Conceptions of Awakening & the Path

During the 12 centuries of Buddhism’s evolution, approaches to mental cultivation have been shaped by changing ideas about the ultimate goal of training and the path(s) by which it can be attained, if any. The various traditions of Buddhistic teaching provide the following alternative views of the process at a minimum:

1. Enlightenment/awakening is gradual and progressive, attained in conjunction with the development of the necessary causes and conditions, namely, the accumulation of merit through moral reform, mental development through the practice of dhyāna (contemplative absorption), and the accumulation of wisdom (prajñā) through analysis of past events and direct insight (vipaśyanā) into the nature of experience. (Early Buddhism)

2. Enlightenment is sudden, total, and of obscure causation. (Zen)

3. Enlightenment is innate, a primordial given, and therefore unattainable yet, nonetheless, to be realized by various means. (Mahāyāna)

4. Enlightenment is a concept, dependent upon its opposite (ignorance), therefore empty. As such, it is to be let go, along with its opposite, lest we become prisoners of our desire for it. (Madhyamaka)

5. Although empty and provisional, the ideas of enlightenment and ignorance are convenient ways of characterizing fundamental energies that are essential to the activity of consciousness and life throughout the universe. (Mantrayāna, or Esoteric Buddhism) On that view, although we are accustomed to thinking of the pair as polar opposites, and the journey from ignorance towards enlightenment as movement along a continuum by finely shaded degrees, that analogy is conditioned by our habitual goal orientation and, therefore, not so much false as incomplete. We will come to see ignorance and enlightenment as qualitative and contingent features of a continually changing experiential field that is fundamentally self-liberating and subject to pulsations, oscillations, and waves, of which ignorance and enlightenment are the primary perceptual nodes.