I have been pondering on this question a lot recently. Every time when this question comes up my mind, the first thing I thought of was what Shiddhatha Gautama said 2500 years ago when he exited from his nonstop seven-day meditation, "it is amazing that the entire living beings possess a whole lot of wisdom and virtues."
As we believe that Buddha set "no lies" one of the five basic precepts, so what he said in his teaching must simply be true. In China, there was a good example recorded in the "the sixth patriarch's altar Sutra" which recorded an anecdote of the sixth patriarch Hui Neng.
Hui Neng (638–713 AD), was a woodsman before he was ealightened. The Sutra said that he once delivered his firewood to a restaurant in town. Having got his job done and on his way leaving from the restaurant, he heard someone reciting the scripts of diamond Sutra. He asked the guy what was he reading, and the guy replied "diamond Sutra". He begged him to read on. Hui Neng was totally engulfed by the script being read, and suddenly attained a great enlightenment when the guy read up to the end of that chapter: "one should not attach his perception of anything to his mind".
As usual as many other pioneers who attained enlightenment before him earnestly reflected their experience by a verse right after they exited that state. Hui Neng's example of enlightenment was recorded in the "Sixth Patriarch Altar Sutra". He summarized his insight of the scripts in the following verse:
" never had I expected that the self is purely clean; never had I expected that the self is beyond birth and demise; never had I expected that the self is completely sustainable; never had I expected that the self is unshakable; never had I expected that the self generates limitless matters" (何期自性本自清净，何期自性本不生灭，何期自性本自具足，何期自性本无动摇，何期自性能生万法")
The two examples I raised on the above are not contemporary and we may feel they are too remote and not so real. So the other day, I googled on this question "who were recognized as enlightened being?", the search listed heaps of entries relevant to this question, and among them were masters teachers and spiritual practitioners. Some of them were very famous worldwide like Ramana Maharshi, Ajahn Chah, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Eckhart Tolle, and so on, whose followers wrote and published their witnesses or their thoughts about the teachers in order to share their experience with the mass multitude.
So I believe there is such thing as Enlightenment. But like most of the learners, I haven't had a chance to experience Enlightenment.
But what is enlightenment all about? How do they feel when they reached that level of state?
I believe it must be a marvelous, wonderful, peaceful, blissful, or perhaps awesome spiritual state that is beyond the capacity of description the worldly language can make us understand.
It is said that when Shidahtah Guatama had achieved his Enlightenment, he realized that it was almost impossible for the sentient beings to achieve the same state, and so he decided to leave the Samsara behind and enter Nivana. However, he might think it was a selfish thought and then had a strong urge to share his discovery and experience about the enlightenment, so he came out of his deep meditation and started his career of 49 years of teaching.
Is there such a thing as enlightenment? I have been skeptical to this question. Because if there is someone in the world who is widely recognized as an enlightened being, how come in the past 30 years since I had the chance to get to know something about Buddhism, have never had the chance to see an real example myself? And I am not the only one who has never witnessed an enlightened being, none of my fellow Buddhists has ever seen one, but the majority of them believe their adored masters are.
Althoug I have been so skeptical about this question, I absolutely believe what Siddhartha Guatama and Hui Neng had said about their experience or insight of enlightenment. I even believe there are a lot more other people somewhere in the world are born to be enlightened beings, and only a very few people have the chance to be learning from them directly.
What enlightenment is all about? Why Buddha, Hui Neng and innumerable other sages of the ancient day spent their whole life time to learn how to achieve that objective with a great amount of effort? My perception of the above questions might not be correct, but it is based on what I have experienced so far. It is because the reality of life is full of contradiction. If we look at worldly matters closely, we will agree that nothing remains the same permanently. However, the logic of our brain is conditioned or is programmed to compare, to judge, to discriminate, to love this and hate that, to insist to do things on a certain way. If everything runs perfectly, then we are happy, but the problem is that it is never guaranteed to go our way, so we are upset, stressed, disappointed when things go other way round. In a nutshell, what makes us suffer is because life sucks, life suffers. This is the cause that drove Shiddahtha to escape from palace to learn from those famous Yogis of his era how to make mind peaceful and happy eternally.
How will we feel when we have achieved certain level of enlightenment? It must be unimaginably marvelous when the mind is tamed and enlightened. That is why Shidahtha Gautama bothered to preach the path which lead to the goal of enlightenment.
In 2009, I was recommended to watch a video clip presented by TED. In the video, Dr. Jill Taylor delivered a speech about her own experience of how it feels being in Nivana. That occurred on her in a morning when she had a brain stroke which despaired her left hemisphere of the brain. Before I quote the relevant content of her speech, I would like to emphasize that Dr. Taylor herself is a neurologist, a brain scientist, and that she was not a believer of any religion prior to her incident, according to what she told Oprah in an interview on TV.
Dr. Jill Taylor could be the one who has used the plainest English to describe the feeling she had in her TED speech in 2008. In that speech she told the audience an incident occurred in a morning of September 1996 when she encountered a massive brain stroke which despaired her left side of the brain. Because she is a neurologist, she knows how the two brain hemispheres work, but to experience how a brain stroke patient feels when part of their brain is getting out of order, that could be the only chance for her. So even though she was in an emergent condition, a thought flashed through her mind -- "how cool it is that how many brain scientists have such a good chance to study the brain inside out."
When her speech came up to the part describing how she felt when her left brain was shuting down and only the right brain did its job. She said,
"Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful." ,
"My left hemisphere -- our left hemisphere -- is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me.", she said, "position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover."
From her speech, we'll understand that to be a living being, we got to have a balanced brain on each of the two hemispheres--the right side provides information, raw or processed, stored, and the left side does the comparing, analyzing, concluding, planning and so on. When these two parts are in conflict, then we will be like living in hell, and when they cooperate, we will have less trouble.
Of course we are not hoping to be knocked out by stoke in order to simulate an artificial enlightenment, but Dr. Taylor's speech convinces us there is such thing as enlightenment, and it is attainable by doing the right practice.
