The Awakening of the Bodhisatta
Bodhisatta’s “spiritual awakening” took place at the age of thirty-five, on the full-moon-day of May. That means the Bodhisatta “Awoke” from the “dream of existence” and was transformed into a “perfectly selfless” Superhuman Buddha (Awake-one). Such a Buddha has no body, mind, or soul. He is free from birth, aging and death “here and now,” not after death.
The Bodhisatta awoke spiritually when He stopped being carried away by emotions, and so stopped personalizing and so gave up the “delusion of personal being,” or existence as a “self.” This means, He gave up attachment to everything that He thought was His. This was not easy to do, but He had prepared Himself for this task, during the numerous lives in samsara, practicing the numerous paramitas of self-sacrifice.
Some writers depict the Bodhisatta as a very lascivious person. If he was so passionate, like other men, He could never have been able to wake up from the “dream of being.” It was because He had practiced relinquishment and renunciation through numerous lives that He was able to renounce everything that He thought was His, and wake up from the dream of “personal existence” or “being.”
In awakening, the Bodhisatta stopped identifying Himself with the body, feelings, sensations, mental constructs, perceptions, cognitions, emotions, actions and everything experienced. He stopped personalizing all elements of experience. Therefore, He ceased to experience a “personal existence.” An Awake-one’s or a Buddha’s identity is only a social convention. Only others identify “Him” as an individual person. “His” identity is a mistake of the ignorant public. When a Bodhisatta awakens from the “dream of being,” He ceases to be a person, and ceases to have an identity.
The Bodhisatta ceased to exist as a person, when He awoke from the dream of existence, and entered the reality of impersonality. Through this process of waking up, He was transformed into a “Buddha,” an Awake-one, who does not exist as a “person.” This transformation was not a physical change such as metamorphosis. It was a psychological change as metempsychosis. Buddha is not a physical entity that is visible and identifiable physically. “He” can be seen only through someone’s own experience, and understanding of the Dhamma. One who sees the Dhamma sees the Buddha, but not as a person in concrete form, but in abstract.
During the time of the Buddha there was a disciple who was very fond of looking at the Buddha. When the Buddha was preaching, he always sat in a place where he could easily see the figure of the Buddha. So the Buddha said to him: “Why do you keep looking at this filthy body? He who sees me sees the Dhamma. He who sees the Dhamma sees me.”
Even after the death of the depersonalized body, the Buddha still lives in the Dhamma. Even when the Dhamma is lost to the world, the Buddha still lives in the Dhamma, until someone rediscovers the Dhamma, and so sees the Buddha. Yet this is not an “existence” of the Buddha in concrete form but His existence in formless abstract.
A Buddha, “does not exist,” because, in becoming a Buddha he awoke from the dream of existence, and ceased to be a self or person. Nibbana, by definition, is the “cessation of being” (bhava nirodho nibbanam). This “cessation of being” is not the annihilation of an “existing entity” but the disappearance of the “delusion of being.” All other beings are said to be “existing” only because they carry the “delusion of being.”