“Enlightenment” is not a good translation of the Buddhist concept of bodhi.
We get this translation from Max Müller, who lived in the 1800s. He was a philologist at Oxford, originally from Germany, and was heavily involved in the translation of Indian texts. For context, this was during the period when Europe was expanding colonially across the globe. It hadn't been long since the British had taken over India, and there was suddenly this massive exchange of ideas between Europe and India. Europeans were very interested in all the Indian texts that were becoming available, translating them and trying to make sense of them. Müller was central to this project.
It's also important to note that I would say it's fair to count him among the German Romantics. He seems to have been sympathetic to that philosophical movement, arguably even a part of it. This means that when he was doing his translations, he brought in ideological biases that came as part of Romanticism—in particular, the idea that the highest good was a type of authenticity, a sense of finding one's own true nature and expressing it through various means.
This is all relevant because the word "bodhi" has a fairly straightforward translation: it simply means "awakening" or "to wake up." The metaphor used in Buddhism is that we are normally in a slumber of delusion and confusion—you might say it's a dream—and that through practice, one can wake up from these delusions to live an awakened life of awareness of what's actually going on.
So how do we get to "enlightenment" from this idea of awakening? We don't have a total answer, as far as I know. I'm not aware of any documents where Müller wrote out his reasoning for choosing enlightenment as his translation for “bodhi”. But we can make some pretty strong guesses.
Enlightenment is a somewhat common metaphor in Christian theology and Christian writing—this idea that God shines light onto things to make them known or better. You can find examples of this metaphor throughout the Bible and in lots of other Christian writing. Of course, Europe had just come through the Enlightenment and was now in the post-Enlightenment era where it felt like people were coming into a modern age, having finally freed themselves from the dark confusion of the past. So there was some desire to tie the idea of bodhi to the Enlightenment, as if they were fundamentally part of the same project.
Additionally, given Müller's Romantic philosophical leanings, there was likely an additional component of wanting to treat bodhi asshining light onto one's true nature or true self and revealing it. Just to be clear, this is not reflective of the general understanding in Buddhism of bodhi. But you could argue that this was an ideologically biased interpretation based on Müller’s limited understanding of Buddhists texts at the time.
Somewhat unfortunately, enlightenment became a very popular translation, I imagine because it fit intuitively with many people's understanding of the world. It really took off. I don't think this was a deliberate attempt to confuse people; it was just following the natural incentives of trying to find explanations that are intuitive. It's what worked for people at the time.
Today, we thankfully have much better access to understand the original texts as they were intended and to understand the ideas within Buddhism as they are meant. This means we've been able to figure out that “enlightenment” is actually not a great translation of “bodhi”, and “awakening” is perhaps better.
Now you could argue that none of this matters—it's just jargon. We're going to have to explain what this idea means no matter what word we use. But I think “awakening” does matter, because the choice to call bodhi "enlightenment" instead of "awakening" carries connotations that cause confusion. The biggest one is that enlightenment makes it sound like bodhi is an attainment, something to be achieved.
Now, it's not exactly wrong to say that there are realizations related to awakening that one can attain in the sense that they happen. There’s a transition that generally happens when one awakens and we want a word to point to that. So in a certain sense, this looks kind of like attainment. But it's important to understand that awakening is really a continuous process. Having it be a verb—that we awaken, we are awakening—does a better job of describing what's actually going on. Awakening is a continual process of perceiving the world in an awakened way that allows one to live an awakened life, a life where one understands that they're not separate from others, that there is no separate self, and where they aren’t bought into a dualist delusion.
Because of how awakening actually is, the word "enlightenment" itself, by making it sound like an attainment, causes confusion. It causes people to strive to attain a thing that doesn't actually exist because it is a way of being. Certainly, if someone passes through bodhi, they should figure this out—but even then, I'm not always sure. There's a sort of ontological dependency that happens when we try to talk about this stuff in terms of how we understand it. There's a sense in which a person can be living their life in a particular way but also talk about it in a way that is confusing or misrepresents what's actually going on, because those words will be interpreted and misunderstood, even if that's not the intention. That's a lot of what happens with this word "enlightenment"—it just causes a lot of confusion about what's really going on.
That's all I really wanted to talk about this week. I don't want to dive into trying to explain enlightenment or awakening or bodhi or whatever you want to call it. That's a much bigger and deeper topic that in some sense is not even really possible to address. It's the kind of thing that can be pointed at but can't really be fully understood without some amount of practice—at least enough to have the right experiences to have some useful reference to understand what awakening could even mean. So I don't know that there's a lot of value in trying to dive into it, but others have written some interesting things if you're curious to follow up. Here’s a few links you might check out.
