First Things First
A long time ago, I attended a talk at Green Gulch Farm given by Reb Anderson, the head dharma teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center. Someone in the audience challenged Reb to define enlightenment in one word, and Reb said, “non-separateness.”
Now just today, on p. 57 of Heinrich Dumolin’s Zen Enlightenment (Boulder, 1979), I read Mr. Dumolin’s statement, “Enlightenment is an experience of oneness.”
However, I cannot see how the glorious realization of oneness, or Indra’s Net, is possible unless the idea of personal self drops from the mind. If a sense of “I” is in the mind, one separates himself or herself from everything outside, and a dual world prevails. It’s “me and other” all the time.
Therefore, if a person defines enlightenment, I think it is more suitable to define it by its core feature, the disappearance of the idea of self, rather than the concomitant realization of oneness.