Enlightenment

Enlightenment in Buddhism is the complete awakening of the mind: every obscuration has been cleared away and wisdom and compassion have fully unfolded. It is what the Buddha attained beneath the bodhi tree at Bodhgaya, and it is where the whole Buddhist path leads.

The English word carries some baggage. It brings to mind the eighteenth century, Hume and Voltaire, reason chasing out superstition. The Sanskrit bodhi means something simpler: waking up. No light switches on in your head. You wake from a dream you had taken, all along, for the real world.

Purified and perfected

Tibetan translators rendered bodhi as jangchub, and the two syllables between them hold the whole idea. Jang means purified: ignorance, confusion and old habits have been cleared out. Chub means perfected, or fully developed. Whatever wisdom and goodness the mind already held has come into its own. You cannot have one half without the other.

People often use enlightenment and nirvana as if they meant the same thing, and that is not wrong. The emphasis differs, though. Nirvana speaks mainly of what you are free from. Enlightenment also speaks of what becomes apparent once you are. In the Mahayana this is never a private matter. Bodhicitta, literally the mind of enlightenment, is the wish to wake up so that others can be helped to wake up too. An enlightened mind is not cool and detached. It is spacious, and it stays involved.

It is worth being clear about what enlightenment is not. It is not a special experience you have one quiet afternoon and lose again by the following week. Calm, clarity and bliss in meditation are fine when they come, but they also go, and the tradition warns against mistaking them for realisation. Nor is it an achievement to tick off.

Recognised, not produced

Dzogchen gives the word a striking turn. According to these teachings, the nature of mind has always been pure and always been awake. Nobody has to manufacture this buddha-nature. The path adds nothing that was missing; it removes what blocks the view, the way wind clears cloud from the face of the sun. Recognising that original nature is called rigpa, and once the recognition is completely stable the tradition speaks of full enlightenment. Nyingma history records practitioners in whom this showed itself at death as the rainbow body.

That can sound a long way off. It starts close to home. Every Saturday at Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling we close the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro by dedicating the merit to the enlightenment of all beings. It is only a few lines, but they keep the aim in view, even on a morning when the mind is mostly busy with the shopping list.