain. I was introduced to Buddhist meditation in It seemed to ease the pain that I did not at that time fully understand. Moving along a pathway of awakening seemed the most important thing that I could possibly do, so I travelled to Thailand and lived as Buddhist monk for two years. During that period, I immersed myself in Thai culture, learnt the language and lived according to the precepts of a monastic.
Read more: Buddhist monk Karma Yeshe Rabgye reflects on eight Buddhist precepts and how to adhere to them on a day of observance and self-restraint. The life of a monk involved training in ethical living, meditation and wisdom. It involved connecting to the monastic community and its wise elders and being an active contributor to this community.
This training did not provide all that I needed but it set the foundations for living a wholesome life of integrity. Now I have been a Buddhist meditation practitioner for nearly 44 years, have attended many intensive silent retreats and have a regular daily practice.
My own Buddhist journey has had a profound effect on me. It has transformed confusion into clarity, ignorance into wisdom, self-preoccupation into altruism and suffering into a sense of psychological freedom. The practice has not been easy, and I have experienced many pitfalls along the way. Compassionate wisdom has helped me to find freedom from suffering. The practice of taking refuge in the awakening of the Buddha, the Dharma and the support found from a community of friends, peers, mentors and teachers is also a great support.
We are no longer beleaguered exiles but people who can find home even in difficult times, people who are aware of the unlikely presence of awakening even in difficult moments, people who are willing to feel our way in the dark to help bring it forth.
Especially early on, most of us still have a lot of self-centeredness, by which I mean belief in the absolute reality of the self and the primacy of its concerns and reactions. One of the bemusing results is that here we are, hoping for an event that by its nature is unprecedented in our lives, and we think we know best about how to make it happen.
We try to exert control over the process, believing we can find our way to enlightenment through acts of will. Just keep showing up. Sit the meditation, attend the retreat, absorb the teachings, face the fear, feel the sorrow, endure the boredom, explore the doubt, stay open to the disturbing and also the knee-bucklingly beautiful in your life.
The path of awakening involves a lot of deconstruction of the self, which can be difficult, even shattering at times. But it should not involve harm. When revelation begins to walk toward you, have the courtesy to walk out to meet it. Moved by his commitment, Krishna walked up behind the man and put his hand on his shoulder.
Expect that awakening will come in unexpected ways. Make yourself available, and trust that enlightenment will find you. The metaphors we use can powerfully shape what we imagine awakening to be. Enlightenment is likened to a lightning bolt or a sudden flash of sparks, something instantaneous and bright. But what happens when we listen to other voices speaking in different images? Here is Qiyuan Xinggang, a seventeenth-century Chinese nun:. In these spare, quiet words is a sense of enlightenment growing in the dark, both autonomous and contained within us—something not in our control but asking our full attention.
Still, the language of light and illumination is everywhere. At the same time, each thing is so particular and alive in the way it shines with its own light; we feel the almost overwhelming sentience of things. And we become aware of what begins to pour out of us like light from an opened window: awe, gratitude, humility, and a suddenly bottomless love.
This light is a way we experience the empty aspect of reality, which is all-pervasive, without conditions, eternal, and undivided. Once, during a retreat, a woman lay down for a nap in a cottage at the end of a remote road.
She awoke to a life-changing awareness of the light reaching everywhere, never blinking and never failing to hold even the smallest particle of existence. It goes both ways; the Daoist idea of the Great Mysterious as the dark source of everything was incorporated into the dharma.
The Chinese teacher Shitou wrote of branches of light streaming from the dark, where the dark is the undifferentiated unity and the light is the manifest world. Without these balancing images, we run into the atom bomb problem, in which the purely bright can tip into something blinding and annihilating.
The Japanese koan genius Hakuin offered an image of radiance that contains both the light and the dark: the purple-golden light illuminating the landscape at twilight.
He only stepped out from under the tree when his companions requested that he teach them. This is the question of embodiment each of us faces: if the nature of the revelation is universal, the way each individual expresses it is particular. In our family, community, work, and creative lives we learn to live our enlightenment, each in our own way.
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