Re: Meaning of "Buddha"?

Thank you Ven. Kumara,

To me, the basic avijjā is captured in the Vipallāsa sutta (AN 2, 52) which is thinking that what is impermanent is permanent, think that what is anatta is atta, thinking that what is dukkha is sukkha and thinking that what is asubha is subha.They are not just avijjā in the sense of "not knowing", but avijjā in the sense of "delusion" - thinking something is what it isn't. We live in a viparyāsa world (< Skt. vi+pari+as "overturn") where everything is upside down. All the other metaphorical words that the Buddha and his disciples use, like dream, mirage, a conjurer's image, apparition, foam, bubble, hollow tree, to describe the world and dhammas, are just metaphors representing our fixed belief in these things (especially the atta) which are false. Therefore when one wakes up to this knowledge, insight and peace result,

Bryan






From: "Kumara Bhikkhu kumara.bhikkhu@... [palistudy]" <palistudy@yahoogroups.com>
To: palistudy@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 2, 2014 4:25 AM
Subject: Re: [palistudy] Meaning of "Buddha"?

 
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