What Is Enlightenment?

 

11.13.2020 WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? What exactly is enlightenment? That’s a tough question to answer. In the Winter 2020 issue of Buddhdharma, Joan Sutherland dives deep into the concept in her teaching “Everything Is Enlightenment.”   “Enlightenment is our true nature and our home, but the complexities of human life cause us to forget,” she writes. “That forgetting feels like exile, and we make elaborate structures of habit, conviction, and strategy to defend against its desolation. But this condition isn’t hopeless; it’s possible to dismantle those structures so we can return from an exile that was always illusory to a home that was always right under our feet.”   The three articles from the Buddhadharma archives below feature a number of Buddhist teachers exploring what enlightenment is, what it isn’t, and whether or not practitioners should expect to attain it.  “Expect that awakening will come in unexpected ways,” writes Sutherland. “Make yourself available, and trust that enlightenment will find you.”

Everything Is Enlightenment Enlightenment is everywhere we look, says Joan Sutherland — we can choose to notice it, but at the same time, we can also trust that it will find us, wherever we are. In the West the idea of enlightenment has gotten a little bruised, in part because the intensity of our longings has made us so vulnerable to disappointment, and in part because we have reason to feel disappointed by the actions of some claiming to be enlightened. Some of us don’t believe in it anymore or think it’s the province of only a few special people. Some of us have misunderstood it as a self-actualization project, and so have missed its power not just to improve but to transform. What happens when we let our projections about enlightenment fall away? Can we find the place where wisdom born of generations of experience meets us where we, each of us, actually live? Is it possible to take on a day-to-day practice of enlightenment?

Forum: What Is Enlightenment? Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Ayya Tathaaloka, Setsuan Gaelyn Godwin, and David Matsumoto explore their traditions’ different perspectives on awakening. Gaelyn Godwin: Enlightenment is understood in Zen as an ordinary state demonstrated in ordinary practices — for instance, in the way someone drinks tea or rolls up a blind. There’s nothing special to do in Zen. There’s a famous awakening story of Ikkyu, a Japanese poet and monk, struggling for enlightenment. He wanted to wake up and he went to his teacher to express his understanding, because in Zen, awakening has to be acknowledged by another. He expressed his understanding of having heard a crow caw, and the teacher said, “Ikkyu, I’m sorry, that’s not the understanding of the buddhas and enlightened ones.” Ikkyu replied, “It’s good enough for me.” His teacher said, “That’s the enlightenment of the buddhas and ancestors.”

What If Our Delusions Aren’t a Barrier to Enlightenment? “What if our deluded minds aren’t a barrier to enlightenment at all?” asks Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. “What if they are the very path to it?” In Mahayana Buddhism, there is a notion that once the Buddha became enlightened, we all did. This teaching points us in the direction of not trying to acquire or gain enlightenment but rather allowing it to meet us along the way. Enlightenment is neither given nor gained, so we are bound to tango with the deluded body-mind. And what a dance it is!

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