This is the event the whole tradition rests on. A man sits down under a tree at a place on the Nairanjana river, in what is now Bihar, and resolves not to get up until he has understood. By morning he has, and for the next forty-five years he is the Buddha rather than Gautama.

What is unusual about the episode, given its importance, is how little the earliest sources say about the content of the realisation, and how much later material accumulated around it. This article works through both.

The setting and the vow #

After abandoning the austerities and accepting food, Siddhartha goes to a pipal tree — Ficus religiosa, thereafter the bodhi or awakening tree — and sits facing east on a cushion of grass given to him by a grass-cutter named Sotthiya. The vow, in the traditional formulation, is uncompromising: let my skin, sinews, and bones dry up and my flesh and blood wither, but I will not rise from this seat until I have attained awakening.

The site is Bodh Gaya, the most important of the four great pilgrimage sites. A descendant of the tree, propagated from a cutting taken to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE and brought back after the original was destroyed, still stands beside the Mahabodhi temple.

The assault of Mara #

Mara — death, the tempter, the personification of everything that keeps beings bound to samsara — makes his major appearance here. The account, which grows more cinematic with each retelling, has three phases.

Armies. Mara attacks with a host of demons hurling rocks, weapons, fire, and darkness. The missiles turn to flowers as they approach.

Daughters. Mara sends his daughters — named in the texts as Craving (Tanha), Aversion (Arati), and Passion (Raga) — to seduce him. They fail.

Challenge. Mara disputes his right to the seat, demanding a witness to his worthiness. Mara’s own troops testify for him; Siddhartha has no one. He touches the earth with his right hand and calls the earth to witness, and the earth goddess responds — in some versions wringing from her hair the water of all the offerings he has made in previous lives.

That gesture, the bhumisparsha mudra, is the single most common iconographic depiction of the Buddha in Asian art: seated, left hand in the lap, right hand reaching down to touch the ground.

Read psychologically, Mara’s three assaults are fear, desire, and doubt — which is how modern commentators almost always read them. Read within the tradition, Mara is a real being with a real interest in preventing awakening, and the six realms he presides over are real. Both readings have long histories; the psychological one is not a modern invention, but its dominance is.

The three watches of the night #

Here the early canon does become specific. The Mahasaccaka Sutta and several parallel passages describe the awakening as three knowledges (tevijja) attained in the three watches of the night, each preceded by the attainment of the fourth jhana — a state of equanimity and purified mindfulness beyond pleasure and pain.

First watch: recollection of past lives. He directs the concentrated mind to the recollection of his own former existences — one birth, two, many hundreds of thousands, through world-contractions and expansions — with their names, families, appearance, experience, and manner of death, “with their aspects and particulars.”

Second watch: the divine eye. He sees beings passing away and reappearing, “inferior and superior, fair and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate,” and understands that they fare according to their actions. This is the direct perception of karma and rebirth — not as doctrine received but as mechanism observed.

Third watch: the destruction of the taints. He directs the mind to the knowledge of the destruction of the asavas — the deep drives usually rendered as taints, effluents, or cankers: sensual desire, becoming, and ignorance (with views sometimes counted as a fourth). He understands, as it actually is, “this is dukkha, this is its origin, this is its cessation, this is the way to its cessation” — the Four Noble Truths — and applies the same fourfold analysis to the taints themselves. Knowing and seeing this, the mind is liberated. The knowledge arises: “Birth is destroyed, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more coming to any state of being.”

What the awakening consisted of #

The texts are not fully consistent about the content, and the inconsistency is itself informative.

Several passages, including the one above, present the third knowledge as insight into the Four Noble Truths. Others present it as insight into dependent origination — the Mahavagga of the Vinaya has the Buddha, in the weeks after the awakening, reviewing the twelve links forwards and backwards. Others again emphasise the extinguishing of craving, or the direct knowledge of the unconditioned.

Scholars have offered several readings. One is that the tradition preserved multiple formulations of a single realisation, all of them approximations of something the texts also insist is beyond formulation. Another, argued in different forms by Lambert Schmithausen and others, is that the accounts were retrofitted — that the three-knowledges schema and the Four Noble Truths content were attached to the awakening narrative at different stages of the tradition’s development. A third is that the frameworks are equivalent in substance: the second noble truth is the operative section of dependent origination, so insight into either is insight into both.

What the accounts agree on is the result rather than the description: craving ended, rebirth ended, nothing further to be done. The tradition has generally been more confident about what awakening removes than about what it is.

The weeks afterwards #

The Vinaya describes the Buddha spending several weeks near the tree, in most versions seven weeks of seven days, each spent in a different spot and posture. Episodes attached to this period include:

  • Reviewing dependent origination in forward and reverse order.
  • Being sheltered from a storm by the serpent-king Mucalinda, who coils beneath him and spreads his hood — another very common image in Southeast Asian art.
  • Receiving the first lay followers, the merchants Tapussa and Bhallika, who offer food and take refuge in the Buddha and the Dhamma. There being no sangha yet, they are the only Buddhists in history to have taken a twofold rather than threefold refuge.

The hesitation to teach #

Then comes the episode that is easiest to skip and hardest to explain away. The Buddha considers teaching and decides against it. The Dhamma he has reached is, in the text’s words, deep, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful, sublime, beyond the sphere of reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise — and this generation delights in attachment. To teach would be wearying and vexing.

The god Brahma Sahampati, perceiving this, appears and pleads. His argument is that there are “beings with little dust in their eyes” who will be lost if they do not hear. The Buddha surveys the world with the eye of an awakened one, sees beings at every stage like lotuses at different depths in a pond — some submerged, some at the surface, some risen clear of the water — and agrees to teach.

Three things are worth noticing. First, the teaching is optional; nothing compels it but compassion. Second, the tradition’s own founding document concedes that the doctrine is very difficult and that most people will not get it. Third, the highest god of the brahminical order appears here as a supplicant to a human being, which is a polemical move as much as a narrative one.

He then considers who to teach. Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, his former teachers, have both died — recently, in the text’s telling, which is a loss he remarks on. He settles on the five companions who had abandoned him, and sets out for Deer Park.

Common questions #

What does “enlightenment” translate? Bodhi, from a root meaning to wake. “Awakening” is the more accurate rendering and is now standard in scholarly writing; “enlightenment” entered English through nineteenth-century translators and carries unhelpful associations with the European Enlightenment. The site is bodhi-manda, the seat of awakening; the tree is the bodhi tree; a being oriented towards it is a bodhisattva.

Was the Buddha the first person to awaken? Not in the tradition’s account. He is one in a series of buddhas, preceded by Vipassi, Sikhi, Vessabhu, Kakusandha, Konagamana, and Kassapa in the standard Theravada list, and to be followed by Maitreya. What makes a samma-sambuddha distinctive is not the awakening itself but the rediscovery of a lost path and the establishment of a teaching.

How long did it take? The tradition says a single night, following six years of searching and — in the longer view — aeons of preparation across previous lives.

Is the earth-touching gesture in the early texts? Not in the Pali discourses. It appears in the later biographical literature and became iconographically dominant. The early canon’s account of the night is the three knowledges, without the confrontation scene.

Sources & further reading #

Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (trans.), The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom, 1995) — MN 26 and MN 36 for the canonical awakening accounts. I. B. Horner (trans.), The Book of the Discipline, vol. 4 (Pali Text Society, 1951) — the Vinaya Mahavagga narrative of the weeks after the awakening and the hesitation to teach. Lambert Schmithausen, “On Some Aspects of Descriptions or Theories of ‘Liberating Insight’,” in Studien zum Jainismus und Buddhismus (Steiner, 1981) — the key study of the inconsistencies in the accounts. Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford, 1998), ch. 1 — a clear synthesis of what the awakening is said to involve. John S. Strong, The Buddha: A Short Biography (Oneworld, 2001), ch. 5 — on Mara, the earth witness, and the growth of the legend.