A little more about bodhi -- awakening or enlightenment -- for Rohatsu, or Bodhi Day. It seems to me there's long been a tendency in Buddhism to sweep enlightenment under the rug.
That's certainly true in the "it's just a philosophy, not a religion" school of the West, in which dharma too often is presented as something you should do because it's good for you, like taking vitamins. But it's true in traditional Asian Buddhism as well.
I'm still reading The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David McMahan, which I've mentioned in earlier posts. (It's not a particularly long book; I just haven't had a lot of time for reading of late.) McMahan writes that the emphasis on meditation for everyone, and not just a cloistered monastic elite, is a significant part of the "modernizing" of Buddhism.
Through most of Buddhist history, the enormous majority of laypeople did not meditate at all. And in some periods this applied to monastics as well. Instead, practice mostly focused on keeping the Precepts and making merit by supporting the monastic sangha. It was (and still is, in some places) understood that bodhi was out of reach for most people.
Of course, "meditation" is not always seated, silent meditation. Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhists practice what might be thought of as chanting meditation. Even then, in Pure Land the faith is that devoted chanting will enable rebirth in the Pure Land, a place in which realization of bodhi becomes possible.
To a large extent the "meditation for everyone" movement has been fueled by Asian teachers. But westerners being introduced to Buddhism in recent years often understand it to be primarily about meditation, and at times I think this has led to some misunderstanding between non-ethic-Asian westerners and traditional Asian Buddhists.
A large part of non-ethnic Asian western Buddhism seems determined to chuck everything about Buddhism but meditation out the window. Some, like Owen Flanagan, tell us that Buddhism is a great philosophy for the 21at century, but of course that silliness about karma, rebirth and Nirvana has to go. He doesn't even mention bodhi, but in Flanagan's "naturalized" Buddhism I don't see a place for bodhi, either.
This takes us back to the story of the Real Dragon I told earlier this week. As Mumon points out in comments, the dragon represents enlightenment. Adopting Buddhism as a philosophy is like decorating your house with dragon figurines. A real dragon -- bodhi -- is something else entirely.
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