If You Achieve Enlightenment, How Will You Know?

Buddhist enlightenment particularly focuses on the realization of anatta, or non-self, directly opposing the eternalist view that the self survives death; interpreters throughout the centuries have instead equated anatta with “self-annihilation,” the view that, under enlightenment, the absolute impermanence of the self is realized.¹ However, I believe that “self-annihilation” is incomplete and inadequate to describe the condition of enlightenment. Self-annihilation is, ironically, a very self-centered practice. Writer David Foster Wallace asserted in a 2003 interview that, “there’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred.”² The inherently egocentric nature of annihilating the self betrays ignorance of the fact that the world is bigger than oneself, as does its opposite, self-eternality. Instead, I propose my own term, “self-unification.” When the self unifies with the world, there is neither self-annihilation nor self-eternality because the self ceases to be the sole center of perceptive experience.

Before unification, we understand the world in relation to the self. Philosophers east and west have observed the reflexivity of perception. Extending Edmund Husserl’s “intentionality”—that consciousness always operates as consciousness of something—Jean-Paul Sartre asserts that all consciousness is conscious of the self’s existence as well as its direct object.³ Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti similarly proposes that all consciousness is “self-cognizing.”⁴ Yet the self remains insulated, a logical afterthought to account for our consciousness of the world. When self and world become united, and the self resides in the world’s myriad objects (and vice versa), the connection between self and world expands to a two-way street. All consciousness directly beholds the self-in-world with no need for cognitive justification.

Therefore, a recognition of enlightenment is unnecessary for enlightenment itself to take place. The question “how will you know?” requires identifying the markers that would necessarily characterize enlightenment. Three markers of enlightenment—the falling away of attachment, the cessation of fear of death, and the full realization of language as expression—are crucial in defining enlightenment as self-unification rather than self-annihilation.

To prove each marker’s validity, we must prove that:

• the marker necessarily follows the definition of enlightenment I have laid out;
• the marker is recognizable (requiring self-consciousness) and knowable (requiring self-knowledge).

Is Self-Knowledge Possible?

Working from the famous cogito ergo sum and the certainty of self-consciousness it offered, René Descartes proposed the “infallibility thesis”: he writes, “as far as [introspective] ideas are concerned… they cannot strictly speaking be false,” guaranteeing that all introspective statements are true.⁵ However, he continues, “thus the only remaining thoughts where I must be on my guard against making a mistake are judgements.”⁶ Self-knowledge, which requires more meticulous assessment, can be ambiguous and false even when self-consciousness is always clear and true.

Buddhist epistemology perennially struggles with the acinteyya, “unanswerable questions” to which the Buddha refused to respond. Literally, acinteyya means “that which cannot or should not be thought, the unthinkable, incomprehensible, impenetrable, that which transcends the limits of thinking and over which therefore one should not ponder.”⁷ As our luck would have it, the unanswerable questions entail those most pertinent to our discussion: Nirvāna itself is “beyond all conceptualization” and the capacities gained from enlightenment are “inconceivable.”^8,9 The normative statement “should not” further suggests that pondering these incomprehensible questions in fact impedes enlightenment. Not only does self-knowledge seem error-bound, enlightenment itself slips further from reach the more we try to know it. One can most certainly argue that we could not know we were enlightened.

However, the rationalist approach needlessly limits us. Dharmakīrti, in establishing the standard Buddhist epistemic doctrine, identifies two paths to knowledge: perception (pratyaksa) and inference (anumana); while inference is conceptual and linguistic, perception is non-conceptual, direct experience.¹⁰ The condition of enlightenment may exist beyond the realm of conceptual inference, but not beyond perception. A realized language will be a crucial marker of enlightenment precisely because, as the barrier between self and language dissolves, the language-as-self can fully and directly express the perceptive experience of enlightenment. Bound to unenlightened, imperfect linguistic communication, though, this essay seeks to conceptually express perceptions of enlightenment, the only way we might approximate “knowing.”

Falling Away of Attachment

The falling away of attachment requires not only releasing the objects of desire but also unclenching the hand itself. David Loy writes that enlightenment is “not something that [one does], nor does it happen to [one]... rather, there is a letting go. Not simply of whatever [one is] grasping, but of grasping.”¹¹ Attachment stems from a desire to possess, yet the condition of enlightenment exists outside of the realm of action.

Classicist Anne Carson writes that Eros, or romantic desire, is “deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence… represent[ed] as lack.”¹² Derived from lack, desire feeds itself as long as there exists a separation between the desiring and the desired, a separation nonexistent in self-unification. In a wave-like series of claims, each cresting upon the previous one, Zen Buddhist philosopher Dōgen writes, “to study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.”¹³ The cessation of attachment is facilitated by the unification of world and self. Once the self which desires and the world which contains the desired objects unite into one, attachment falls away.

However, resolving attachment by simply acquiring the desired object differs substantially from the letting go of attachment. Despite seeming diametrically opposed, would their results not converge, for the subject and the object are united nevertheless?

The distinction is often illustrated in Buddhist thought by the metaphor of the seed. Steven Collins notes that “this idea of [construction-] consciousness as ‘seeded’ or ‘seedless’ is very important in all Buddhist thought… when men have ‘no desire for growth,’ then their ‘seeds are destroyed,’ just as they have destroyed rebirth.”¹⁴ Construction-consciousness further refers to the desire of the un-enlightened to “[create] continued life in time.”¹⁵ Desire is, by definition, future-oriented. We plant seeds not for the seed itself but for the plant we imagine it will become. In desire, we disregard what we do have: the absolute present of the seed. To resolve desire through acquisition is thus incompatible with a view of enlightenment that revolves around unification with the world.

Cessation of Fear of Death

Buddhist thought often suggests that, in enlightenment, one realizes the momentariness of existence. This realization directly follows the cessation of future- or past-oriented thinking. The Pali and Theravada canon explains that “all matter before birth is past, all that after death is future, while the matter occurring between rebirth and death is present.”¹⁶ Fyodor Stcherbatsky presses the line of logic to conclude, “moments are necessarily discrete; every moment, i.e., every momentary thing is annihilated as soon as it appears, because it does not survive in the next moment. In this sense everything represents its own annihilation.”¹⁷ The self is compressed to a momentary, instantaneous existence.

However, inherent within the recognition of its momentariness is a recognition of the timelessness of existence. Dōgen writes, “it is a mistake to suppose that birth turns into death… Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, nor summer the end of spring.”¹⁸ Stcherbatsky is correct that states of existence, including life and death, are discrete; however, in rejection of past and future, moments exit out of time and become timeless. “Annihilation” privileges acceleration towards the future event of death over the present state of living. In self-unification, we do not cease to fear death because existence has already vanished through self-annihilation; instead, we do so because death is an expression of existence no more eternal or momentary than all those we have inhabited before.

Realization of Language

Lastly, enlightenment is marked by a full realization of language. In conventional Buddhist thought, language is often indicative of delusion while enlightenment is connected to silence. Immediately after achieving enlightenment, the Buddha was said to have told his disciples, “material form, O monks, is not the self. If material form were the self… a man should be able to say regarding his material form.”¹⁹ In futility, the unenlightened pursues self-expression through language. Contemporary Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna writes that “what language expresses is nonexistent… unarisen and unceased, like nirvāna / is the nature of things,” echoing again the idea that language attempts to express a self annihilated in enlightenment.²⁰ That language is futile because it fails is fallacious. Dissolution of the barrier between self and language is not evidenced by the elimination of language, but instead by its expansion. Enlightenment allows us to tap into language’s full reservoir of possibilities.

Of course, by nature of our unenlightened minds, we cannot comprehend a fully realized language, if it exists. Perhaps it is the “ideal language” advocated for in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a language free from the inadequacies and ambiguities of natural language.²¹ But even Wittgenstein admitted in his later work, Philosophical Investigations, that “we have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”²² Wittgenstein intuitively rejects ideal language for its ease, in many ways similar to enlightenment’s platonic ideal of silence, wherein everything is so perfectly understood that expression is unnecessary. If the perfect, crystalline smoothness of the ideal language bars the speaker from “walking on rough ground” – meaningfully engaging with the world – that language must run counter to unification of self and world. So what now?

We must approximate. Hee-Jin Kim, in analyzing Dōgen’s use of Koan language, proposes and categorizes seven rhetorical methods Dōgen employs that reflect an integration of self and language through the language itself.²³ In order to be recognized as a marker, language must be reimagined through concrete, technical avenues. Again, within our conception, enlightenment must be expressible and knowable (though knowledge is not necessary to enlightenment). The existence of such requirements demands a mode of communication, a language we are liberated into rather than liberated out of.

The realization of language is the marker that perhaps most closely merges marker and method. While enlightenment necessarily encapsulates a fully realized language as one of its manifestations, language is a tool with which the exercise of deconstructing the barrier between self and language serves the larger objective of dissolving the barrier between self and world asked of self-unification. One such linguistic avenue is metaphor. Kim writes in commentary of Dōgen’s writing that, “Metaphor in Dōgen’s sense is not that which points to something other than itself, but that in which something realizes itself… the symbol is not a means to edification but an end in itself—the workings of ultimate truth.”²⁴ The metaphor is attached to and therefore always a degree separated from that for which it is a symbol and conduit. However, the consummation of metaphor and signified, so endlessly and cyclically intertwined that they are merely two expressions of one truth, is a microcosm of the consummation of self and language, and ultimately of self and world.

If we define enlightenment as “self-unification” rather than “self-annihilation,” these markers—falling away of desire, cessation of fear of death, and full realization of language—necessarily characterize enlightenment. Tracing the dimming of egocentrism and anthropocentrism to its logical conclusion, I would raise that an enlightened person should have no conscious, continuous desire to know whether they are enlightened. By its ideal nature, enlightenment is often seen as an isolating state, but it is above all connective and encompassing. World and self infuse each other absolutely, like ink in water.