What is the difference between bodhi and nirvana

And a key cog in the machinery of control are the feelings that arise in response to the input. A donut smells good, so we approach it; a restless hunger feels bad so we try to escape it — by, say, eating a donut; social status feels good and ridicule feels bad, so we pursue and avoid, respectively. If you interact with such feelings via tanha — via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings — you will continue to be controlled by the world around you.

But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behaviour can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned. T here are debates within Buddhism about how dramatically to conceive of nirvana and the unconditioned. Or is it a bit more mundane, just freedom from the mindless reactivity to causes, to conditions, that would otherwise control you?

Thinking of complete liberation in the here and now as a kind of zone — a metaphorical if not a metaphysical zone — might be useful.

And it might be useful regardless of whether you think the zone is realistically reachable or just something you can get closer and closer to. When I phoned my wife after my first weeklong silent meditation retreat, she said I sounded like a completely different person — before I had even said anything about the retreat, or said anything of substance at all. The very tenor of my voice sounded different, she said.

And she liked the new tenor a lot. Now, I grant you that this might have been more of a comment on the old tenor than on the new one. Anyway, the point is that there had been a real change of tenor. Certainly, the world as I saw it had a new tenor.

I had shed so much of my usual self-absorption that I could take a new kind of delight in the people and things around me. I was more open, suddenly inclined to strike up conversations with strangers. The world seemed newly vibrant and resonant. It is the fate of all conditioned things to change when conditions change.

And conditions change all the time. And you would think that a meditative discipline devoted, in some sense, to tamping down the influence of feelings on perception, to fostering a view of sober clarity, would only abet that tendency.

After that first retreat, I felt like I was living in a zone of enchantment, a place of wonder and preternatural beauty. I was still reacting at least somewhat reflexively to the causes impinging on me.

Still, one source of the enchantment, I think, was that I was spending less time reacting, less time having my buttons pushed, and more time observing — which, as a bonus, allowed for more thoughtful responses to things.

I assume that living in the unconditioned would be great, but living in the less conditioned can be pretty great, too. You could take many ideas that are fundamental to Buddhism and recast them in terms of the conditioned, the caused.

Indeed, you could say that Buddhist philosophy consists largely of taking the idea of causality really, really seriously. In that discourse, the Buddha also emphasises the impermanence of the things we think of as parts of the self. And this too — the perennial arising and passing away of thoughts, emotions, attitudes — is a consequence of the ever-changing forces that act on us, forces that set off chain reactions inside us.

The things inside us are subject to causes, to conditions — and it is the fate of all conditioned things to change when conditions change. And conditions change pretty much all the time. Y ou might say that the path of progress in a serious mindfulness-meditation regimen consists largely of becoming aware of the causes impinging on you, aware of the way that things manipulate you — and aware that a key link in that manipulation lies in the space where feelings can give rise to tanha , to a craving for pleasant feelings and an aversion to unpleasant feelings.

This is the space where mindfulness can critically intervene. Maybe I should have put an asterisk after the word aware in the previous paragraph. This kind of awareness, which critically includes an awareness of the feelings evoked by perceptions and by thoughts, and the feelings that guide trains of thought, can be heightened to surprising levels through meditation.

Buddhist enlightenment has something in common with Enlightenment in the Western scientific sense. That said, undergirding this experiential understanding, and often accompanying it, is the more abstract understanding that is part of Buddhist philosophy.

Making real progress in mindfulness meditation almost inevitably means becoming more aware of the mechanics by which your feelings, if left to their own devices, shape your perceptions, thoughts and behaviour — and becoming more aware of the things in your environment that activate those feelings in the first place.

You could say that enlightenment in the Buddhist sense has something in common with Enlightenment in the Western scientific sense: it involves becoming more aware of what causes what. All of this flies in the face of stereotype. Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. And, yes, it does involve those things. It can let you experience your feelings — anger, love, sorrow, joy — with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before.

And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments — that is, you are not mindlessly labelling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like.

Still, you do this not in order to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights.

And all of this means informing your responses to the world with the clearest possible view of the world. Underlying this whole endeavour is a highly mechanistic conception of how the mind works.

The idea is to finely sense the workings of the machine and use that understanding to rewire it, to subvert its programming, to radically alter its response to the causes, the conditions, impinging on it. But they still fly. This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to Aeon. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Religion Trust. Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making, including commissioning or content-approval.

Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings. Nitin K Ahuja. Thinkers and theories. Initially Buddhism spread from India and gradually assimilated into many foreign cultures, therefore Buddha Purnima is celebrated in many different ways all over the world.

In most of the Buddhist countries the cities, villages, roads, streets, temples and houses are brightly illuminated with colorful Lanterns, electric lights and beautiful decorations.

In India, pilgrims come from all over the world to Bodh Gaya to attend the Buddha Purnima celebrations. The Mahabodhi Temple wears a festive look and is decorated with colorful flags and flowers. On this day devout Buddhist and followers wear only white clothes. They gather in their Viharas or temples before dawn for the ceremonial, honorable- hoisting of the Buddhist Flag and the singing of hymns in praise of the Holy Triple Gem: The Buddha, The Dharma his teachings , and The Sagha his disciples.

On this day, the Buddhists free birds and animals from cages, distribute fruit and clothes to poor and sick. These symbolic offerings are to remind followers that just as flowers- fruits will parish after a short while, the candles and incense sticks would burn out, so the life is subject to decay and destruction.