General characterizations of bodhi

In the most general terms, bodhi designates the attain-ment of that ultimate knowledge by virtue of which a being achieves full liberation (vimoksa, vimukti) or NIRVANA.

Sometimes the term is understood to refer to the manifold process of awakening by which one comes variously and eventually to know the truth of things “as they truly are” (yathabhutam ), thereby enabling liberation from DUHKHA (SUFFERING) and REBIRTH for both self and others.

At other times bodhi is taken to refer to the all-at once culmination of that process. In the latter sense, the term bodhi may be said to belong to the large category of names for things or events so ultimate as to be essentially ineffable, even inconceivable.

However, in the former more processive sense, either as a single term standing alone or as an element in any number of compounds (bodhicitta, bodhisattva,

abhisambodhi, bodhicarya, etc.), bodhi is a subject of extensive exposition throughout which it is made clear that the term belongs more to the traditional categories of PATH (marga), practice (carya, pratipatti), or cause (hetu) than to the category of fruition or transcendent effect (phala).

Thus, despite a common tendency in scholarship to regard bodhi as a synonym for nirvana, vimoksa, and so on, it is best to treat bodhi as analytically distinct in meaning from the various terms for the result or consequence of practice.

Although the term bodhi often refers to the liberat-ing knowledge specifically of BUDDHAS (awakened ones), it is not reserved for that use alone; bodhi is also ascribed to other and lesser kinds of liberated beings, like the ARHAT.

When the full awakening of a buddha is particularly or exclusively intended, it is common to use the superlative form, ANUTTARASAMYAKSAMBODHI (COMPLETE, PERFECT AWAKENING).

In East Asian Buddhist discourse, particularly in the CHAN SCHOOL (Japanese, Zen), one encounters other terms (e.g., Chi-nese, wu; Japanese, satori) that are also translated as “awakening” or “enlightenment.”

These other terms are perhaps related in meaning to bodhi, but they were very seldom used actually to translate the Indic word, are not admitted to be precisely synonymous with it, and in their common usages notably lack its sense of ultimacy or finality.

They refer rather to certain mo-ments or transient phases of the processes of realization arising in the course of contemplative practice. As such they are the focus of much dispute over their purportedly “sudden” or “gradual” occurrence.

Traditional accounts of bodhi found in or derived from South Asian sources are often connected to accounts of Sakyamuni’s own liberating knowledge, attained in his thirty-fifth year, in the final watch of his first night “beneath the bodhi tree.”

He is said then to have achieved, in a climax to eons of cultivation extending through innumerable past lives, the ultimate knowledge (vidya) or ABHIJNA

(HIGHER KNOWLEDGES) that is, knowledge of the extinction of the residual impurities (asravaksayajñana; literally, “oozings” or “cankers”) of sensual desire (kama), becoming (bhava), views (drsti), and ignorance (avidya).

This extinguishing or purgative knowledge arises precisely in the immediate verification of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS that is, in the intuitive confirmation (abhisamaya) of the truth of duhkha (suffering), the truth of the origin (samudaya) of suffering in craving (trsna) and ignorance (avidya), the truth of the cessation (nirodha) of suffering, and the truth of the path (marga) leading to the cessation of suffering.

To the limited and questionable extent that one can conceive of bodhi as an experience, these knowings or extinc-tions are, so to speak, the content or object of Sakyamuni’s experience of awakening, and the four noble truths are what it was that he awakened to.

We may note in this classical account of bodhi the convergence of two modes of soteriological discourse a discourse of purgation or purification signaled by the use of terms like eradication (ksaya) and canker (asrava), and a discourse of veridical cognition, exemplified by such terms as knowledge (vidya) and abhijña.

Bodhi is thus shown to be, at once, a cleansing and a gnosis, an understanding that purifies and a purification that illuminates.

The more systematic or scholastic traditions of Buddhism commonly expound bodhi in terms of its constituent factors (bodhipaksa, bodhipaksikadharma).

These, of course, are components of awakening in the sense of an extended process or path rather than in the sense of a single, unitary culmination of a path. There are thirty-seven such factors, grouped in seven some-what overlapping categories.

The four “foundations of MINDFULNESS” (smrtyupasthana) are mindfulness or analytical meditative awareness of the body (kaya), of feelings (vedana), of consciousness (vijñana), and of mind-objects (dharma).

The four “correct eliminations” (samyakprahana) or “correct exertions” (samyakpradhana) are the striving to eliminate evil that has already arisen, to prevent future evil, to produce future good, and to increase good that has already arisen.

The four “bases of meditative power” (rddhi-pada) are aspiration (chanda), strength (lrya), composure of mind (citta), and scrutiny (mlmamsa).

The five “faculties” (indriya) are FAITH (sraddha), energy (lrya), mindfulness (smrti), concentration (samadhi), and PRAJNA (WISDOM).

The five “powers” (bala) are five different degrees of the five faculties ranging from the lowest degree sufficient to be simply a follower of the Buddha, through the higher degrees necessary to achieve the higher degrees of sainthood: status as a stream winner (´srotapanna), a once-returner (sakrdagamin), a non returner (anagamin), and an arhat.

The seven “limbs of awakening” (bodhyanga) are memory (smrti), investigation of teaching (dharmapravicaya), energy (vlrya), rapture (prlti), serenity (prasrabdhi), concentration (samadhi), and equanimity (upeksa). The final eight factors are the components of the noble eightfold path.

So manifold and complex a characterization of bodhi, as a process comprising multiple parts, serves to underscore the fact that awakening is clearly not an end divorced from its means, nor a realization separate from practice; rather it is the sum and the perfection of practice.

This fact is often explicitly acknowledged in Buddhism in assertions of the unity of realization and practice or in the variously formulated insistence that practice is essential to realization.

Such claims must be kept in mind as cautions against the temptation to conceive of bodhi as a wholly autonomous, self-generated, and entirely transcendent “experience.”

Indeed, it could serve even as warrant for banning the very use of modern, largely Western notions of “experience” (pure experience, religious experience, mystical experience, etc.) from all discussions of bodhi or analogous terms.

To speak of “the experience of awakening,” rather than of, say, the performance or the cultivation of awakening, is to risk reifying the process and, worse still, isolating it from the rest of Buddhism.