Review
In Becoming Enlightened His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains the Buddha's core teaching of interdependence and karma, gently guiding you through a process that will enable you to understand how your present actions influence your future experience. He encourages us to broaden our outlook and achieve a profound shift in our personal values. He also gives us the tools to deal with the negative emotions we may experience in the process, helping us to make sense of deeper issues such as the cycle of death and rebirth. Finally, he rewards us with six focal practices called the six perfections - generosity, morality, patience, effort, concentration and wisdom - to help us move forward in our journey from self-centredness to enlightenment. Becoming Enlightened is an important new work by one of the world's great spiritual leaders. 268pp, 130mm x 185mm, hardback, 2009

Extract
Simultaneously Realizing All
Enlightenment is a state of freedom not only from the counter-productive emotions that drive the process of cyclic existence but also from the predispositions established in the mind by those afflictive emotions. These subtle predispositions, or latent forces within the mind, see to it that whenever conventional phenomena come to your mind, the ultimate is not manifest, and when the ultimate truth is manifest to your mind, conventional phenomena cannot appear. This means that even when you arrive at the profound point of being able to directly realize the truth, during that deep realization other phenomena cannot appear to your mind, and later, when a conventional phenomenon appears to your mind, you cannot realize emptiness directly. Rather you must alternate between these two types of realizations - the wisdom that directly knows the truth, and the perception of ordinary phenomena.

In Buddhist terms this necessity of alternation is called the 'defilement of apprehending the two truths as if they were different entities.' When this defilement is extinguished, a single consciousness can take conventional phenomena to mind even while directly realizing the ultimate truth. It is then possible to simultaneously know everything, both the diversity of phenomena and their profound mode of being, emptiness. This is omniscience.

When you overcome not only the afflictive emotions preventing liberation from cyclic existence but also these more subtle defilements, at that point you have achieved a Buddha's 'great enlightenment,' a thorough purification of the sources of all problems and full comprehension of all that can be known.

The Power of Enlightenment
Great Vehicle scriptures tell us that when defilements associated with the mind are purified, you bring to fulfillment your capacities to effect both your own development and that of other beings. Since you have removed the limitation forcing you to alternate between direct realization of the profound reality of emptiness and paying attention to other phenomena, you have overcome all problems and have achieved realization of all knowables; now you can spontaneously bring about the well-being of others. Over countless eons you have practiced solely for the sake of others, so now your activities to help others come without exertion.

From beginningless time your mind has been empty of inherent existence, and now that your mind is also purified of all defilements, your emptiness of mind is called a Buddha's nature body. Your mind, which formerly merely contained the seeds of the qualities of Buddhahood, is now a Buddha's wisdom body.

For countless great eons you have single-mindedly practiced to benefit others with the altruistic attitude depicted in the prayer-wish:

May I at all times
Be available for others' sake
Just as earth, water, fire, wind, medicine,
And forests should be available to all.

The result of this powerful development of altruistic will is that the capacities intrinsic to your mind have matured so that your mind and body are one undifferentiable entity. Even in ordinary life, the very subtle mind and energy that carries the very subtle mind are one entity, and now in the pure state of having completed the path, this basic fact of the undifferentiable entity of subtle mind and its energy allows you to manifest in manifold ways most appropriate to helping others. Among the forms you can take is a 'complete enjoyment body,' which, in accordance with earlier prayer-wishes, remains as long as space exists to relieve suffering with continuous altruistic activities for high-level practitioners. This complete enjoyment body also appears at appropriate moments in history as a 'supreme emanation body' to teach the path to enlightenment. Shakyamuni Buddha was just such a being.

In Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan, and Vietnam, those following the Great Vehicle and in particular the mode of instruction at Nalanda, India's prime center of Buddhist learning, speak of a Buddha as having four bodies - a nature body, a wisdom body, a complete enjoyment body, and an emanation body - or three bodies when the first two are treated as one, called 'the body of attributes.'

In these countries, we say that our teacher Shakyamuni Buddha, who appeared in India more than 2.500 years ago, had become enlightened a long time earlier and appeared as a supreme emanation body in this world in India while at the same time appearing as appropriate in myriad other worlds in accordance with the dispositions and interests of sentient beings when the time is ripe.

These appearances can take various forms, including even a bridge or a ship as needed, or as a leader of a religion other than Buddhism, teaching attitudes such as love, compassion, tolerance, and contentment. Thus from a Buddhist's perspective many teachers of other religions could have been emanations of a Buddha or of a Bodhisattva. If Buddhas can appear even as a bridge or a ship, they could definitely appear as religious figures providing helpful teachings for millions of beings. Thus, from this standpoint as well as from seeing that the world's many religions are helpful for different types of persons, we should respect all religions as beneficial to society.

From Becoming Enlightened, ?2009 by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, published by Rider.