Re: Meaning of "Buddha"?

I completely agree with Prof Cousins.

As suggested before, this is not only a problem of Pali or of any other Indic language, but of English (French etc.) too. There is it seems a wide consensus among the native speakers of English (see e.g. Rupert Gethin, Sayings of the Buddha, OUP 2008, p. xxxii cum n. 38) to translate buddha, bodhi and related terms with 'awake(ning)', not 'enlightenment'. One objection is the historically very loaded meaning of 'Enlightenment'. The other bold one: there is no 'light' primarily implied in, described by, associated with bodhi in the very texts you mentioned. However, I know of no particular study of historiography explaining the use of Enlightened/Enlightenment for certainly more than a century of Buddhist Studies, and the subsequent switch to Awakened/Awakening.

Eugen Ciurtin

2014-12-01 22:58 GMT+02:00 'L.S. Cousins' selwyn@ntlworld.com [palistudy] <palistudy@yahoogroups.com>:

For me the term 'enlightened' very much has a resonance of the 18th
century Enlightenment and embodies an overly intellectualist
understanding of what the Buddha attained. I don't think bodhi is
simply a culmination of insight. Rather it is a union of calm and
insight. So it is not merely an understanding, but also a stilling of
all that disturbs the mind.

And that, it seems to me, is the point of waking from the sleep induced
by the kilesa that disturb the mind. I don't understand the notion of
'Awakening' as anything to do with waking from dream. Rather it is
waking from a dull or drugged state so as to be free from all obstacles
both to understanding and to wholesome states.

Clearly the root BUDH has both the meaning of 'waking up' and the
meaning of 'knowing'. So this duality is probably built into the
connotations of these pre-Buddhist terms: buddha and bodhi.

Lance Cousins

Dr E. Ciurtin
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