Awakening

If we translate bodhi as “illumination,” as most people do, the word is, like it or not, metaphorical and points toward the world, the light that pours down upon the world. If we translate bodhi as “awakening,” the word corresponds exactly to its early usage in Sanskrit, from the root budh-, “to wake,” and points exclusively to the mind, to what happens in the mind and has no counterpart in the manifest. It is only by enhancing this characteristic, which the mind shares with nothing else, that one can achieve that detachment from the existent world, that separation from what is given, that irreversible caesura: the bodhi that transforms Prince Gautama into the Buddha, into the Awakened One.

Roberto Classo
Ka