Buddhist Romanticism

The key to his awakening lay in his revolutionary insight that the
processes leading to becoming could be best dismantled by dividing them
into four categories—stress or suffering (dukkha), the cause of stress, the
cessation of stress, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress.
Each of these categories carried a duty. Stress, he saw, should be
comprehended to the point of developing dispassion for its cause. Its cause
was then to be abandoned, so that its cessation could be realized. To do all
of this, the path had to be developed. As he later said, only when he
realized that all four of these duties had been brought to completion did he
affirm that he was truly awakened.
This strategy of reaching the deathless by focusing on the problem of
stress in the present moment constituted the Buddha’s radical innovation
within the Indian religious tradition. The four categories he used in
analyzing stress became known as the four noble truths, his most
distinctive teaching.
The Buddha later used two formulae to describe the knowledge that
came with true awakening. Although the two differ somewhat in their
wording, the essential message is the same: Total release had been attained,
there was nothing left in the mind that would lead to rebirth, and there was
no further work to be done for the sake of maintaining his attainment.
“Knowledge and vision arose in me: ‘Unprovoked [uncaused] is
my release. This is the last birth. There is now no further becoming.’”
— SN 56:11
“My heart, thus knowing, thus seeing, was released from the
effluent of sensuality, released from the effluent of becoming,
released from the effluent of ignorance. With release, there was the
knowledge, ‘Released.’ I discerned that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life
fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’” —
MN 4
The Buddha then spent the next seven weeks experiencing the bliss of
release: a release that was conscious but lay beyond the consciousness of
the six senses—counting the mind as the sixth—and beyond the confines of
space and time (§§46–47; DN 11). At the end of the seventh week, and at
the invitation of a Brahmā, he decided to teach what he had learned about
the path of awakening to others. Even though his mind had gone beyond
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