How long does it take to get enlightened?
Depiction of the Buddha under the bodhi tree, place where he achieve enlightenment after 6 years of search and practice.
This question may be answered with an old story:
A monk is walking through the countryside. He asks an old lady sitting by the side of the road how long it will take him to get to the mountain. She ignores him. He asks her again and she ignores him again. And so for a third time. The monk assumes that the woman must be deaf. As he walks on he hears her shout out: “Seven days!” The monk return to the woman: “grandmother, I asked you this question three times and you ignored me each time. Why did you wait until I had walked on by before shouting out the answer?” The old lady said, “Before I could answer I had to look at how fast you were walking and how determined you looked.”
Buddhists who are convinced that there is such a thing as enlightenment and that they have potential to realize it, and who are following the path to that realization, gives little time to speculating on how long it will take. Seven days, seven months, seven years, seven lifetimes –however long it takes, there is no alternative route.
More questions and answers HERE.
Source:
- Without and Within – Ajahn Jayasaro
Ryokan Says
Reaching enlightenment is an extremely fortuitous event, inside modern Buddhism we have leading figures that have been attributed with this ultimate state, without they considering themselves Arahants, but by their closest followers. However the main issue is not about achieving, it is about creating and maintaining a practice of self-improvement, even though perhaps doesn’t lead us to the ultimate goal (in this life), it will provide us with a means to be more happy and gradual self-improvement. When we get some level of benefits from this practice we start to have more confidence in it, we realize that we don’t have to wait to get enlightened to see results, and we can even see them gradually increasing within us while providing sort of an evidence of their effectiveness in our daily life.
The Sufi tale of the ant is a good example of what might be the attitude of some Buddhists towards the idea of enlightenment.
~Ryokan
