He is awake.
The victory is his.
He has conquered the world.
How can he lose the way
who is beyond the way?
His eye is open.
His foot is free.
Who can follow after him?
The world cannot reclaim him
or lead him astray,
nor can the poisoned net of desire hold him.
He is awake!
The gods watch over him.
He is awake
and finds joy in the stillness of meditation
and in the sweetness of surrender.
Hard it is to be born,
hard it is to live,
harder still to hear of the way,
and hard to rise, follow, and awake.
Yet the teaching is simple.
Do what is right.
Be pure.
At the end of the way is freedom.
Till then, patience.
If you wound or grieve another,
you have not learned detachment.
Offend in neither word nor deed.
Eat with moderation.
Live in your heart.
Seek the highest consciousness.
Gautama the Buddha is talking about the very essence of buddhahood: the height of buddhahood and the depth of it, the glory and the grace, the tremendous freedom that it brings, the light that it showers, the love, the joy, the bliss, the awakening.
These sutras are rare, rare even amongst the rarest sutras, because Buddha is opening his own heart to you. He is inviting you to become a guest in his innermost core. He is revealing, in simple words, the fragrance that has happened to him and that is also possible for you because each man is born to be a buddha.
Unless one becomes a buddha one has not lived and one has not known what life is. One has dreamed of course, and dreamed of a thousand and one things; but one has been asleep. And whether your dreams are beautiful or ugly does not matter. In the morning of buddhahood when you have awakened, all those dreams, both good and bad, sweet and bitter, golden dreams and nightmares, will be known as false, illusory. It was a self-deception, and people have lived for lives in self-deception; the capacity to deceive oneself is enormous. Beware of it. One can even dream that one is awake, one can even dream that one has become a buddha. That is the ultimate trick the mind can play upon you.
It happened in Baghdad…