Is Enlightenment Achievable? – Dialectic Two Step

Estimated reading time: 9 minute(s)

Question: Do You Think Enlightenment or Awakening that follows meditation practice is actually achievable?

Response: Enlightenment – arghh. What a troublesome idea.  Buddhist teachers need to be careful when getting pulled into this discussion.  Making short sharp declarations like enlightenment is not a goal can be confusing.  But associating it with personal achievement can also be misleading.

Is there such a thing as awakening that follows meditation practice?
Click To Tweet

So let’s start with that part of the question.  Is there such a thing as awakening that follows meditation practice?  There are two ideas merged into a premise here.  Awakening and practice.  Let’s start with practice.

We all know what practice is.  It is the repetition of skills until we achieve mastery.  We master tying our shoes in two stages.  First someone points out the way and then we keep doing it until we get it right.  Meditation seems to be this kind of activity.  We meditate today and we do OK.  We meditate tomorrow, we get better at it.  After 10 years we’re professionals.   But does it lead to Enlightenment?

The goal of learning to tie our shoes is independence. We also improve our fine motor and problem solving skills. We learn the value of persistence and lots of other things.  But do we achieve a new metaphysical state of being when we learn to tie our shoes?

Enlightenment. Is it something that we can achieve with practice?
Click To Tweet

To get to some kind of answer, let’s talk about enlightenment.  Is it something that we can achieve with practice?  All of the Buddhist traditions give us a squishy answer.  In the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism there is the Lamrim, or stages of the path.  In Zen there is the elusive koan and quest for Satori.  There is a goal of Nirvana. The teachings point the way, and we must cross the river of fire and water. All of these directions seem to confirm that we must exert effort and that the fruit of our labor is awakening.

Is enlightenment achievable? There is nothing to achieve, but finding it takes much work.
Click To Tweet

But contrast that with the ubiquitous concept of Buddha Nature, or the Pure Land’s teaching of other power.  We see a very different story.  Buddha nature is our inherent primordial nature, our pure and natural state available for us to discover by setting aside the obscurations of self.

Pure Land Buddhism tells us that we must rely on other power – Buddha Amitabha – for our salvation. The efforts of self-power will be fruitless.  Only by surrender to Amitabha, accepting the grace of our inherent Buddha Nature, will we discover enlightenment.

So which is it?  Do we practice hard to attain enlightenment, or do we surrender and accept our Buddha nature and move on?  Here’s the squishy answer – Yes.  Accessing our enlightened nature requires transcendence.  By transcendence, I don’t mean we toss out one or the other view.  Transcendence is seeing both as part of a whole. An enlightened being is capable of holding both the impermanent nature of self and the unchanging nature of wakefulness in the same view.

So here is my answer to the question:

Is enlightenment achievable? There is nothing to achieve, but finding it takes much work.

Dialectic Two-Step  is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio

Get Each Week's Dialectic Two Step In Your Email Box

If you enjoyed this post,  please like and share.

The post Is Enlightenment Achievable? – Dialectic Two Step written by Andrew Furst appeared on Andrew Furst.