I gave this talk this morning at our Full Moon Zen Sunrise Sit. A recording follows the text.

Today is Rōhatsu, when Zen Buddhists celebrate Siddhartha Guatama’s enlightenment. Rōhatsu simply means “the eight day of the twelfth month” in Japanese.

Earlier this week, in anticipation of this talk, I reread accounts of the Buddha’s enlightenment in two important compilations of Buddhist texts, the Pali Canon (which is the most complete compilation of early Buddhist scriptures) and a newer translation of the Zen text Records of Transmission of the Lamp (which is an 11^th century Chinese compilation of short biographies of significant Indian and Chinese teachers). I thought I was looking for a key line or two describing the Buddha’s awakening experience that might serve as a starting point for a talk about our own awakenings.

Reading these accounts again, I instead was struck by their folklore elements, and by the similarities of some of these folklore elements with the folklore in other wisdom traditions. Here, for example, is the brief passage about the Buddha’s enlightenment from Transmission of the Lamp:

“The Lalitavistara Sutra says that, `In the twelfth month, on the eighth day, at the time of the appearance of the morning star, the bodhisattva became a Buddha called “the teacher of Gods and Man”.’ At that time, he was thirty years old, which was in the fourth year of the reign of King Mu, corresponding to the twentieth year of the sexagenarian cycle.” 

That’s literally all it says about the Buddha’s enlightenment experience in this account.

It’s also Christmastime, of course. Having been raised Catholic, I sensed strong similarities and resonances between the passage I just read and some Christian texts often read this time of year. Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, is Christianity’s enlightenment moment and story. Light entering the world, and entering our hearts, during this time of year when the days are shorter, also is a theme in other traditions—Hinduism’s Diwali and Judaism’s Hanukkah, for example.

The Gospel of Matthew provides the account of Jesus’s birth.  It opens with a lineage chart (not unlike our Zen lineage charts) tying Jesus to the first Jewish prophet, Abraham, and his son, King David, thus locating Jesus in time and in society.  The Transmission of the Lamp story also locates the Buddha’s enlightenment temporally and socially in relation to the reign of King Mu.  

There’s a star in each story, orienting its central figure and signal event cosmically. 

If we consider other versions of the Rōhatsu story, we sense other similarities and resonances between it and the Christian story.  The location of each story’s event and the landscape there is described, situating the central characters and events spatially and in relation to the natural world.  In the Rōhatsu story, the Buddha even touches the Earth, which speaks to bear witness to his enlightenment. 

Spirits appear in each story—the evil spirit Mara in the Buddhist myth; an angel in Christian lore.  These are very different spirits, to be sure, but the presence of spirits in each story situates it metaphysically, in relation to the widespread human intuition that there’s something beyond the sensible realm.

In the short passage from the Transmission of the Lamp I read we’re told Siddartha Guatama was 30 years old when he had his enlightenment experience and begins teaching.  That’s about the age we meet Jesus again in the gospels, as this rabbi, or teacher, begins to share his insights. 

In the Transmission of the Lamp, we also learn the Buddha was called “the teacher of Gods and Men.”  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is called Immanuel, which means “God with us.”  These foundational figures in their respective wisdom traditions, their moments of enlightenment, and their teachings are being situated in relation to the divine, to some conception of ultimate reality. 

Crucially, each of these central figures also endures trials and tribulations and has a transformative personal experience, resituating himself with respect to himself, so to speak.  Metanoia.

By drawing these comparisons, I’m not suggesting these two wisdom traditions and their central stories, characters, messages, and aims are identical.  But I do think these stories, and others like them in other wisdom traditions, are very human.  Each displays and conveys common human concerns and yearnings. 

Perhaps the desire for enlightenment is a desire to locate oneself, to situate oneself, to relate oneself in the broadest possible sense—to one’s own self; to others near and far; to non-human beings and elements; to the universe, the cosmos; to that which lies beyond our sensory awareness; to ultimate reality.  And perhaps enlightenment is that developing sense of relatedness, of being situated, of “here-ness,” of presence.

Who knows where we come from, and where we are, but we find ourselves here as distinct beings.  To become healthy and whole as distinct persons, we must differentiate from our mothers and those close to us as a developmental imperative.  Yet that transformation also can give rise to an uncomfortable sense of apartness, of being unsituated.  Perhaps that’s a necessary life experience.  It’s a very common one, to be sure. 

For many of us, it also will feel imperative to resituate oneself in this vast universe.  The word universe means combined into one.  It means whole.  We want to know ourselves as integrated; as combined into the whole.

If we can take one big cosmic step back, we might begin to see something joyfully playful about our yearnings and transformations.  As I take that step back, I’m reminded of a quote from the early modern philosopher Francis Bacon (if you’ll permit me to borrow from another tradition once more).  Talking about the wise King Solomon from Jewish scripture, he said:

“Nay, the same Solomon the king, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of service and attendance, of fame and renown, and the like, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith expressly, “The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out;” as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide His works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s playfellows in that game.”

In Zen, we call this the samadhi of play.

Strolling outside Tuesday afternoon I sensed snow was coming.  I opened a weather app to see there was none in the forecast.  Having grown up high in the mountains of southwestern Colorado, however, I could feel it in my bones.  Sure enough, as I sat down early Wednesday morning to search for a Buddhist text to use as a touchstone for this talk, light snow—the first of the season in Boston—began to fall.  It lasted an hour or so and didn’t leave a trace.  Too insubstantial and improbable to register significantly in the meteorologists’ models, those of us who have a certain quality of situated experience—in this case, from living in the mountains—could sense its emerging presence, nonetheless.  The coming snow was registering itself in my bones.  Jeff and snow.  Not separate.

Those of us who wander on the Zen path seek knowing the whole of reality and experience this way; knowing “not separate” in our bones. Generations of wanderers have come to this experiential knowledge along this path. This deep knowledge of our relatedness is what we celebrate on Rōhatsu.

As it turns out, the quote I was looking for was not ancient wisdom within the pages of Transmission of the Lamp.  I found it in the contemporary description of this ancient text on the book’s back cover, which says, “The message of this book, that Chan practice can enable a free participation in life’s open-ended play, seems as necessary to our own time as it was to the restless times of 11^th century Song China.”  Indeed.

Happy Holidays. May our hearts, well, be light.