Enlightenment in Buddhism

Today is what we call our group learning program, where each Sunday and Wednesday I come together with students, helping them to understand the path to enlightenment.

I start with meditation, guiding you guys in a meditation session, and then afterwards I'll share a talk with you guys from this book.

It's titled Developing a Life Practice: The Path That Leads to Enlightenment.

Today we're in chapter four.

Every Sunday I go chapter by chapter.

Unconditioned objects do not arise, they do not change, and they do not fade away.

They are permanent.

Enlightenment is that way.

You can't put your finger on what Buddha is, but Buddhism does have various teachings.

There is, for instance, the teaching about the three bodies of Buddha, the sublime, indescribable Dharmakaya Buddha, the Sambhogakaya Buddha, the subtle body of rapture or grace, and the Nirmanakaya Buddha, the historical person who awakened under the Bodhi tree.

He was a person just like everyone else who attained something wonderful that is possible for others to attain, women and men.

Maybe these aspects of Buddha have something in common with the Christian concepts of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

So let's dig into why emotions arise in the first place.

And I love this because this is where we go back to what the Buddha discovered when he was Siddhartha Gautama sitting under the Bodhi tree, the Tree of Enlightenment, and became awakened to the truth.

What he became awakened to was dependent origination.

This is where everything arises and falls due to causes and conditions.

We want you to understand them, and in turn, when you understand them, let's soften our viewpoints, our reaction towards them, and respond with clarity and compassion instead of things like anger, aversion, and hatred.

This is gonna be the way we are going to tame the mind, control the mind on the Buddhist path because we want to realize our true natural state of Nirvana, which is blowing out the three fires of greed, anger, and ignorance, so we're no longer living in a delusional world.

We understand why things are happening, like emotions, and we're able to respond in a very skillful way, like an enlightened being, like a Buddha, an Arhat, or a Bodhisattva would.

I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I hope it helped you.

There, the tradition says that he sat beneath the sacred fig tree, and he meditated.

The tree became known as the Bodhi tree, the tree of awakening.

It was around when he was about thirty-five that he attained the enlightenment.

He became known as the Buddha, and a- awakens basically meant that he understood the nature of suffering and the way to become free from it.

He sat under a tree to think.

He sat beneath what would come to be known as the Bodhi tree, a massive ficus with heart-shaped leaves, and vowed not to stand back up until he had achieved enlightenment.

He meditated for seven weeks.

Low energy? Unfocused? Foggy? You might be dehydrated.

But the Dalai Lama doesn't preside over all Buddhists the way, like, the Pope presides over all Catholics.

His leadership is specific to the Gelug, or Yellow Hat, school of Tibetan Buddhism, while many other schools of thought have their own leadership and sacred texts and traditions.

So while it definitely gets more representation in pop culture, Tibetan Buddhism is just one part of the canopy of various Buddhist branches, twisting and blooming like the limbs of the Bodhi tree itself.

And all of them, together, make up the Sangha.