Enlightenment

Abstract

This chapter focuses on enlightenment. Many writers describe Buddhism as a path to happiness, but there are a few important ways in which enlightenment and happiness can be quite different. Happiness, for example, is often thought of as an entirely subjective state. The problem that Buddhists are trying to solve, however, is not merely a subjective state. The problem for Buddhists is not only about feeling bad but is a precarious and destructive way of being in the world, one that people often fail to recognize at all. In this sense, the Buddhist goal is more like being healthy than being happy. Enlightenment involves a radical reorientation of an individual’s outlook on the world. It is one that takes into account the ways in which an individual’s habits of seeing, feeling, thinking, and responding to things fool that individual into having a visceral sense that the world is one way when it is really very different.