This is my attempt to render into contemporary English one of my favorite suttas from the Pali canon, known variously as the Vyagghapajja Sutta or the Dighajanu Sutta, for the two names by which the Buddha’s questioner is called in the text (see first note, below). I’ve written this version after exhaustive reading of three translations, all by people who know Pali (which I do not) and who have spent their lives practicing the discipline of the Blessed One (which I have not). Two of those are on the web, available at the generally excellent Access to Insight site:

• Translation by Narada Thera
• Translation by Thanissaro Bhikku

There is also an excellent translation, a bit more abbreviated than those, and more contemporary in its style, in Bhikku Boddhi’s selection of suttas from the Anguttara Nikaya, Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Chapter on the Eights).

I’m particularly fond of this sutta because, in it, the Buddha addresses a question that spiritual leaders seldom address—how can we find happiness in the life we’ve chosen in this world. And the answers he gives are entirely practical, and, in fact, reflect a shrewd understanding of the economics and operational realities of holding a job and heading a family.

Gotama Siddhata achieved Enlightenment and became the Buddha when he was 35 years old, and he taught for the next 40 years. He died at the age of 80, after a long and painful illness which he suffered with fortitude and grace.

We don’t know precisely what it means to be Enlightened. The Buddha himself frequently referred to the state he attained through that experience as a “awakening”. When we wake from sleep, we understand that what we experienced in our dreams, although it felt powerfully real, was in fact delusory—a distortion of the reality we know when we wake. Just so, the Buddha understood that what unenlightened people experience through their lives, although it feels powerfully real, is a delusion, a distortion of what the Buddha experienced as “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”.

The decision that the Buddha made to reveal that knowledge and vision to the world was a difficult and courageous one. Imagine that you were able to enter another person’s dream and attempt to how the dreamer the reality of the world as you knew it. Would you be able to convince the dreamer that the figures and events in her dream were illusory and that she would be better off shedding those illusions and facing the reality that you experienced in the waking world? The task would be difficult, at best.

We don’t know precisely what it means to be Enlightened. The Buddha himself frequently referred to the state he attained through that experience as a “awakening”. When we wake from sleep, we understand that what we experienced in our dreams, although it felt powerfully real, was in fact delusory—a distortion of the reality we know when we wake. Just so, the Buddha understood that what unenlightened people experience through their lives, although it feels powerfully real, is a delusion, a distortion of what the Buddha experienced as “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”.

The decision that the Buddha made to reveal that knowledge and vision to the world was a difficult and courageous one. Imagine that you were able to enter another person’s dream and attempt to how the dreamer the reality of the world as you knew it. Would you be able to convince the dreamer that the figures and events in her dream were illusory and that she would be better off shedding those illusions and facing the reality that you experienced in the waking world? The task would be difficult, at best.

Yet that is the task that the Buddha took upon himself; to show those of us who are not yet Enlightened that the world we experience is not the real world but a construct of our minds with which we delude ourselves, that there is a more profound reality that we would experience if awakened to it, and that our lives would be immeasurably better if we were to just accept the promise of such an awakening.