Modern Buddhism: Enlightenment and the Will to Flower 

Every Buddhist talks about Enlightenment, but I don’t know that anyone ever achieves it, nor that it is anything achievable. But it seems that we need goals to propel us through the day unafraid, and so for a Buddhist that often revolves around the concept of Enlightenment, the next best thing to Buddhahood, I suppose. After all, if the Buddha was awakened, then surely enlightenment must have struck the match that lit the candle? But what does that even look like, anyway?  

Does an enlightened person smile all the time? They don’t in the pictures. As a matter of fact, until recently, with the ascendance of ‘lovingkindness’ in the modern Buddhist lexicon, the most serious Buddhists almost universally seemed the sternest and most unsmiling of all, almost as though precepts were something there to be enforced, kinda’ like commandments. Mostly, though, I just don’t think I could listen to someone proclaim himself to be enlightened without thinking that maybe that was just a little bit pompous.

I’ ve always been a little bit suspicious of ‘bliss’, too, to be honest, and the fact that author Joseph Campbell had second thoughts about using that in a prominent title perhaps confirms my suspicions. The same goes for enlightenment, and ‘Buddha mind’, and Buddha hood, in general. I’ve been around a lot of monks and a lot of writers, a lot of New Age types, and a lot of wheeler-dealers, and it seems as though everyone is cut out of the same cloth, EXCEPT… except when they deliberately follow another plan, or path.  

And that means, first and foremost, to bury the wrath. Don’t react. The upshot of social media is that, when two strangers meet, there is often a pissing contest to see who wins. There is nothing really to be gained, but still…that’s what humans do. I don’t think that happens so much when two people know each other well, of course, but that’s not advanced social media. That’s friendship, metta, with well-established pathways to fulfillment. Don’t rock the boat; that’s implicit. Something more is needed in a world of 8 billion people: will, the will to cooperate. It works; I’ve tried it. That’s what the masters do. Try it. Pull your punches for the good of society.