I’m going to quote extensively from an article in Tricycle magazine with Bhikkhu Bodhi, the most prolific English translator of the Pali suttas currently living. I’m quoting rather than linking because you have to sign up for their newsletter, but the article is entitled “In Defense of Enlightenment”. He’s being interviewed about an article he wrote elsewhere where he defended his use of the term “enlightenment” as a translation of “Bodhi”, rather than “awakening”.
“ The classical Pali text on grammar, Saddanīti, assigns to this root the meanings of “knowing (or understanding),” “blossoming,” and “waking up,” in that order of importance. The Pali-Sanskrit noun buddhi, which designates the intellect or faculty of cognition, is derived from budh, yet entails no sense of “awakening.” Further, when we look at the ordinary use of verbs based on budh in the Pali suttas, we can see that these verbs mean “to know, to understand, to recognize.” My paper cites several passages where rendering the verb as “awakens” would stretch the English word beyond its ordinary limits. In those contexts, “knows,” “understands,” “recognizes,” or “realizes” would fit much better. The verbs derived from budh that do mean “awaken” are generally preceded by a prefix, but they are not used to refer to the Buddha’s attainment of bodhi.”
“ I rest my case largely on the use of imagery in the texts. The root budh itself has no reference to light, but the imagery used to illustrate the Buddha’s attainment usually involves light, radiance, or luminosity. The texts speak of his attainment of sambodhi as the arising of light. They refer to the Buddha as a “maker of light” and “one who dispels darkness.” That kind of imagery is quite in keeping with the use of “enlightenment” as a rendering of bodhi. On the other hand, we find absolutely no similes, metaphors, or imagery in the canonical texts that illustrate the Buddha’s attainment of complete sambodhi as a waking up from sleep or the Buddha as one who has woken up from the sleep of ignorance or who wakes other people up from sleep.
As you know, the suttas abound in similes, so if “awakening” were intended by bodhi, we would expect to find texts where the Buddha says: “Just as a man might awaken from a deep sleep, so I have awakened from ignorance and attained supreme bodhi.” But we find nothing like that. Rather, we find: “Ignorance was dispelled, and knowledge arose, just as darkness is dispelled when light arises.” And again: “In regard to these four noble truths, there arose in me vision, knowledge, and light.” The Buddha, as teacher, is compared to the sun rising in the sky and lighting up the world, and to a man who brings a bright lamp into a dark room so those in the room can see forms. Thus there is no canonical basis for preferring “awakening” to “enlightenment,” and much against this choice.”
“ We might be able to relate more easily to “awakening” than to “enlightenment” because every day we literally wake up from sleep, while “enlightenment” suggests something exalted and remote. And I confess that in introductory talks on Buddhism I sometimes use “the awakened one” for the Buddha, precisely because it is more accessible. But one of the reservations I have about “awakening” is that to my mind it fails to convey the depth, thoroughness, and transformative impact of sambodhi, the attainment that makes a person a buddha or an arhat. The word “awakening” suggests an instantaneous change in one’s level of consciousness. But in the texts the Buddha describes his attainment as a multifaceted, comprehensive understanding, an act of penetrating the nature of reality—the nature of experience—from multiple angles. It involved understanding the four noble truths from twelve angles, the five aggregates from twenty angles, the links of dependent origination from countless angles. In my view, the word “enlightenment” better conveys this vast, profound, stable, and comprehensive level of understanding.”
“ I would say that “awakening” better describes instantaneous insights into the nature of existence, for example, into impermanence or selflessness, than the consummate achievement of buddhahood. One might also use “awakening” to represent the first of the four stages of realization, which is usually translated as “stream-entry”—that is, the first decisive breakthrough, where, just momentarily, one dispels the darkness of ignorance, sees into the truth of the dhamma, and enters the irreversible path to liberation. So even though the texts don’t use a Pali word that corresponds to “waking up from sleep” for “stream-entry,” I would say that this attainment might be described as an awakening.
However, what my paper deals with is the appropriate word to use for the Buddha’s attainment, and for arhatship, the fourth and final stage of realization. Within the canonical texts, that’s where we find the word bodhi or sambodhi [sambodhi=“complete” or “perfect” enlightenment].”
“ I’m trying to determine what the Buddha’s disciples would have heard him saying. I raised the question: Did they hear him say, in effect, “I am an awakened one, one who has attained awakening”? If we correctly understand the use of the word bodhi and the verbs connected with it, I think there’s no evidence that that was what they heard him say.
The objective of the spiritual quest in the Indian ascetic circles of the time was to attain the supreme knowledge that brings liberation from the cycle of repeated birth and death. So when the Buddha said that he had attained sambodhi, that he was a buddha, his first disciples heard him claim that he had attained supreme knowledge, the knowledge that brings the attainment of nirvana—the goal they were all striving for. So it wasn’t that they were asleep, living in a dream world, and now he’s woken up. Rather, they were living in the darkness of ignorance, and now he had attained the supreme knowledge that has dispelled the darkness of ignorance.
If translators want to use “awakening” and “awakened one,” they’re certainly entitled to do so. But what I maintain is that it would be a mistake to assume that the Buddha intended the words bodhi and buddha to convey those meanings. Rather, I argue, he intended to say: “I am one who has known the liberating truth. I have arrived at supreme knowledge.” And this supreme knowledge, this unsurpassed perfect sambodhi, I maintain, is better represented by the English word enlightenment than by awakening.”
