Ken talks about waking up as something we can actually do. In this passage, his description of the five-path map points directly to experience: developing an intention, experiencing some insights, waking up, seeing clearly, and learning how to live from that seeing in the midst of ordinary life.
I'm struck by how simply he speaks about bodhisattvas and buddhas. A bodhisattva understands the nature of experience directly but hasn’t yet learned to live every moment from that view. For a buddha, that view has permeated the whole of life.
Ken's description of buddhas and bodhisattvas cuts through idealisations about spiritual life. He shifts the focus from goal seeking to developing capacity to experience everything that arises. This passage stays with me because it reminds me that integration is an ongoing process and that living awake is possible.
From Then and Now 7
Raquel: What’s the difference between buddhas and bodhisattvas?
Ken: Ah okay, that's a good point. Very loosely speaking bodhisattvas are apprentice buddhas. To make it a little more refined, in all traditions of Buddhism there’s a map of spiritual progress known as the five paths. There’s the path of accumulation, path of accommodation, path of seeing, path of practice and path of no practice. And in the path of accumulation, you’re developing, generating the goodness and well being which lays the foundation for spiritual understanding. And there’s a long exposition way at the end of this book on the five paths, a sufficiently detailed one. The path of accommodation is where you begin to get some intimation of what experience is actually like—the emptiness and so forth and so there’s a process of accommodation to that. The path of seeing is where you actually wake up. And when you wake up you have a certain experience of being awake and present, but it’s not fully integrated in your life. So the path of practice is where you’re working at integrating all aspects of experience into this seeing that’s been uncovered, and the path of no practice is when that process is complete.
You become, officially, a bodhisattva when you enter the path of seeing. That is you understand the nature of experience directly, and then you go through all the stages of a bodhisattva until you get to the path of no practice, which is equivalent of buddhahood. So from this map, what the Buddha represents is the way of experiencing things in which you can experience all aspects of experience awake and present, which means you can experience everything that arises. Remember we talked about this, developing the ability to experience everything. The understanding and seeing of a bodhisattva and a buddha are the same; the degree in which it has permeated all experience is different. Okay so that’s why I say bodhisattvas are buddhas in training.