What did Buddha Realize, When He Achieved Enlightenment? This truth shocked the Entire Universe.
#enlightenment #buddha #buddha #feeling
Welcome back to the Ego podcast. In our previous episode, we delved deep into "The Buddha's Enlightenment: What Did He Realize?"
• What Did the Buddha Enlighten About?
We discovered a very important conclusion: The object of reality is Feeling (Vedana).
To understand this better, we explored the concept of reality, a vast category that includes everything present in the moment. Reality is perceived through human senses, such as sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and consciousness. This leads to the classification of reality objects into six categories: form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mental objects. Human perception of reality is often linked to the material world through the six senses: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind.
However, if we observe correctly and deeply, we will see that reality is not the fixed and inherent material world we often understand. Reality only arises when there is an interaction between the six senses and the six objects according to the principle of Dependent Origination. For example, when the eye and a form object interact, we not only see the image but also generate a feeling about that image. Similarly, when the ear and a sound object interact, it creates a feeling of sound; nose and smell object, feeling of smell; tongue and taste object, feeling of taste; body and touch object, feeling of touch; and consciousness with mental objects, feeling of mental objects.
The Buddha realized that reality is Feeling, not the material world. The objects of reality are six types of feelings: image, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mental objects.
Today, we will continue this journey by exploring the workings of the mind, a crucial part of the Buddha's enlightenment. We will discover that the knowing mind is the Buddha's enlightenment. The knowing mind is divided into two types: Direct knowing mind and Indirect knowing mind. We will delve deeper into this division and its role in perceiving reality.
Let’s embark on the next part of the journey to explore the mind and the Buddha’s enlightenment."
Chapter 1: What is the Mind?
In the Buddha's enlightenment journey, two key aspects need exploration: What did he realize, and how did he achieve it? To deeply understand these, we must grasp two core concepts in Buddhist philosophy: direct knowing through the senses and indirect knowing through consciousness.
Direct knowing through the senses:
Psychology calls this sensory perception of objects. In Buddhism, it is classified into a group called the aggregate of perception (Sanna Skandha). These are eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, body consciousness, and mental consciousness. It arises due to the interaction between the six senses and six objects, making it impermanent, ownerless, and nonself (anatta). These direct knowings are the same for both the enlightened and the ordinary, for all animals, regardless of individual knowledge, understanding, or experience. They do not contain concepts, words, or discrimination (nonconceptual, nonverbal, nondiscriminative). Each direct knowing only acknowledges or recognizes one single object as it is without adding or subtracting knowledge or concepts, making it true knowing of the object at the sensory level. Many religions misunderstand this direct knowing as the soul, as the seeing, hearing, and knowing nature that is neither born nor dies within each person.