The Buddha’s Parting Words Revisited: Lamp or Island?
You can be an island or a lamp, on a bicycle or a ship, and the path to fruition is the same, if you plant seeds along the way. The reference is to the Buddha’s parting words in which he urges followers to be a ‘lamp’ or to be an ‘island’, or either, or both, or neither, in catuhskoti logic, subsequent narrators, translators, and explainers suggesting that the word dipa can somehow mean both, when the reality is that it can only mean either, unless you’re making a play on words in Magadhi prakrit, aka ‘Pali’.
Because big brother Sanskrit shows that the original word(s) are clearly distinct, modern transliterations being closer to dvipa than dipa for the word that means ‘island’, for which the prakrit speakers presumably simply slurred down the more complex sorta-three-syllable word into only two distinct syllables, while explainers suggest that the original meaning is essentially the same. The only problem is that they’re not the same. So, this is more than linguistic fun, notwithstanding that Buddha might have simply made a pun, which I’m sure that he was capable of, being the human that he was.
Or maybe he was simply being prescient, since being an island refuge for yourself and/or a lamp for yourself and your path (and others’, since lamps tend to radiate outward), is very similar to the difference between the Theravada approach to Buddhist practice and the most obvious approaches to a Mahayana practice, that outward radiation being obviously more diverse by design and definition, more Bodhisattva than arahant. There are many Mahayanas. There is only one Theravada. Or in my Buddhist dialectic, it can allow for two-in-one, all in good time. As I said before, save yourself then save the world.
streaming consciousness... 
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