This is a post about the word "enlightenment," not enlightenment itself. But the words we use do shape our understanding of things, and this one is a bit clumsy.
I have assumed that "enlightened" came to be the standard English word for "bodhi," which means "awakened," because that's how "bodhi" was rendered in the first English language translations of the sutras. But Lewis Richmond says that while that was sometimes true, the real culprit was D.T. Suzuki.
D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) was a one-time Japanese Rinzai Zen monk and scholar who lived in the West for a time.� His books and lectures stimulated much interest in Zen in the West. Lewis Richmond writes,
"D.T. Suzuki used the word 'enlightenment' to translate the Japanese term satori� and his recounting of the enlightenment stories from the Zen koan literature made quite a splash among intellectual elites at the time. From that time forward, the idea of a sudden transformative spiritual experience became embedded in Western cultural imagination."
This brought about the idealization of enlightenment/satori as the ultimate psychedelic head trip, popular in the 1960s and for a long while thereafter.
However, in western history the Age of Enlightenment, sometimes just called the Enlightenment, refers to an 18th century (or so) intellectual movement that idealized reason and the advance of knowledge. As Lewis Richmond says, the word is encrusted with cultural history, and baggage, that is unhelpful to a Buddhist.
In fact, in all my years as a Zen student I have hardly ever heard the E word, or even the S word (satori), spoken by a Zen teacher. They more often say a person is "awakened" or "realized" than enlightened.� Other traditions may use words like "insight" or "wisdom." Do you hear the "E" word much where you are?
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