Bodhi · Pāli/Skt: bodhi

Bodhi is the Pali and Sanskrit word for awakening, from the root budh. The Pali Text Society’s dictionary gives “(supreme) knowledge, enlightenment, the knowledge possessed by a Buddha”. Piyadassi Thera, explaining the compound bojjhaṅga, writes that it “is composed of bodhi + anga”, and that bodhi here means “insight concerned with the realization of the four Noble Truths”, which are set out on our page on the four noble truths.

Piyadassi lists the seven factors of awakening as mindfulness, keen investigation of the dhamma, energy, rapture, calm, concentration and equanimity, with the Buddha’s own gloss on their name: “They conduce to enlightenment, monk, that is why they are so called”. And when the brahman Doṇa asks what kind of being he is (AN 4.36), the Buddha refuses every category, likens himself to a lotus that “stands unsmeared by the water”, and ends: “Remember me, brahman, as ‘awakened.’” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu).

The awakening has a place and a tree. Udāna 1.1 finds the newly awakened Buddha staying “in Uruvelā at the root of the tree of awakening on the bank of the Nerañjarā River” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato); the Pali is bodhirukkhamūle. The same dictionary identifies the tree, the assattha, as the holy fig, Ficus religiosa, “the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment”, the Bo tree. For that night see the Buddha’s enlightenment; for the festival that remembers it, Bodhi Day.

Pali commentary also asks whose awakening it is. Dhammapāla speaks of “the enlightenment of disciples, paccekabuddhas, and perfectly enlightened Buddhas” (trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi), and the dictionary sets a paccekabuddha’s paccekabodhi apart from sammāsambodhi. In his introduction Bodhi explains the three: a perfectly enlightened Buddha reaches the goal without a teacher and founds a dispensation, a paccekabuddha reaches it unaided but founds none, and a disciple arahant reaches it through a Buddha’s teaching; all were held identical in their realisation of nibbāna. See types of buddhas.

The Pali texts already speak of the anuttaraṃ sammā-sambodhiṃ of past buddhas (the dictionary cites S v.160), and Mahayana texts set that goal before every bodhisattva. In the Diamond Sutra a bodhisattva “should conceive the aspiration for supreme and perfect awakening after eliminating all ideas” (§14, trans. Paul Harrison); the Sanskrit names the goal anuttarā samyaksaṃbodhi. The mind set on it is what Mahayana texts call bodhicitta. For how the traditions compare, see what is enlightenment?