What Does Buddha Mean?

This short text is an extract from Chapter 13 of my upcoming book, The Boundless Body, published with Collective Ink Books. Here I describe what Buddha means in my own way, and why the realisation of Buddha is the ultimate fruition of spiritual work.

The ongoing flow of experience has no boundary in the usual sense of the word. You cannot feel or see or hear any boundaries, because any such boundary is automatically part of it. Yet you can realise that the finite is still couched in and emerges from the infinite as its creative expression. A great visual metaphor for the non-dual experience is that of a dewdrop in infinite space. Remember: life is the ongoing flow of experience. Not my life, not life as some vague and abstract force acting on us, but your life. All of life is your life; the world is your world. Life is your own direct experience right now, and it appears as a finite dewdrop surrounded infinitely in all directions by absolute lucidity. There is nothing outside of this dewdrop other than infinite consciousness, and the dewdrop and its container are not two. This is the union of the absolute and consequent nature of God, of finite and infinite.

The finite dewdrop is like an image or temporary appearance of ultimate reality, projected on to its own sheer lucidity or nothingness. It is limited in the sense that it has definite form, even though it is completely engulfed by its own fundamental, infinite nature. The finite is simply all present sensory impressions, while the infinite is the formless substrate of all those impressions. God, Buddha, the Infinite, the Divine, is not somewhere else; do not look outside for it. “Buddha is in You-dha… DUUUH!” as Lama Surya Das has said. It is no more and no less than the fundamental nature of everything you have ever experienced.

The dewdrop is an appropriate metaphor because it truly feels as though all mind-body-sense experience were held in one embrace, all inclusive, dependable and stable, yet light and at ease. It is all part of one ongoing, flowing image. It also captures the transparency and translucency of our experience, which we have trained ourselves to perceive in prior chapters. Our body, self and world in essence are not physical objects rigidly fixed in space and time, as they appear under Physical perception. They are part of the everchanging, ongoing flow of our experience, constantly arising and passing. Physicality is simply the densest level of Form, and all perceived Form is the child of Source and completely engulfed by sheer lucid awareness.

This is known as One Taste consciousness, not because the mind, body and senses appear bland or uniform, but because you experience them all at once inside of you. Inside and outside collapse, and in one fell swoop the entire world rests in your lap. Your perception is wide open, aware of all inner and outer phenomenon everywhere, yet without the ordinary subject-object split. It all appears as one all-encompassing, ever-morphing painting, inseparable from your sense of self. The Dzogchen school of Tibetan Buddhism calls this the Great Perfection: all things just as they are and have always been, with no self and other, no divinity and profanity, no heaven and hell – just this, right now, in its absolute perfection, in all directions, engulfing the entirety of experience.