Bodhi · Pāli/Skt: bodhi

Bodhi is the Pali and Sanskrit word for awakening. Writing on the factors of enlightenment, Piyadassi Thera takes the compound bojjhaṅga apart: the term “is composed of bodhi + anga”, “anga means factors or limbs”, and bodhi denotes “insight concerned with the realization of the four Noble Truths”. So bodhi in the early texts is a seeing rather than a mood: understanding suffering, its arising, its ending and the path, which is set out on our page on the four noble truths.

It is also the word behind the title Buddha. In the Doṇa Sutta (AN 4.36) a brahman asks the Buddha what kind of being he is. He refuses every category, says of the fermentations that would have made him one that “those are abandoned by me, their root destroyed”, compares himself to a lotus that grows in water and stands clear of it, and finishes: “Remember me, brahman, as ‘awakened.’”

No single discourse defines bodhi; instead the texts describe what conduces to it. Piyadassi gives 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 the name: “They conduce to enlightenment, monk, that is why they are so called.”

The passages above are Pali ones. Mahayana traditions keep the word and change its scope, since there “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings”, so the awakening in view is full buddhahood undertaken for others rather than for oneself alone.