Methinks it's an awakening from avijja.
Say, someone has been thinking, thus living, in an unhappy way; then
one day he wakes up to a truth, allowing him to recognise what he
didn't see before and to realise how deluded he was. (We can't know
how deluded we are until we wake up from it.)
I still can't intellectualise why "awakening" makes more sense, but
intuitively it feels just right.
kb
'L.S. Cousins' selwyn@... [palistudy] wrote thus at 04:58 AM 02-12-14:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>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