"Let there be light."Clifford DeVoe[src]EnlightenmentSource

The Enlightenment was a plan concocted by Clifford DeVoe, and his wife Marlize to diminish the intelligence of everyone on Earth and revert them back to a period without technology. That way, DeVoe would be free to rule over humanity as their teacher.

The plan revolved around DeVoe gaining the powers of the metas created when Barry Allen returned from the Speed Force. It was opposed, and ultimately stopped, byTeam Flash. The aftermath led to the creation of Earth-1's version of Cicada.

During a Peace Corps trip to Kenya, West Africa meant to provide clean drinking water to poor villages, Marlize DeVoe was attacked by a militia in one of said villages, who stole the water purifier she created. Although she survived, Marize grew to agree with her husband Clifford's ideology regarding technology as a result, both of them viewing it as a hindrance that needed to be done away with.

After the pair drew schematics for a Thinking Cap, a device designed to boost Clifford's intelligence and allow him to upgrade the delivery system of knowledge at Central City University, they realized it required more power and believed that the Particle Accelerator would be the best option. Despite realizing that the accelerator would most likely explode and create a dark matter event, Clifford went along with the plan and was wearing the Thinking Cap during the explosion. He was struck by lightning, but he survived.

While the event made Clifford a meta-human with superhuman intelligence, an unforeseen side effect of his intelligence was that his brain began overwhelming his body, causing it to deteriorate. Although Marlize built a hoverchair designed to slow down the process, it was not a permanent solution.

DeVoe believed himself to be enlightened as a result of the super intelligence, believing that he alone knew what humanity needed most to truly be knowledgeable. To that end, he and Marlize began planning The Enlightenment to revert humanity back to a time without technology and begin the quest for knowledge anew.

DeVoe's plan began with the attack of the Samuroid. Although Vibe and Kid Flash had been working to keep Central City safe, when the Samuroid attacked and demanded to see the real Flash, the two were unable to defeat it. When Wally West later tried to fight it in the Flash's suit, he was easily defeated and mocked.

The Team realized they couldnt defeat him and that they needed to bring Barry Allen back from the Speed Force. Team Flash's plan to bring him back was successful, but resulted in Central City Bus 405 being hit with dark matter and creating twelve new meta-humans.

Although Barry destroyed the Samuroid, DeVoe believed everything was going according to plan and began the next phase.

Although Ramsey Deacon and Becky Sharpe were incarcerated (faster than DeVoe predicted, according to Marlize) and Team Flash was becoming close to discovering his identity, DeVoe assured his wife that everything was under control and that he had thought through every possible variable.

He later hunted down the meta known as The Weeper, saying that he had gone through a lot of trouble to create him and that he couldnt die yet. It is unknown if he spared the Weeper's life, but he began harvesting the psychoactive tears he released to better control his wife.

When Barry and Joe West came to his house to question him, he appeared in simple clothes and an electric wheelchair, saying he had no idea where he was the night of the accelerator explosion and that he didnt know any of the bus metas (except for Mina Chaytan, explaining that he knew her from university).

Despite his cooperation, Barry knew that DeVoe would be a problem, so he confronted DeVoe again at his work. DeVoe later complained to David Singh, falsely claiming that Barry was harassing him and his wife and forcing Barry to apologize. Barry later broke into DeVoe's home to discover that he was spying on Team Flash, but the DeVoes complained again and were given a restraining order against Barry.

Barry defied that order and confronted DeVoe, who revealed that he is not only super humanly intelligent, but that he is aware of his identity as the Flash as well as the identity of all his friends, taunting Barry by claiming that he couldnt defeat the fastest mind alive and that he would be thinking of him.

After allowing Barry and Iris West's wedding out of an understanding of their love, DeVoe captured Barry and imprisoned him in a speedster trap. He lectured Barry, stating that he was first and foremost a teacher and that his imprisonment was a lesson. Barry tricked DeVoe into letting him out by vibrating so fast he could not be seen, tricking him into thinking Barry had escaped and leading to him opening the cell.

DeVoe used his chair to teleport the two into the sky, where DeVoe attempted to contain Barry again. However, Barry managed to send DeVoe crashing into the water. Both combatants survived the encounter.

Marlize later bought one of the bus metas, the telepath Dominic Lanse, from Amunet Black and brought him before DeVoe. DeVoe proceeded to use his Hoverchair to transfer his consciousness into Dominic's body, leaving his original body with multiple stab wounds and a knife that Barry had touched previously in Barry's apartment. Successfully framing Barry for his own murder, DeVoe celebrated with his wife.

DeVoe and Marlize hid from Team Flash while Barry was incarcerated, only resurfacing during Barry's escape with the incarcerated bus metas. Despite Barry's best efforts, DeVoe managed to use his Hoverchair to absorb the powers of Ramsey Deacon, Mina Chaytan, Sylbert Rundine, and Becky Sharpe, also discarding Dominic Lanse's body and taking Sharpe's instead. He also killed Gregory Wolfe, the Warden of Iron Heights, with the chair simply because he was in DeVoe's way, making Marlize doubt her husband's goodness.

Despite Barry's release from prison, DeVoe believed that he had everything he needed to continue his plan.

Team Flash refocused their efforts on locating the other bus metas with the help of Ralph Dibny, locating Izzy Bowin and attempting to create the Cerebral Inhibitor to limit his intelligence. However, Izzy became reckless and, with DeVoe utilizing a combination of Sharpe's luck and Kilg%re's technopathy, both the inhibitor and Izzy were lost, with DeVoe switching bodies once again.

With only three metas remaining, Marlize learned that DeVoe had been using the Weeper's tears to control her and keep her in love with him. Horrified at the loss of self-control, she attempted to record a video to herself for if she lost her memories, only to discover that she had already done this before. DeVoe appeared and taunted her, stating that she had discovered the truth over and over again before drugging her one more time. When she awoke, she was completely loyal to him again.

After sending another Samuroid to attack Caitlin Snow, DeVoe tricked Team Flash into using Edwin Gauss to attack him in the pocket dimension, discovering too late that DeVoe was not actually there. DeVoe, Marlize, and the Samuroid attacked STAR Labs while their main field agents were away, with Marlize and the Samuroid attacking Iris and Joe respectively while DeVoe sent a T-Rex structure to attack Ralph. While they were distracted, DeVoe stole the powers of Matthew Kim and Janet Petty, while also briefly taking Gausss body.

Ralph attacked him using the Sonic Scepter, stunning him. While Ralph took that as a victory and used power-dampening cuffs on him, DeVoe actually managed to break out of them and take Ralph's body while he was distracted, horrifying Team Flash. The Team then attempted to attack him, but they all were effortlessly defeated, with Caitlin losing her Killer Frost side due to Melting Point's powers.

DeVoe then disappeared, appearing with Marlize and using Ralph's body to shapeshift back into his original face. DeVoe also stated that since Ralph's body could handle the excess dark matter his brain caused, he was no longer in danger and The Enlightenment could truly begin.

With Team Flash on the defensive, they planned to take Neil Borman, A.K.A. Fallout, to a secure A.R.G.U.S. facility so that DeVoe couldnt capture him. To ensue their success, they also recruited Leo Snart of Earth-X, but unknown to them, Siren-X followed them back to Earth-1.

DeVoe planned to hijack Fallout's transfer, but after he and Siren-X arrived, Barry became emotionally distraught due to DeVoe taunting him with Ralph's voice. Against DeVoe's predictions, Siren-X won the fight and captured Fallout for herself. Although Barry managed to stop her plan to irradiate all of Central City, DeVoe was angry that Barry wasnt behaving like he expected, leading to Marlize reminding him that emotions can compromise thinking.

Unfortunately for him, DeVoe's lack of understanding of emotions led to Marlize once again realizing the kind of person DeVoe truly is. Not making the mistakes she made previously, she instead hijacked his Hoverchair and used it to escape the pocket dimension they were hiding in while DeVoe was unable to stop her.

Without his wife and assistant to aid him, DeVoe's plan briefly came to a halt. As Team Flash wondered what would happen next, Iris began an article about DeVoe and his criminal activities. After publishing it, it had a positive reception and many of her readers began their own investigations, destroying any positive reputation DeVoe once had.

DeVoe attacked the A.R.G.U.S. facility holding Fallout, shape-shifting into John Diggle to gain access and using his powers to fight through all the guards when he turned back to his true appearance. He eventually managed to capture Fallout, shrinking him to use him as a battery for the Enlightenment satellites. When Barry destroyed one of the satellites, however, DeVoe hijacked the S.T.A.R. Labs one to use in place of the one Barry took out.

In a desperate bid to prevent the Enlightenment, Team Flash recruited Marlize to help them stop her mad husband. Using Cecile Horton's temporary powers caused by her pregnancy and the cerebral inhibitor, Marlize established a psychic connection between Barry and DeVoe with the intention of bringing out DeVoe's good side. Shortly after entering The Thinker's mind, Barry discovered Ralph, still inside DeVoe's consciousness but unable to actually do anything to escape.

In the real world, DeVoe confronts Marlize and Team Flash. Despite being blocked by a forcefield, he boasted that his ultimate goal for the Flash was to gain access to the Speed Force and the infinite knowledge he sought. Thus, he once he severs the connection, Barry would be trapped in his mind. Marlize then transports herself and the team to the pocket dimension to hide themselves from DeVoe temporarily.

The pair sped through DeVoe's consciousness to find his good side, only to find him dead in his classroom. Instead, the pair realized that if Ralph gained control of his body again, DeVoe would disappear. DeVoe sent multitudes of copies of himself after the two, but they both managed to come out on top and Ralph regained control of his body again just in time to save Cecile from being choked to death byDeVoe.

However, just before losing control of the body, DeVoe had put his consciousness into his hoverchair, which then created a hologram of himself. When Marlize removed an important part of the chair, the hologram was destroyed, putting an end to Clifford's madness. However, this also triggered a dead man switch, and caused the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite to fall from the sky. However, Barry, Cisco, Ralph, and Nora West-Allen managed to stop the satellite's falling debris from killing any civilians, leaving the Enlightenment a complete failure.[1] The destroyed satellite rained down pieces of shrapnel in 46 different locations in Central City.[2]

As a result of Nora's interference in assisting Barry in destroying the satellite, it altered the trajectory of the debris, which were flooded with dark matter. This event caused the creation of meta-tech, ordinary objects that held meta-human-like abilities. Among these include the dagger and wound of the serial killer Cicada (also giving him meta-human powers) and Spencer Young's phone.[3] This also led to the creation of other meta-humans besides Cicada.[4] Additionally, with the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite destroyed, Team Flash's ability to track meta-humans became severely limited, forcing them to find new ways to fight crime.[5] Ultimately, however, Cisco managed to hack into the other four satellites DeVoe had launched into Earth's orbit to carry out the Enlightenment, allowing Team Flash to use those satellites to help them search for dangerous meta-humans.[4]

Due toDeVoe's actions the night of theEnlightenment, the A.R.G.U.S facility where Grodd was being held lost power. As a result, the meta-dampeners in Grodd's cell at were momentarily disabled, until generators came on, restoring power to the building. This gave him a window that he needed to take control of a guard's mind, forcing that guard to cut power to his cell, thereby allowing Grodd to escape. Months later, Grodd resurfaced, stealing a device Dr. Tanya Lamden had built to help King Shark. Grodd then attempted to use that device on himself to enhance his own powers in an attempt to take over Central City, but was ultimately thwarted by the combined efforts of Team Flash and King Shark.[6]

The rest is here:
Enlightenment | Arrowverse Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

Most people have heard that the Buddha was enlightened and that Buddhists seek enlightenment. But what does that mean?"Enlightenment" is an English word that can mean several things. In the West, the Age of Enlightenment was a philosophical movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that promoted science and reason over myth and superstition, so in Western culture, enlightenment is often associated with intellect and knowledge. But Buddhist enlightenment is something else.

To add to the confusion, "enlightenment" has been used as the translation for several Asian words that don't mean the same thing. For example, several decades ago English speakers were introduced to Buddhism through the writing of D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966), a Japanese scholar who had lived for a time as a Rinzai Zen monk. Suzuki used "enlightenment" to translate the Japanese word satori, derived from the verb satoru, "to know."

This translation was not without justification. But in usage, satori usually refers to an experience of insight into the true nature of reality. It has been compared to the experience of opening a door, but to open a door still implies a separation from what's inside the door. Partly through Suzuki's influence, the idea of spiritual enlightenment as a sudden, blissful, transformative experience became embedded in Western culture. However, that's misleading.

Although Suzuki and some of the first Zen teachers in the West explained enlightenment as an experience that one can have at moments, most Zen teachers and Zen texts tell you that enlightenment is not an experience but a permanent state: a stepping through the door permanently. Not even satori is enlightenment itself. In this, Zen is in alignment with how enlightenment is viewed in other branches of Buddhism.

Bodhi, a Sanskrit and Pali word that means "awakening," also is often translated as "enlightenment."

In Theravada Buddhism, bodhi is associated with the perfection of insight into the Four Noble Truths, which end dukkha (suffering, stress, dissatisfaction). The person who has perfected this insight and abandoned all defilements is an arhat, one who is liberated from the cycle of samsara, or endless rebirth. While alive, he enters a sort of conditional nirvana, and at death, he enjoys the peace of complete nirvana and escape from the cycle of rebirth.

Most of us perceive the things and beings around us as distinctive and permanent. But this view is a projection. Instead, the phenomenal world is an ever-changing nexus of causes and conditions or Dependent Origination. Things and beings, empty of self-essence, are neither real nor not real: the doctrine of The Two Truths. Thoroughly perceiving sunyata dissolves the fetters of self-clinging that cause our unhappiness. The dual way of distinguishing between self and other yields to a permanent nondual outlook in which all things are interrelated.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the idea of practice is that of the bodhisattva, the enlightened being who remains in the phenomenal world to bring all to enlightenment. The bodhisattva ideal is more than altruism; it reflects the reality that none of us is separate. "Individual enlightenment" is an oxymoron.

A branch of Mahayana Buddhism, the Tantric schools of Vajrayana Buddhism, believes that enlightenment can come all at once in a transformative moment. This goes hand-in-hand with the belief in Vajrayana that the various passions and hindrances of life, rather than being obstacles, can be fuel for transformation into enlightenment that can occurin a single moment, or at least in this lifetime. Key to this practice is a belief in inherent Buddha Nature, the innate perfection of our inner natures that simply waits for us to recognize it.This belief in the ability to achieve enlightenment instantly is not the same as the Sartori phenomenon, however. For Vajrayana Buddhists, enlightenment is not a glimpse through the door but a permanent state.

According to legend, when the Buddha realized enlightenment he said something to the effect of "Isn't it remarkable!All beings are already enlightened!" This state is what is known asBuddha Nature, which forms a core part of Buddhist practice in some schools. In Mahayana Buddhism, Buddha Nature is the inherent Buddhahood of all beings. Because all beings are already Buddha, the task is not to attain enlightenment but to realize it.

The Chinese master Huineng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an (Zen), compared Buddhahood to a moon obscured by clouds. The clouds represent ignorance and defilements. When these are dropped away, the moon, already present, is revealed.

What about those sudden, blissful, transformative experiences? You may well have had these moments and felt you were onto something spiritually profound. Such an experience, while pleasant and sometimes accompanied by genuine insight,is not, by itself, enlightenment. For most practitioners, a blissful spiritual experience not grounded in the practice of the Eightfold Path to achieve enlightenment will not likely be transformative. Chasing blissful states can itself become a form of desire and attachment, and the path toward enlightenment is to surrender clinging and desire.

Zen teacher Barry Magid said of Master Hakuin, in "Nothing Is Hidden":

The teacher and monk Shunryu Suzuki (1904-1971) said of enlightenment:

Both legend and documented evidence suggestthat skilled practitioners and enlightened beings may be capable of extraordinary, even supernatural mental powers. However, these skills are not evidence of enlightenment, nor are they somehow essential to it. Here, too, we are warned not to chase these mental skills at the risk of mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.

If you wonder if you have become enlightened, it is almost certain you have not. The only way to test one's insight is to present it to a dharma teacher. Don't be dismayed if your achievement falls apart under a teacher's scrutiny. False starts and mistakes are anecessary part of the path, and if and when you achieve enlightenment, it will be built on a solid foundation and you will have no mistake about it.

Read this article:
What Do Buddhists Mean by 'Enlightenment'?

The Enlightenment has been defined in many different ways, but at its broadest was a philosophical, intellectual and cultural movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It stressed reason, logic, criticism, and freedom of thought over dogma, blind faith, and superstition. Logic wasnt a new invention, having been used by the ancient Greeks, but it was now included in a worldview which argued that empirical observation and the examination of human life could reveal the truth behind human society and self, as well as the universe. All were deemed to be rational and understandable. The Enlightenment held that there could be a science of manand that the history of mankind was one of progress, which could be continued with the right thinking.

Consequently, the Enlightenment also argued that human life and character could be improved through the use of education and reason. The mechanistic universe that is to say, the universe when considered to be a functioning machine could also be altered. The Enlightenment thus brought interested thinkers into direct conflict with the political and religious establishment; these thinkers have even been described as intellectual terrorists against the norm. They challenged religion with the scientific method, often instead favoring deism. The Enlightenment thinkers wanted to do more than understand, they wanted to change for, as they believed, the better: they thought reason and science would improve lives.

There is no definitive starting or ending point for the Enlightenment, which leads many works to simply say it was a seventeenth and eighteenth-century phenomena. Certainly, the key era was the second half of the seventeenth century and almost all of the eighteenth. When historians have given dates, the English Civil wars and revolutions are sometimes given as the start, as they influenced Thomas Hobbes and one of the Enlightenments (and indeed Europes) key political works, Leviathan. Hobbes felt that the old political system had contributed to the bloody civil wars and searched for a new one, based on the rationality of scientific inquiry.

The end is usually given as either the death of Voltaire, one of the key Enlightenment figures, or the start of the French Revolution. This is often claimed to have marked the downfall of the Enlightenment, as attempts to rework Europe into a more logical and egalitarian system collapsed into bloodshed which killed leading writers. It's possible to say that we are still in the Enlightenment, as we still have many of the benefits of their development, but I've also seen it said we're in a post-Enlightenment age. These dates do not, in themselves, constitute a value judgment.

One problem in defining the Enlightenment is that there was a great deal of divergence in the leading thinkers' views, and it is important to recognize that they argued and debated with each other over the correct ways to think and proceed. Enlightenment views also varied geographically, with thinkers in different countries going in slightly different ways. For instance, the search for a science of man led some thinkers to search for the physiology of a body without a soul, while others searched for answers to how humanity thought. Still, others tried to map humanitys development from a primitive state, and others still looked at the economics and politics behind social interaction.

This might have led to some historians wishing to drop the label Enlightenment were it not for the fact that the Enlightenment thinkers actually called their era one of Enlightenment. The thinkers believed that they were intellectually better off than many of their peers, who were still in a superstitious darkness, and they wished to literally lighten them and their views. Kants key essay of the era, Was ist Aufklrung literally means What is Enlightenment?, and was one of a number of responses to a journal which had been trying to pin down a definition. Variations in thought are still seen as part of the general movement.

The spearhead of the Enlightenment was a body of well-connected writers and thinkers from across Europe and North America who became known as the philosophes, which is the French for philosophers. These leading thinkers formulated, spread and debated the Enlightenment in works including, arguably the dominant text of the period, the Encyclopdie.

Where historians once believed that the philosophes were the sole carriers of Enlightenment thought, they now generally accept that they were merely the vocal tip of a much more widespread intellectual awakening among the middle and upper classes, turning them into a new social force. These were professionals such as lawyers and administrators, office holders, higher clergy and landed aristocracy, and it was these who read the many volumes of Enlightenment writing, including the Encyclopdie and soaked up their thinking.

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century shattered old systems of thinkingand allowed new ones to emerge. The teachings of the church and Bible, as well as the works of classical antiquity so beloved of the Renaissance, were suddenly found lacking when dealing with scientific developments. It became both necessary and possible for philosophes (Enlightenment thinkers) to begin applying the new scientific methods - where empirical observation was first applied to the physical universe - to the study of humanity itself to create a science of man.

There was not a total break, as the Enlightenment thinkers still owed a lot to Renaissance humanists, but they believed they were undergoing a radical change from past thought. Historian Roy Porter has argued that what in effect happened during the Enlightenment was that the overarching Christian myths were replaced by new scientific ones. There is a lot to be said for this conclusion, and an examination of how science is being used by commentators does seem to greatly support it, although that's a highly controversial conclusion.

In general, Enlightenment thinkers argued for freedom of thought, religion, and politics. The philosophes were largely critical of Europes absolutist rulers, especially of the French government, but there was little consistency: Voltaire, critic of the French crown, spent some time at the court of Frederick II of Prussia, while Diderot traveled to Russia to work with Catherine the Great; both left disillusioned. Rousseau has attracted criticism, especially since World War 2, for appearing to call for authoritarian rule. On the other hand, liberty was widely espoused by Enlightenment thinkers, who were also largely against nationalism and more in favor of international and cosmopolitan thinking.

The philosophes were deeply critical, indeed even openly hostile, to the organized religions of Europe, especially the Catholic Church whose priests, pope, and practices came in for severe criticism. The philosophes were not, with perhaps some exceptions like Voltaire at the end of his life, atheists, for many still believed in a god behind the mechanisms of the universe, but they railed against the perceived excesses and constraints of a church they attacked for using magic and superstition. Few Enlightenment thinkers attacked personal piety and many believed religion performed useful services. Indeed some, like Rousseau, were deeply religious, and others, like Locke, worked out a new form of rational Christianity; others became deists. It was not religion which irked them, but the forms and corruption of those religions.

The Enlightenment affected many areas of human existence, including politics; perhaps the most famous examples of the latter are the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Parts of the French Revolution are often attributed to the Enlightenment, either as recognition or as a way to attack the philosophes by pointing to violence such as the Terror as something they unwittingly unleashed. There is also debate about whether the Enlightenment actually transformed popular society to match it, or whether it was itself transformed by society. The Enlightenment era saw a general turn away from the dominance of the church and the supernatural, with a reduction in belief in the occult, literal interpretations of the Bible and the emergence of a largely secular public culture, and a secular intelligentsia able to challenge the previously dominant clergy.

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries era was followed by that of a reaction, Romanticism, a turn back to the emotional instead of the rational, and a counter-Enlightenment. For a while, in the nineteenth century, it was common for the Enlightenment to be attacked as the liberal work of utopian fantasists, with critics pointing out there were plenty of good things about humanity not based on reason. Enlightenment thought was also attacked for not criticizing the emerging capitalist systems. There is now a growing trend to arguing that the results of the Enlightenment are still with us, in science, politics and increasingly in western views of religion, and that we are still in an Enlightenment, or heavily influenced post-Enlightenment, age. More on the effects of the Enlightenment. There has been a lean away from calling anything progress when it comes to history, but you'll find the Enlightenment easily attracts people willing to call it a great step forward.

Read more:
A Beginner's Guide to the Enlightenment

Events

1715Louis XIV dies; Louis XV takes French throne

1748Montesquieu publishes The Spirit of Laws

1751Diderot publishes first volume of Encyclopdie

1759Voltaire publishes Candide

Although the first major figures of the Enlightenmentcame from England, the movement truly exploded in France, whichbecame a hotbed of political and intellectual thought in the 1700s.The roots of this French Enlightenment lay largelyin resentment and discontent over the decadence of the French monarchyin the late 1600s. Duringthe reign of the wildly extravagant Sun King Louis XIV (reigned 16431715),wealthy intellectual elites began to gather regularly in Parisian salons (oftenhosted by high-society women) and complain about the state of theircountry. The salons only grew in popularity when Louis XIV diedand the far less competent LouisXV took over.

Gradually, complaints in the salons and coffee shops changed fromidle whining into constructive political thought. Especially afterthe works of John Locke became widespread, participants at the salonsbegan to discuss substantive political and social philosophies ofthe day. Before long, cutting-edge thought in a variety of disciplinesworked its way into the salons, and the French Enlightenment wasborn.

By the early 1700s,coffee shops, salons, and other social groups were popping up allover Paris, encouraging intellectual discussion regarding the politicaland philosophical status of the country. Moreover, members of thesegroups increasingly clamored to read the latest work of leadingphilosophers. These nontraditional thinkers came to be known asthe philosophes, a group that championed personal libertiesand the work of Locke and Newton, denounced Christianity, and activelyopposed the abusive governments found throughout Europe at the time.As varied as they were, the leading French philosophes generallycame from similar schools of thought. They were predominantly writers,journalists, and teachers and were confident that human societycould be improved through rational thought.

A large part of the philosophes attacks were focusedon the Church and its traditions. In matters of faith, many of theprominent philosophes were deiststhey believed inan all-powerful being but likened him to a cosmic watchmaker whosimply set the universe in autonomous motion and never again tamperedwith it. Moreover, they disdained organized religionand the Churchs traditional idea of the chain of being, whichimplied a natural hierarchy of existenceGod first,then angels, monarchs, aristocrats, and so on.

The philosophes also raised objections against the decadentlifestyles of leading Church representatives, as well as the Churchs persistenceincollecting exorbitant taxes and tithes from the commoners to fundoutlandish salaries for bishops and other Church officials. Whatthe philosophes found most appalling, however, was the control thatthe Church held over impressionable commoners by instilling in thema fear of eternal damnation. The philosophes may have had mixedfeelings about the common people, but they had very strong feelingsagainst the Church. As a result, they provoked the Church by challengingdoctrines such as the existence of miracles and divinerevelation, often disproving specific tenets with simple science.The Church, in turn, hated the philosophes and all they stood for.

Complementing and enabling the socially and politicallyactive atmosphere was the dramatically improving literacy ratein France. Beyond just talking about revolutionary ideas, more andmore French people, especially in Paris and its surrounds, werereading and writing about them as well. A symbiotic relationshipdeveloped as readers anxiously awaited more literature from thephilosophes, and in turn the response that the writers receivedcompelled them to write more. The scholarly atmosphere at the timealso provided women of French societyalbeitstill within traditional roles as salon hostesseswithan opportunity to contribute to the conversation.

Originally posted here:
SparkNotes: The Enlightenment (16501800): The French ...

Introduction Encyclopdia Britannica, Inc.Photos.com/Jupiterimages

The main goal of the wide-ranging intellectual movement called the Enlightenment was to understand the natural world and humankinds place in it solely on the basis of reason. The movement claimed the allegiance of a majority of thinkers in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, a period that Thomas Paine called the Age of Reason. German philosopher Immanuel Kant saw the essential characteristic of the Enlightenment as a freeing from superstition and ignorance. At its heart the movement became a conflict between established religion and the inquiring mind that wanted to know and understand through reason based on evidence and proof.

The Enlightenment was inspired by a common faith in the possibility of a better world. Enlightenment thinkers wanted to reform society. They celebrated reason not only as the power by which human beings understand the universe but also as the means by which they improve the human condition. The goals of rational humans were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness. The movement led to revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics.

The Enlightenment was especially prominent in France, where its leaders were known as the philosophes. One of the great works of the philosophes was the publication of a multivolume encyclopedia, the Encyclopdie. The Enlightenment occurred all across Europe, however, notably also in Scotland (where it was called the Scottish Enlightenment) and Germany (where it was known as the Aufklrung).

Like all historical movements, the Enlightenment had its roots in the past. Three of the chief sources for Enlightenment thought were the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution of the late Middle Ages.

The ancient philosophers had noticed the regularity in the operation of the natural world and concluded that the reasoning mind could see and explain this regularity. Among these philosophers Aristotle was preeminent in discovering and explaining the natural world.

The birth of Christianity interrupted philosophical attempts to analyze and explain purely on the basis of reason. Christianity built a complicated worldview that relied on both faith and reason to explain reality.

The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation ended the worldview that the church had presented for a thousand years. The Renaissance revived classical learning, while the Reformation broke up the Christian church in western Europe. Coupled with these events was the scientific revolution, a modern movement that soon lost patience with religious quibbling and the attempts of churches to hamper progress in thought. Among the leaders of this revolution were Francis Bacon, Ren Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, andmost significant of allIsaac Newton. Among other achievements, Newton captured in a few mathematical equations the laws that govern the motions of the planets. This success of Newtons contributed to a growing faith in the capacity of human beings to attain knowledge.

The response of organized religion to the avalanche of new ideas and facts was far from friendly. A perfect example of this is that Galileo was called before the Roman Catholic Inquisition in Rome and forced to take back his statements that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the solar system. Churches in the 17th and 18th centuries sought to defend themselves against Enlightenment rationalism, and the great number of new denominations after the Protestant Reformation made a united front impossible.

While most early supporters of rationalism and new scientific methods did not deny either God or religion, they brought both under the microscope of reason. They rejected religious knowledge acquired through either revelation or the teaching of any church. Instead, they accepted a certain body of religious knowledge that they thought was inborn in every person or that could be acquired by the use of reason. Advocates of this natural, or rational, religious attitude expressed a belief in a benevolent and loving God who was the author of natures wonders, a God who had set the world in motion and formulated the laws by which it operated. They also believed in the obligation of people to lead virtuous and pious lives. This religious viewcalled Deismfound many followers during the Enlightenment, but it was never an organized religion like Christianity.

Eventually both Christianity and its deistic opponents were faced with a rejection of religion in an upsurge of atheism, the disbelief in the existence of a god or gods. This reaction had its roots in the ancient philosophy of materialism that had been set forth by Epicurus and his followersa world of atoms and empty space and nothing more (see Epicureanism). If reason could not discover a god, said the atheists, there was no purpose served by deciding there was one.

Very little escaped examination by Enlightenment thinkers. Besides criticizing established religion and broadening the range of scientific effort, they provided new points of view on society, politics, law, economics, and the course of history.

The Deist search for a natural religion led to an investigation of peoples in all parts of the world. The conclusion was, according to Scottish philosopher David Hume, that there is a great uniformity among the acts of men in all nations and ages. This led to a sense that all people are linked together in a universal brotherhood. The Swiss lawyer Emmerich de Vattel urged the creation of a society of states living in peace under the binding rules of natural law. Toward the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant wrote Toward Perpetual Peace, but by then Europe was embroiled in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.

The optimistic view of a universal brotherhood was reinforced by the English philosopher John Lockes notion that people are the result of their environment. He believed that humans are born without qualities such as goodness or evil and that an individuals character is formed by experiences of the world. Locke likened the human mind at birth to a tabula rasa, or blank slate or writing tablet, on which experience writes.

Beliefs, like other human differences, were thought to be the product of environment. For this reason, Enlightenment leaders argued that moral improvement should be the responsibility of society. Lockes theories led to the idea that the existing social, economic, and political abuses should be corrected. The brutality of law enforcement and the institution of slavery were both attacked. Moreover, human irrationality was believed to be the result of false ideas, instilled by faulty schooling. Enlightenment thinkers thus believed that education should be a prime concern of society.

The Enlightenment gave rise to what were then considered radical political theories. Several important Enlightenment thinkers criticized arbitrary, authoritarian governments. They began to propose a different form of social organization, based on the idea of natural rights that all people had.

The French writer Voltaire, a major figure of the Enlightenment, was a staunch advocate of the principles of reason, liberty, justice, and toleration. He used his sharp wit to skewer the absurdities of religious intolerance and of the absolute rule of kings.

In England, John Lockes highly influential theories supported democracy as a better form of government. Locke believed that each person is naturally free and equal under the law of nature. He argued that chief among the natural rights are the rights to life, liberty (freedom from arbitrary rule), and property. Locke wrote that legitimate government represents a social contract, in which people consent to be governed by majority rule but do not give up their natural rights. The ultimate source of government authority is the people, not a king or other ruler. Locke argued that if a government abuses its trust and violates the peoples fundamental rights, the people are entitled to rebel. They can then replace that government with another to whose laws they can willingly give their consent.

The French political philosopher Montesquieu developed the theory that political authority should be separated into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. He believed that this separation and balance of powers would help to prevent the abuse of government authority and protect individual liberties. Montesquieu also classified governments by their manner of conducting policy. He wrote that democracies (and other republics) are based on the quality of public virtue, or the motivation to achieve the public good.

Montesquieu was a strong influence on the Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, in his treatise The Social Contract, argued for a society in which the separate wills of individuals are combined to govern as the general willthe public spirit seeking the common good of liberty and equality. This general will is expressed in laws to which all submit. Rousseaus book was an emotionally charged work calling for political democracy.

Before the end of the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas about democracy won significant victories. Locke himself had helped draft the English Bill of Rights in the late 17th century. About a century later, Enlightenment political philosophy strongly influenced the Founding Fathers of what became the United States. Thomas Jefferson wove the principles of Lockean rights into the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The framers of the U.S. Constitution embraced Montesquieus ideas about the separation of powers. In France, during the French Revolution, the thought of Montesquieu and Rousseau influenced the creation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which proclaims that men are born and remain free and equal in rights and that the Law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part, personally or through their representatives, in its making. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment realized that for all of history the hand of law had been turned against the masses and in favor of the few. Law was therefore criticized on the ground that it was invalid unless it conformed to the natural law. Law was not made by rules but was discovered by right reason.

Enlightenment thinkers proposed changes in government involvement in economic affairs. In both France and Great Britain early classical economistsincluding Adam Smith of Scotlandclaimed that individuals freed from government interference would serve their own economic interest, and by so doing they would serve the general good of society as well. Smith has been hailed by politicians and economists in the United States and the United Kingdom as the founder of, and inspiration for, capitalism. In Smiths The Wealth of Nations (1776), the fundamental principles of capitalism are fashioned into the powerful economic and social theory that today dominates politics in much of the developed world.

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the history of humankind moved in cyclesfrom growth and prosperity to decay and death. The Christian church looked forward to the heavenly kingdom of God. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon, however, criticized these views. He believed that by the proper methods of inquiry humankind could move to greater benefits through the conquest of nature. By the end of the 18th century, the idea of scientific and intellectual progress turned into a general belief in the progress of humankind, a progress that was both moral and material but that would depend on the rule of sound reason.

The Enlightenment ended as people began to react against its extremes. The celebration of abstract reason provoked contrary spirits to begin exploring the world of sensation and emotion in the cultural movement known as Romanticism. People seeking religious solace or salvation began to turn away from the rationalist Deism. Moreover, the French Revolution entered a period in which the revolutionaries executed many thousands of nobles, priests, and others suspected of being opponents. This Reign of Terror severely tested the belief that people could govern themselves well without a king.

Many of the effects of the Age of Reason persist today, however, particularly in the respect given to science and in the growth of democracy. The high optimism that marked much of Enlightenment thought survived as one of the movements most enduring legacies the belief that human history is a record of general progress.

Read more:
Enlightenment - Students | Britannica Kids | Homework Help

Editors Note: This is a guest post by Michael C. Williams.It is the 23rdinstallment in ourEnd of IR Theory companion symposiumfor thespecial issueof theEuropean Journal of International Relations.SAGEhas temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue.This post refers to Williamsarticle(PDF). Aresponse, authored byDaniel J. Levine, will appear at 10am Eastern.

Other entries in the symposiumwhen availablemay be reached via the EJIR Special Issue Symposium tag.

Disciplinary history is too important to be left only to intellectual historians. It should concern anyone interested in international politics. The tradition of all dead generations may not weigh on the brains of todays International Relations (IR) scholars with quite the fever of Marxs nightmare, but it does continue to exert powerful and often unrecognized effects on contemporary thinking. The idea of an end of IR theory that animates the Special Issue of the EJIR provides an intriguing opportunity to open up this issue: to ask where the field is going by looking again at where it came from.

This story can be told in many ways. One of the most revealing is to take seriously Stanley Hoffmanns famous claim that IR developed as a quintessentially American social science (PDF). Hoffmann was right, though for reasons and with implications quite different from those he advanced. In his eyes, these origins lay mainly in a concern with American hegemony and policy-oriented theory in the context of the Cold War. No one could doubt that these questions were important, yet in many ways IRs origins and commitments are better located in a wider but generally unrecognized analytic and political sensibility that, in his brilliant study of Desolation and Enlightenment, Ira Katznelson has called the political studies enlightenment (note the small e).

Katznelson holds that diverse figures in post-war American social science including Dahl, Hofstaeder, Lasswell, Lindblom, Polanyi, and Arendt were united in the view that the desolation of the previous half century and its apparent refutation of Enlightenment promises of progress, peace, and the reign of reason. In response, they undertook systematic analyses of the limits of a century and a half of increasing rationalism within the liberal Enlightenment tradition. Yet they did so not to reject modernity or liberalism, but to save it. They held that understanding the calamities of the period required seeing them not as simple irrationality erupting inexplicably into the otherwise placid, progressive, world of reason, but as specifically modern, arising in important aspects from the Enlightenment itself, and representing key weaknesses within it, including its inability to engage the question of radical evil in modernity; the increasing dominance of technology, and technical rationality; the rise of mass society and mass politics, and the accompanying crisis of classical liberalism and its vision of democracy; and the rise of extreme nationalism and anti-liberal politics as an at least partial consequence of liberal modernity, not as its simple antithesis. The goal was to grasp these dynamics philosophically, historically, and sociologically, in order to understand how they might be countered in pursuit of suitably chastened but nonetheless recognizable Enlightenment values and principles.

Although Katznelsons account does not include any scholars in the nascent field of IR. Yet his analysis captures remarkably many of the concerns of some of the most prominent thinkers in post-war IR, including Morgenthau, Neibuhr, and Herz, who might well be viewed as part of an analagous IR enlightenment. Post-war realism was not concerned simply with defeating a facile idealism, or teaching realpolitik to a naively liberal America. Nor was it interested constructing a modern social science. On the contrary, IR in this period began as a reaction against rationalist social science. As research by Nicolas Guilhotand others has shown, IR was an irredentist movement driven by political as well as methodological reasons. At its core was the need to engage in the urgent task of assessing the flaws of existing forms of liberal modernism and, I believe, with providing foundations for a new and more realistic liberalism.

If this is true, then the canonical divide between realism and liberalism that continues to dominate IR theory is fundamentally erroneous. Realism sought to reformulate and revive a form of liberalism by looking hard at the legacy of desolation and trying to address it. Far from being its implacable adversary, Realism in post-war IR emerged as one of the most powerful attempts to reformulate and save liberalism. The historical forgetting of these concerns has created the strangely divided theoretical landscape that we see today. It has allowed a denuded liberalism to continue blithely on, as if none of the desolation had ever happened, or as if it had little or nothing to do with liberalism itself. At the same time, it allows large parts of contemporary realism to operate without a serious engagement with its historical relationship to liberalism. Putting the IR enlightenment back into disciplinary history puts this issue back on the contemporary agenda.

Equally importantly, it also lets us rethink the relationship between Realism and critical and constructivist theories to which it is often opposed. It is often claimed that post-war American IR developed as a positivist social science, and that this marks a fundamental divide between American and European IR, which remained more historically and sociologically oriented. True as this may be of contemporary theory, it cannot be convincingly traced to the thinkers of the IR enlightenment, who were fundamentally opposed to rationalist social science for political as well as methodological reasons. As IR has moved ever closer toward rationalist political science, it has become increasingly blind to this heritage. Losing its previous scepticism toward social science, IR became in many ways a standard-bearer for precisely the kinds of political knowledge that the IR enlightenment had been at pains to reject and which they sought to construct the field in opposition towards. In fact, if one wished to be particularly provocative, it is possible to say that from this perspective what is often taken as the defining moment in the invention of IR theory Waltzs Theory of International Politics actually marked the culmination of a move away from the fields beginnings and represents the end of IR theory as conceived by the IR enlightenment. From that point onward, the irredentist analytic and political concerns of its earlier beginnings were almost fully eclipsed as IR was subsumed within the conventions of American social science that the proponents of post-war liberal realism had opposed and sought to avoid.

This history shows, finally, that from its very inception IR was a substantive normative and political project. The IR enlightenment did not have all the answers. But a more serious engagement with it may provide both a clearer understanding of where we have come from, and open paths to a more productive future for the field as an analytic and a political enterprise.

Read this article:
The International Relations Enlightenment and the Ends of ...

Comment by hellomynameisIt has been proposed on forums that this buff will be more beneficial at higher levels, since then 50% would give more xp. But when you think about it, you will get xp 50% faster for 1 hour no matter what level you are. You will basicly save 30 minutes of leveling no matter what level you are.

We can messure it in XP, or levels gained, or time saved. If you want to gain as much xp as possible from the buff, save it for higher levels. If you want to gain as many levels as possible while this buff is active, then do the quest at lvl20. If you want to save time, then it really doesn't matter what level you use it at, you will save 30 minutes of the average time it takes level at that level for 1.5 hour, therefore going through the content in 1 hour instead of 1.5 hours.

Now, if you want to make good use of the buff, have 10-15 quests lined up within one quest hub and deliver them all when you get this buff.

We can messure it in XP, or levels gained, or time saved. If you want to gain as much xp as possible from the buff, save it for higher levels. If you want to gain as many levels as possible while this buff is active, then do the quest at lvl20. If you want to save time, then it really doesn't matter what level you use it at, you will save 30 minutes of the average time it takes level at that level for 1.5 hour, therefore going through the content in 1 hour instead of 1.5 hours.

Now, if you want to make good use of the buff, have 10-15 quests lined up within one quest hub and deliver them all when you get this buff.

What's NOT obvious is that the duration stacks - that is, if you complete the "every 10 levels version" and then a daily back to back, the durations will add together, so two of them will give you two hours worth of Enlightenment, etc.

Not sure if there's a cap yet.

EDIT: A few more quirks of this spell.

Comment by crankyslapThis only gives +20% from level 86 and up. I only needed 3 of these to get my monk from 81 to 85 (I saved up all quests that provide this buff until then) so I suggest you spend some before you hit cata content...

Comment by mahe4While in a Dungeon, this Buff doesn't run out, until you finished the dungeon.

Comment by HallwackerThis buff is bugged, I noticed that it will stay on 0 seconds sometimes, and doesn't disappear. As one of the comments said, it doesn't get removed during dungeon, it might have something to do with this. However, I'm questing and getting a whole 40k experience per quest in northrend (borean tundra) with a 0 second duration Enlightenment.

Comment by Skyl3lazerNote that this buff doesn't fall off if you die normally, only if you have 0 minutes remaining in a dungeon and are ressed.

PS: Don't join a battleground or log out when it's stuck on 0 seconds, or it will be removed.

Comment by MickMaster01Currently bugged, it stays on 0 seconds for a VERY long time before it finally disappears (about 30-60 minutes or so).

Edit: That's 7% free mastery for anyone crunching numbers.

Comment by WiltleafAs of 10.07.2012 during "Rolling Restarts" this buff has been nerfed to 50% down from 100%. Not sure yet about the master buff as my monk is lvl 88.

The reason for this is that the buff does not run out when the timer reaches 0 (bug), it seems to last another ~30 minutes. This easily enough time to squeeze out another level. Extending the duration will only grant one "hidden" post 0 bonus, as opposed to two by doing them separately. E.g. 60m+30m, 60m+30m > 120m+30.

Another trick to squeeze out faster levels is to fill up your quest log with "completes" before you log out for the night, assuming your buff has run out. When you re-up the buff the next morning, go and turn in all of your quests for a bonus 50% on each one of them.

Godspeed!

tl;dr - always let the buff run out, do not append quests. Save up completed quests before logging for the night for the daily turn in on the next day.

The down side is that bug will eventually be fixed. Even if it isn't, doing it my way still yields more time. For example, going by three sets of grabbing the quest. You go and get the quest, have it for 60, then 30 due to the bug. Repeat. So it looks something like this:60+30+60+30+60+30 = 270mins.

Now, you do it my way of going to 20mins, then refreshing it. So, you get it, go from 60 - 20 so that's 40mins. Then you add 100mins by refreshing it so late. So, after 2sets you've gained 140mins. If you always refresh it from 20mins, then you'll always get 100mins.

In the end, going from 2hours down to 20mins over and over will yield the most time, and will be reliable since the first method is only able through a bug at this time.

Comment by greystokerThis DOES persist thru death. If you have the 0s duration thing blinking (glitch?) if you die it WILL drop. DONT DIE if it says 0s.

Too bad.

Comment by BuckmoneyHow to win at Enlightenment:1. Rest until the weekend2. Do the Daily every day3. On the weekend, do dungs and/or quest4. Don't waste time

Comment by SaltychipTime doesn't diminish while you're logged out so if you need to go somewhere or do something you can log out and save the timer.

It appears as though that glitch has been fixed.

Let's suppose that a level 30 character (we'll call him Character A) wants to use the Enlightenment buff. The character would have the +50% bonus experience for one hour. After 1 hour of work, the character will have gained as much experience as he would have gained with 1.5 hours of leveling at the same pace without the buff. If the character stacked buff and earned the 2 hour bonus, he will have gained 3 hours worth of experience in just 2 hours. If he levels up at least 10 levels per day, the character will have 4 hours worth of the Enlightenment buff per day. If he logs off before the buff expires and continues questing the next day, he can keep up his 4 hour Enlightenment buff all the way until he can no longer level up 10 times within 4 hours, which would usually happen around level 50 or 60.

Now let's suppose that a level 30 character (we'll call him Character B) decided to collect his daily Enlightenment buffs and use them, but instead of turning in the quest he earns every 10 levels, he saves them all up for when he is level 80. After one hour of work without the 10-level buff, the character will have gained an hour worth of experience. After two hours of work, he will have gained only two hours of experience.

Why won't Character B gain as much experience? It's simple. He never benefited from stacking buffs at lower levels. Unless he is able to perfectly stack his 10-level buffs from levels 80 to 85, he will lose time and experience overall.

I'm sorry if that wasn't clear to you, but just take my word for it.

EDIT:As of 5.1, you can no longer stack Enlightenment buffs. All quests which grant a player with Enlightenment now only give 1h of experience -- no more, no less. Therefore, the best way to gain experience using the buff is by simply buffing it whenever you can (assuming that you don't already have the buff). As a note, you might find it slightly strategic to complete the objectives of many quests but not turn the quests in, use Zen Pilgrimage, collect your Enlightenment buff, and then turn in those former quests. It saves you a few minutes worth of leveling.

Comment by orcsmashTo make the most out of this buff complete 24 quests get the buff and hand them all in with a 50% bonus.

Back to back daily buffs WILL stack up to two hours as well.

As in, do the daily one day and log out with ~5 minutes on the buff*, log in the next day and complete the daily first thing and the buff time will extend to 2 hours, not 1 hour and whatever time was remaining. So the "free time" effect is not just a perk of doing the 10's quest + the daily. If you can only play your monk ~2hrs a day, you can perpetually keep them buffed just with the daily quest.

*Alternately, an earlier comment indicates the buff will extend to 2hrs even when it's stuck at 0s. So if that's true, you just need to cast Zen Pilgrimage before you hit 0s so you don't lose the buff on the loading screen. You'll gain a few more minutes of buff time in this case.

Comment by VersipellisoJust a little note, when you get to 85, the buff decreases to 20% extra experience per hour, it says on the rewards from the quest that its 50%, but if you hover over the buff, it's only 20%.

It was very nice for blizz to add this to monks, anything to make that 1-90 grind easier.

This is how I used the buff and it helped speed up leveling a lot:

Wait until you have a huge line of a quests to turn in like (like 5-6 of those kill 10 of this and that) and then do the daily to get the buff. Return, turn the quests in and you get mega xp. And go from there.

At first I just used it for grinding dungeons as healing (as I usually do when leveling a new healer) but felt I wasn't getting enough XP.

And yes of course if you stack it to the 2 hours, even better.

Though the post-85 buff did give more duration, but aparantly it just added an hour, rather than renewing to full 2 hours. Dunno if this a new change or just a post-85 thing. Couldn't find any "hotfix notices" to explain it, though i guess they do tend to group those up and release them at later times.

Comment by bfree380Very odd, but my wife and I (both 86) did the daily on Thursday, logged out, did the daily on Friday, logged out, then today (Saturday) when we logged on, we both had 2 hours of the buff. My wife logged out while I took a quick shower and stupidly forgot to log off. When I got out I logged out for a minute, and when I came back on, I only had 20 minutes left :/ Not sure what happened, but it was REALLY annoying.

Comment by Piranha42481Did the quest today on my monk and got NO buff. >.>

Tonight I logged in before bed just to do the daily...did it and it went up to 3 hours...I also hit level 50 upon completing it and was immediately given the new quest. Did that one and now my buff says 4 HOURS. I wonder what the new max is?

Is this a bug? anyone else have problems with this

make sure to cancel WoW's 8th Anniversary before finishing the quest for Enlightenment.

edit why downrate, it is true T__T

apply WoW's 8th Anniversary then Enlightenment = not working only WoW's 8th Anniversary stays up

apply Enlightenment then WoW's 8th Anniversary = working

Comment by MuriloNZDoesn't seem to be stacking to 2 hours anymore; the last 2 days I've gotten my daily refresh with 2-4 minutes left on current buff, and it only went up to 1 hour.

Comment by mrespmanAs of 5.1, this buff no longer persists at 0 seconds. It ends when it reaches zero, no matter if you're in a dungeon or not.

Comment by Philk913well i havent been playing my monk much but each day i have logged in to do this daily and then just log back out im currently sitting at 6hrs dont know know how high it stacks but loving it i will update if i get to a cap

It's possible this works like flasks where if you complete it with < 15 minutes remaining, it will boost you up to 1:15. It certainly does not boost you up to 1:59.

Comment by FurydeathLook's like it's been nerfed again I have it saying 20% down from 50%.

As of 5.1 the buff also does not glitch anymore and won't last infinitely. It will, however, stack infinitely. If you are not planning on playing your monk one day, you should still at least log in to do the quest really quickly to get an extra hour banked up for when you do play him.

Comment by enkidu23I have been doing the daily since level 11 or so, every day, and nothing else, and parking my monk in the temple while I work on other toons. As a result, my monk currently has an enlightenment buff of 2 DAYS. It stacks, alright, lol....

Comment by MinatauranI knew that I would not be leveling my monk for a while, so I did dailies for 12 straight days. I can confirm that yes you can get to at least 12 hours of enlightenment. And while some people have posted that it up ticks to an extra hour, this is not true. If you have a addon that shows the exact time you will see that it only grants 1 hour. I tested this from 20 to 85.

I leveled to 84.8ish and then did the enlightenment quest 6 days in a row. On the 6th day (today) I completed the quest and the xp from completing the quest leveled me to 85.

I should have thought about this a little more, but completing the quest replaced my 5H remaining buff of +50% experience gained with 6H remaining of +20% exp...

I'm not sure if leveling to 85 automagically replaces the % you gain from 50% to 20%, or if it was the fact that completing the quest and having it be what dinged me to 85 did me in. Either way, I'm pretty ticked off that I got boned.

Comment by hjp426Did this get hotfixed? Yesterday I had two hours stacked, I log in to do the daily today, finish it, and now I only have an hour. Hadn't logged in at all in between. ?

Comment by AzshantaI've been stacking the buff up on my monk alt when I'm unable to play her, and she's currently up to 9 hours on the buff, so it appears that the limit is NOT 2 hours like a few people have said before, but in fact something much higher.

Get Buff @ Level 45 = 20%Level with Buff from 45 to 47 = 20%

Get Buff @ Level 47 = 50%

O_o dunno why

Comment by menoblackIt seems that if you have this buff and rested experience at the same time this gives you a 100% buff (without using any rested xp). This works all the way till level 90.

Comment by ZauroxI receive no bonus xp from Enlightenment even though it says that I get 20% bonus xp, and my quest log show the bonus xp but when I turn in the quests I just receive normal xp... Been like this ever since 86+

Comment by fang620A cap of 24 hours has now been added to this buff (patch 5.2)My monk had 3 days of this buff saved up pre-patch. When I logged on after the patch, it was down to 24h and doing the monk class dailies just refreshes this buff back up to 24 hours.

Comment by Odinraneon my monk, currently level 29, i have 9 enlightenment stacks on. still not sure if there is a cap. haven't seen any yet.

Comment by SalculdEffect #5: You will neurotically obsess about optimizing your leveling time while this buff is active. Alt-tabbing out? Log off to maximize its uptime. PVP server on the minority faction? Log off to maximize its uptime. Have to poop? Log off to maximize its uptime.

Comment by TauhrakThe trick i've found with this is to save up as many stacks as you can before it becomes 20%, then nuke through levels 80-90 using this buff, not sure of maximum stack, but i had 17hours on mine, i just did daily for about 3 weeks to get to that stage, then hit 79 off of daily quest xp, and rushed up, spamming dungeons and questing until 90, had a good amount of buff remaining, too, about 5 hours i believe.

Comment by UnrageI can confirm this buff stacks up to a maximum of 24 hours.

Comment by TCG503I can confirm this stacks at least up to 4 hours and persists from day to day. I've done the daily quests 4 days in a row.

Did a quest that gave 42k exp with the buff. I did exact same quest without the buff and it gave 37k exp.

Comment by piraka810I can confirm at least 5 hours of stacking. As I have been logging on every day and stacking it.

Comment by fxkill2006The buff can be canceled by right clicking on it. Learned it by the hard way. :S

Comment by spamplzThis does also increase experience gained from pet battles.

Comment by sivlayou can actually time to have 3 hours of enlightment. wait until reach a round number 20/30/40 etc then go do the level up quest at the peak, after doing the peak quest, grab the daily..do that, you now have 2 hours...if you time it so you manage to get the quest, the daily, and the next day's daily you get a huge 3 hours..which if wearing heirlooms, in a level 8+ guild and know all the quests, and the best ones to take that don't take you from end of a zone to the next, you could easily get 15/20+ levels from level 20/40 at least..and probably 10/15 level post level 40 >55 or even 58..but you need to really time stuff, so you make the absolute most out of the buff..you can also use enlightment with the 300% xp buff too...which is needless to say, huge amount of levels in almost no time at all

Comment by FurukiBlizz should make this a universal daily. It's plenty hard enough to get to the Peak of Serenity as a level 20 non-monk anyway. Why not reward those of us who do it for our effort?

Comment by kelthozadAs of now, the current max hours on this buff is 6 hours. I just tested it and I had a starting 6 hours when i entered the meditation, then i left with 6 hours after completing the daily quest.

Comment by glaiveninjaNote that this buff will dissapear when entering a skirmish.

Comment by AisenfaireIn WOD: Note that for level 90 above, this buff no longer gives you bonus experience. Instead, it gives you some mastery that scales with your level (at level 92 I get 207 mastery).

Comment by gtademThis buff rocks. In full heirlooms, I was able to go from 80-83 in a single hour in Mount Hyjal.

Comment by goodpoltergeistI had a 14 hour buff saved up, and it just disappeared. Didn't notice till I went to the peak of serenity to get the buff for dinging 80, and realized it was gone. Don't know how or why. I had just completed a dungeon (Utgarde Pinnacle) in which we had died several times, and I dinged 80 during the instance. I thought the buff persisted through death, but maybe it doesn't like it when you die too much. Anyway, now I just have a measly 2 hour buff ;_;

You will lose this buff when you change specs.

A word of advice: Do not stack it. Wait for an invasion wave to begin, and go to the first one you intend to do. Pilgrimage to the Summit and do your quest, then go back, and fight every invasion in the wave.

You'll probably be able to do this 2-3 times in a day because you can pretty easily blow through 11+ levels like this in 2 waves of invasions.

Comment by DidikillyouAs today (2016 08 23) it was nerfed down from 50% +xp to 20% +xp.

It didn't. It still read as 22 hours and I know that it wasn't so close that the duration had dipped to 21 hours before I did the daily.

Based on how frequently I do the daily, I'd estimate that either the buff became bugged a couple days ago prior to this post -- or Blizzard did a stealth hotfix. Could others please confirm that this is happening?

Edit: It appears to be a problem for others as well.

Comment by Rudy199So, basically this is a ''hero class'' perk for monk? Like DK starts from level 55 and DH from 98?

Talk to Zidormi to see the Peak of Serenity before the Legion attacked. Then you can do the daily quest, but for some reason you may not receive the buff, just the experience, if you are over level 100.

Comment by NeszJust a quick tip, don't relog if you reach level 85 while still having this buff, it will keep on giving you +50% exp gain. Once you relog it goes down to 20%.

Edit: Can confirm this still stacks as of 7.3.5

Comment by ShahafAs of 8.0.1 now only grants Mastery.

Comment by JacevandeverCan you not get this buff on allied races any more? I did the initial quest at 20 and got it for an hour, then came back and did the daily. But when I came back at level 40, there are no more quests, despite being given the level 40 breadcrumb quest to go back to the Peak of Serenity. I thought you got a quest to get the buff every 10 levels?

More here:
Enlightenment - Spell - World of Warcraft - wowhead.com

Gautama Buddha[note 3] (c. 563/480 c. 483/400 BCE), also known as Siddhrtha Gautama,[note 4] Shakyamuni (ie "Sage of the Shakyas") Buddha,[note 5] or simply the Buddha, after the title of Buddha, was an ascetic (ramaa) and sage, on whose teachings Buddhism was founded.[5] He is believed to have lived and taught mostly in the eastern part of ancient India sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.[note 6]

Gautama taught a Middle Way between sensual indulgence and the severe asceticism found in the ramaa movement common in his region. He later taught throughout other regions of eastern India such as Magadha and Kosala.

Gautama is the primary figure in Buddhism. He is believed by Buddhists to be an enlightened teacher who attained full Buddhahood and shared his insights to help sentient beings end rebirth and suffering. Accounts of his life, discourses and monastic rules are believed by Buddhists to have been summarised after his death and memorised by his followers. Various collections of teachings attributed to him were passed down by oral tradition and first committed to writing about 400 years later.

In Vaishnava Hinduism, the historic Buddha is considered to be an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.[9] Of the ten major avatars of Vishnu, Vaishnavites believe Gautama Buddha to be the ninth and most recent incarnation.[10][11]

Scholars are hesitant to make unqualified claims about the historical facts of the Buddha's life. Most people accept that the Buddha lived, taught, and founded a monastic order during the Mahajanapada era during the reign of Bimbisara (c.558 c.491 BCE, or c. 400 BCE),[12][13][14] the ruler of the Magadha empire, and died during the early years of the reign of Ajatasatru, who was the successor of Bimbisara, thus making him a younger contemporary of Mahavira, the Jain tirthankara. Apart from the Vedic Brahmins, the Buddha's lifetime coincided with the flourishing of influential ramaa schools of thought like jvika, Crvka, Jainism, and Ajana. Brahmajala Sutta records sixty-two such schools of thought. It was also the age of influential thinkers like Mahavira (referred to as 'Nigantha Nataputta' in Pali Canon),[18] Praa Kassapa, Makkhali Gosla, Ajita Kesakambal, Pakudha Kaccyana, and Sajaya Belahaputta, as recorded in Samaaphala Sutta, whose viewpoints the Buddha most certainly must have been acquainted with.[note 7] Indeed, Sariputta and Moggallna, two of the foremost disciples of the Buddha, were formerly the foremost disciples of Sajaya Belahaputta, the sceptic; and the Pali canon frequently depicts Buddha engaging in debate with the adherents of rival schools of thought. There is also philological evidence to suggest that the two masters, Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, were indeed historical figures and they most probably taught Buddha two different forms of meditative techniques. Thus, Buddha was just one of the many ramaa philosophers of that time. In an era where holiness of person was judged by their level of asceticism, Buddha was a reformist within the ramaa movement, rather than a reactionary against Vedic Brahminism. While the general sequence of "birth, maturity, renunciation, search, awakening and liberation, teaching, death" is widely accepted,[pageneeded] there is less consensus on the veracity of many details contained in traditional biographies.

The times of Gautama's birth and death are uncertain. Most historians in the early 20th century dated his lifetime as c. 563 BCE to 483 BCE. More recently his death is dated later, between 411 and 400 BCE, while at a symposium on this question held in 1988, the majority of those who presented definite opinions gave dates within 20 years either side of 400 BCE for the Buddha's death.[note 6] These alternative chronologies, however, have not been accepted by all historians.[note 8]

The evidence of the early texts suggests that Siddhrtha Gautama was born into the Shakya clan, a community that was on the periphery, both geographically and culturally, of the eastern Indian subcontinent in the 5th century BCE. It was either a small republic, or an oligarchy, and his father was an elected chieftain, or oligarch. According to the Buddhist tradition, Gautama was born in Lumbini, now in modern-day Nepal, and raised in the Shakya capital of Kapilvastu, which may have been either in what is present day Tilaurakot, Nepal or Piprahwa, India.[note 1] He obtained his enlightenment in Bodh Gaya, gave his first sermon in Sarnath, and died in Kushinagar.

No written records about Gautama were found from his lifetime or from the one or two centuries thereafter. In the middle of the 3rd century BCE, several Edicts of Ashoka (reigned c. 269232 BCE) mention the Buddha, and particularly Ashoka's Rummindei Minor Pillar Edict commemorates the Emperor's pilgrimage to Lumbini as the Buddha's birthplace. Another one of his edicts (Minor Rock Edict No. 3) mentions the titles of several Dhamma texts, establishing the existence of a written Buddhist tradition at least by the time of the Maurya era. These texts may be the precursor of the Pli Canon.[63] [note 10] The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts are the Gandhran Buddhist texts, reported to have been found in or around Haa near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan and now preserved in the British Library. They are written in the Gndhr language using the Kharosthi script on twenty-seven birch bark manuscripts and date from the first century BCE to the third century CE.[64]

On the basis of philological evidence, Indologist and Pali expert Oskar von Hinber says that some of the Pali suttas have retained very archaic place-names, syntax, and historical data from close to the Buddha's lifetime, including the Mahparinibba Sutta which contains a detailed account of the Buddha's final days. Hinber proposes a composition date of no later than 350320 BCE for this text, which would allow for a "true historical memory" of the events approximately 60 years prior if the Short Chronology for the Buddha's lifetime is accepted (but also reminds that such a text was originally intended more as hagiography than as an exact historical record of events).[65][66]

The sources for the life of Siddhrtha Gautama are a variety of different, and sometimes conflicting, traditional biographies. These include the Buddhacarita, Lalitavistara Stra, Mahvastu, and the Nidnakath. Of these, the Buddhacarita is the earliest full biography, an epic poem written by the poet Avaghoa in the first century CE.[73] The Lalitavistara Stra is the next oldest biography, a Mahyna/Sarvstivda biography dating to the 3rd century CE. The Mahvastu from the Mahsghika Lokottaravda tradition is another major biography, composed incrementally until perhaps the 4th century CE. The Dharmaguptaka biography of the Buddha is the most exhaustive, and is entitled the Abhinikramaa Stra, and various Chinese translations of this date between the 3rd and 6th century CE. The Nidnakath is from the Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka and was composed in the 5th century by Buddhaghoa.

From canonical sources come the Jataka tales, the Mahapadana Sutta (DN 14), and the Achariyabhuta Sutta (MN 123), which include selective accounts that may be older, but are not full biographies. The Jtakas retell previous lives of Gautama as a bodhisattva, and the first collection of these can be dated among the earliest Buddhist texts. The Mahpadna Sutta and Achariyabhuta Sutta both recount miraculous events surrounding Gautama's birth, such as the bodhisattva's descent from the Tuita Heaven into his mother's womb.

In the earliest Buddhist texts, the nikyas and gamas, the Buddha is not depicted as possessing omniscience (sabbau)[78] nor is he depicted as being an eternal transcendent (lokottara) being. According to Bhikkhu Analayo, ideas of the Buddha's omniscience (along with an increasing tendency to deify him and his biography) are found only later, in the Mahayana sutras and later Pali commentaries or texts such as the Mahvastu.[78] In the Sandaka Sutta, the Buddha's disciple Ananda outlines an argument against the claims of teachers who say they are all knowing [79] while in the Tevijjavacchagotta Sutta the Buddha himself states that he has never made a claim to being omniscient, instead he claimed to have the "higher knowledges" (abhij).[80] The earliest biographical material from the Pali Nikayas focuses on the Buddha's life as a ramaa, his search for enlightenment under various teachers such as Alara Kalama and his forty-five-year career as a teacher.[81]

Traditional biographies of Gautama generally include numerous miracles, omens, and supernatural events. The character of the Buddha in these traditional biographies is often that of a fully transcendent (Skt. lokottara) and perfected being who is unencumbered by the mundane world. In the Mahvastu, over the course of many lives, Gautama is said to have developed supramundane abilities including: a painless birth conceived without intercourse; no need for sleep, food, medicine, or bathing, although engaging in such "in conformity with the world"; omniscience, and the ability to "suppress karma". Nevertheless, some of the more ordinary details of his life have been gathered from these traditional sources. In modern times there has been an attempt to form a secular understanding of Siddhrtha Gautama's life by omitting the traditional supernatural elements of his early biographies.

Andrew Skilton writes that the Buddha was never historically regarded by Buddhist traditions as being merely human:

It is important to stress that, despite modern Theravada teachings to the contrary (often a sop to skeptical Western pupils), he was never seen as being merely human. For instance, he is often described as having the thirty-two major and eighty minor marks or signs of a mahpurua, "superman"; the Buddha himself denied that he was either a man or a god; and in the Mahparinibbna Sutta he states that he could live for an aeon were he asked to do so.

The ancient Indians were generally unconcerned with chronologies, being more focused on philosophy. Buddhist texts reflect this tendency, providing a clearer picture of what Gautama may have taught than of the dates of the events in his life. These texts contain descriptions of the culture and daily life of ancient India which can be corroborated from the Jain scriptures, and make the Buddha's time the earliest period in Indian history for which significant accounts exist. British author Karen Armstrong writes that although there is very little information that can be considered historically sound, we can be reasonably confident that Siddhrtha Gautama did exist as a historical figure. Michael Carrithers goes a bit further by stating that the most general outline of "birth, maturity, renunciation, search, awakening and liberation, teaching, death" must be true.

The Buddhist tradition regards Lumbini, in present-day Nepal to be the birthplace of the Buddha.[note 1] He grew up in Kapilavastu.[note 1] The exact site of ancient Kapilavastu is unknown. It may have been either Piprahwa, Uttar Pradesh, in present-day India, or Tilaurakot, in present-day Nepal. Both places belonged to the Sakya territory, and are located only 15 miles apart.

Gautama was born as a Kshatriya,[note 12] the son of uddhodana, "an elected chief of the Shakya clan", whose capital was Kapilavastu, and who were later annexed by the growing Kingdom of Kosala during the Buddha's lifetime. Gautama was the family name. His mother, Maya (Mydev), Suddhodana's wife, was a Koliyan princess. Legend has it that, on the night Siddhartha was conceived, Queen Maya dreamt that a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side, and ten months later Siddhartha was born. As was the Shakya tradition, when his mother Queen Maya became pregnant, she left Kapilavastu for her father's kingdom to give birth. However, her son is said to have been born on the way, at Lumbini, in a garden beneath a sal tree.

The day of the Buddha's birth is widely celebrated in Theravada countries as Vesak. Buddha's Birthday is called Buddha Purnima in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India as he is believed to have been born on a full moon day. Various sources hold that the Buddha's mother died at his birth, a few days or seven days later. The infant was given the name Siddhartha (Pli: Siddhattha), meaning "he who achieves his aim". During the birth celebrations, the hermit seer Asita journeyed from his mountain abode and announced that the child would either become a great king (chakravartin) or a great sadhu. By traditional account,[which?] this occurred after Siddhartha placed his feet in Asita's hair and Asita examined the birthmarks. Suddhodana held a naming ceremony on the fifth day, and invited eight Brahmin scholars to read the future. All gave a dual prediction that the baby would either become a great king or a great holy man. Kondaa, the youngest, and later to be the first arhat other than the Buddha, was reputed to be the only one who unequivocally predicted that Siddhartha would become a Buddha.

While later tradition and legend characterised uddhodana as a hereditary monarch, the descendant of the Suryavansha (Solar dynasty) of Ikvku (Pli: Okkka), many scholars think that uddhodana was the elected chief of a tribal confederacy.

Early texts suggest that Gautama was not familiar with the dominant religious teachings of his time until he left on his religious quest, which is said to have been motivated by existential concern for the human condition. The state of the Shakya clan was not a monarchy and seems to have been structured either as an oligarchy, or as a form of republic. The more egalitarian gana-sangha form of government, as a political alternative to the strongly hierarchical kingdoms, may have influenced the development of the ramanic Jain and Buddhist sanghas, where monarchies tended toward Vedic Brahmanism.

Maya's dream, Gandhara, 2nd century CE.

The Infant Buddha Taking A Bath, Gandhara 2nd Century CE.

Siddhartha was brought up by his mother's younger sister, Maha Pajapati. By tradition, he is said to have been destined by birth to the life of a prince and had three palaces (for seasonal occupation) built for him. His father, said to be King uddhodana, wishing for his son to be a great king, is said to have shielded him from religious teachings and from knowledge of human suffering. While uddhodana has traditionally been depicted as a king, and Siddhartha as his prince, more recent scholarship suggests the Shakya were in-fact organised as a semi-republican oligarchy rather than a monarchy.[102]

When he reached the age of 16, his father reputedly arranged his marriage to a cousin of the same age named Yaodhar (Pli: Yasodhar). According to the traditional account,[which?] she gave birth to a son, named Rhula. Siddhartha is said to have spent 29 years as a prince in Kapilavastu. Although his father ensured that Siddhartha was provided with everything he could want or need, Buddhist scriptures say that the future Buddha felt that material wealth was not life's ultimate goal.

At the age of 29, Siddhartha left his palace to meet his subjects. Despite his father's efforts to hide from him the sick, aged and suffering, Siddhartha was said to have seen an old man. When his charioteer Channa explained to him that all people grew old, the prince went on further trips beyond the palace. On these he encountered a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and an ascetic. These depressed him, and he initially strove to overcome ageing, sickness, and death by living the life of an ascetic.

Accompanied by Channa and riding his horse Kanthaka, Gautama quit his palace for the life of a mendicant. It's said that "the horse's hooves were muffled by the gods" to prevent guards from knowing of his departure.

Gautama initially went to Rajagaha and began his ascetic life by begging for alms in the street. After King Bimbisara's men recognised Siddhartha and the king learned of his quest, Bimbisara offered Siddhartha the throne. Siddhartha rejected the offer but promised to visit his kingdom of Magadha first, upon attaining enlightenment.

He left Rajagaha and practised under two hermit teachers of yogic meditation. After mastering the teachings of Alara Kalama (Skr. ra Klma), he was asked by Kalama to succeed him. However, Gautama felt unsatisfied by the practice, and moved on to become a student of yoga with Udaka Ramaputta (Skr. Udraka Rmaputra). With him he achieved high levels of meditative consciousness and was again asked to succeed his teacher. But, once more, he was not satisfied, and again moved on.

According to the early Buddhist texts,[110] after realising that meditative dhyana was the right path to awakening, but that extreme asceticism didn't work, Gautama discovered what Buddhists know as being, the Middle Way[110]a path of moderation away from the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, or the Noble Eightfold Path, as described in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, which is regarded as the first discourse of the Buddha.[110] In a famous incident, after becoming starved and weakened, he is said to have accepted milk and rice pudding from a village girl named Sujata.[111] Such was his emaciated appearance that she wrongly believed him to be a spirit that had granted her a wish.[111]

Following this incident, Gautama was famously seated under a pipal treenow known as the Bodhi treein Bodh Gaya, India, when he vowed never to arise until he had found the truth. Kaundinya and four other companions, believing that he had abandoned his search and become undisciplined, ceased to stay with him, and went to somewhere else. After a reputed 49 days of meditation, at the age of 35, he is said to have attained Enlightenment,[113] and became known as the Buddha or "Awakened One" ("Buddha" is also sometimes translated as "The Enlightened One").

According to some sutras of the Pali canon, at the time of his awakening he realised complete insight into the Four Noble Truths, thereby attaining liberation from samsara, the endless cycle of rebirth, suffering and dying again.[114][116] According to scholars, this story of the awakening and the stress on "liberating insight" is a later development in the Buddhist tradition, where the Buddha may have regarded the practice of dhyana as leading to nirvana and moksha.[114][note 13]

Nirvana is the extinguishing of the "fires" of desire, hatred, and ignorance, that keep the cycle of suffering and rebirth going.[119] Nirvana is also regarded as the "end of the world", in that no personal identity or boundaries of the mind remain.[citation needed] In such a state, a being is said to possess the Ten Characteristics, belonging to every Buddha.[citation needed]

According to a story in the ycana Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya VI.1)a scripture found in the Pli and other canonsimmediately after his awakening, the Buddha debated whether or not he should teach the Dharma to others. He was concerned that humans were so overpowered by ignorance, greed and hatred that they could never recognise the path, which is subtle, deep and hard to grasp. However, in the story, Brahm Sahampati convinced him, arguing that at least some will understand it. The Buddha relented, and agreed to teach.

After his awakening, the Buddha met Taphussa and Bhallikatwo merchant brothers from the city of Balkh in what is currently Afghanistanwho became his first lay disciples. It is said that each was given hairs from his head, which are now claimed to be enshrined as relics in the Shwe Dagon Temple in Rangoon, Burma. The Buddha intended to visit Asita, and his former teachers, Alara Kalama and Udaka Ramaputta, to explain his findings, but they had already died.

He then travelled to the Deer Park near Varanasi (Benares) in northern India, where he set in motion what Buddhists call the Wheel of Dharma by delivering his first sermon to the five companions with whom he had sought enlightenment. Together with him, they formed the first sagha: the company of Buddhist monks.

All five become arahants, and within the first two months, with the conversion of Yasa and fifty-four of his friends, the number of such arahants is said to have grown to 60. The conversion of three brothers named Kassapa followed, with their reputed 200, 300 and 500 disciples, respectively. This swelled the sangha to more than 1,000.

For the remaining 45 years of his life, the Buddha is said to have travelled in the Gangetic Plain, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and southern Nepal, teaching a diverse range of people: from nobles to servants, murderers such as Angulimala, and cannibals such as Alavaka. Although the Buddha's language remains unknown, it's likely that he taught in one or more of a variety of closely related Middle Indo-Aryan dialects, of which Pali may be a standardisation.

The sangha travelled through the subcontinent, expounding the dharma. This continued throughout the year, except during the four months of the Vassa rainy season when ascetics of all religions rarely travelled. One reason was that it was more difficult to do so without causing harm to animal life. At this time of year, the sangha would retreat to monasteries, public parks or forests, where people would come to them.

The first vassana was spent at Varanasi when the sangha was formed. After this, the Buddha kept a promise to travel to Rajagaha, capital of Magadha, to visit King Bimbisara. During this visit, Sariputta and Maudgalyayana were converted by Assaji, one of the first five disciples, after which they were to become the Buddha's two foremost followers. The Buddha spent the next three seasons at Veluvana Bamboo Grove monastery in Rajagaha, the capital of Magadha.

Upon hearing of his son's awakening, Suddhodana sent, over a period, ten delegations to ask him to return to Kapilavastu. On the first nine occasions, the delegates failed to deliver the message and instead joined the sangha to become arahants. The tenth delegation, led by Kaludayi, a childhood friend of Gautama's (who also became an arahant), however, delivered the message.

Now two years after his awakening, the Buddha agreed to return, and made a two-month journey by foot to Kapilavastu, teaching the dharma as he went. At his return, the royal palace prepared a midday meal, but the sangha was making an alms round in Kapilavastu. Hearing this, Suddhodana approached his son, the Buddha, saying:

"Ours is the warrior lineage of Mahamassata, and not a single warrior has gone seeking alms."

The Buddha is said to have replied:

"That is not the custom of your royal lineage. But it is the custom of my Buddha lineage. Several thousands of Buddhas have gone by seeking alms."

Buddhist texts say that Suddhodana invited the sangha into the palace for the meal, followed by a dharma talk. After this he is said to have become a sotapanna. During the visit, many members of the royal family joined the sangha. The Buddha's cousins Ananda and Anuruddha became two of his five chief disciples. At the age of seven, his son Rahula also joined, and became one of his ten chief disciples. His half-brother Nanda also joined and became an arahant.

Of the Buddha's disciples, Sariputta, Maudgalyayana, Mahakasyapa, Ananda and Anuruddha are believed to have been the five closest to him. His ten foremost disciples were reputedly completed by the quintet of Upali, Subhoti, Rahula, Mahakaccana and Punna.

In the fifth vassana, the Buddha was staying at Mahavana near Vesali when he heard news of the impending death of his father. He is said to have gone to Suddhodana and taught the dharma, after which his father became an arahant.

The king's death and cremation was to inspire the creation of an order of nuns. Buddhist texts record that the Buddha was reluctant to ordain women. His foster mother Maha Pajapati, for example, approached him, asking to join the sangha, but he refused. Maha Pajapati, however, was so intent on the path of awakening that she led a group of royal Sakyan and Koliyan ladies, which followed the sangha on a long journey to Rajagaha. In time, after Ananda championed their cause, the Buddha is said to have reconsidered and, five years after the formation of the sangha, agreed to the ordination of women as nuns. He reasoned that males and females had an equal capacity for awakening. But he gave women additional rules (Vinaya) to follow.

According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta of the Pali canon, at the age of 80, the Buddha announced that he would soon reach parinirvana, or the final deathless state, and abandon his earthly body. After this, the Buddha ate his last meal, which he had received as an offering from a blacksmith named Cunda. Falling violently ill, Buddha instructed his attendant nanda to convince Cunda that the meal eaten at his place had nothing to do with his passing and that his meal would be a source of the greatest merit as it provided the last meal for a Buddha.[121] Mettanando and von Hinber argue that the Buddha died of mesenteric infarction, a symptom of old age, rather than food poisoning.[122][123]

The precise contents of the Buddha's final meal are not clear, due to variant scriptural traditions and ambiguity over the translation of certain significant terms; the Theravada tradition generally believes that the Buddha was offered some kind of pork, while the Mahayana tradition believes that the Buddha consumed some sort of truffle or other mushroom. These may reflect the different traditional views on Buddhist vegetarianism and the precepts for monks and nuns.

Waley suggests that Theravadins would take suukaramaddava (the contents of the Buddha's last meal), which can translate literally as pig-soft, to mean "soft flesh of a pig" or "pig's soft-food", that is, after Neumann, a soft food favoured by pigs, assumed to be a truffle. He argues (also after Neumann) that as "(p)lant names tend to be local and dialectical", as there are several plants known to have suukara- (pig) as part of their names,[note 14] and as Pali Buddhism developed in an area remote from the Buddha's death, suukaramaddava could easily have been a type of plant whose local name was unknown to those in Pali regions. Specifically, local writers writing soon after the Buddha's death knew more about their flora than Theravadin commentator Buddhaghosa who lived hundreds of years and hundreds of kilometres remote in time and space from the events described. Unaware that it may have been a local plant name and with no Theravadin prohibition against eating animal flesh, Theravadins would not have questioned the Buddha eating meat and interpreted the term accordingly.

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha died at Kuinra (present-day Kushinagar, India), which became a pilgrimage centre. Ananda protested the Buddha's decision to enter parinirvana in the abandoned jungles of Kuinra of the Malla kingdom. The Buddha, however, is said to have reminded Ananda how Kushinara was a land once ruled by a righteous wheel-turning king and the appropriate place for him to die.

The Buddha then asked all the attendant Bhikkhus to clarify any doubts or questions they had and cleared them all in a way which others could not do. They had none. According to Buddhist scriptures, he then finally entered parinirvana. The Buddha's final words are reported to have been: "All composite things (Sakhra) are perishable. Strive for your own liberation with diligence" (Pali: 'vayadhamm sakhr appamdena sampdeth'). His body was cremated and the relics were placed in monuments or stupas, some of which are believed to have survived until the present. For example, the Temple of the Tooth or "Dalada Maligawa" in Sri Lanka is the place where what some believe to be the relic of the right tooth of Buddha is kept at present.

According to the Pli historical chronicles of Sri Lanka, the Dpavasa and Mahvasa, the coronation of Emperor Aoka (Pli: Asoka) is 218 years after the death of the Buddha. According to two textual records in Chinese ( and ), the coronation of Emperor Aoka is 116 years after the death of the Buddha. Therefore, the time of Buddha's passing is either 486 BCE according to Theravda record or 383 BCE according to Mahayana record. However, the actual date traditionally accepted as the date of the Buddha's death in Theravda countries is 544 or 545 BCE, because the reign of Emperor Aoka was traditionally reckoned to be about 60 years earlier than current estimates. In Burmese Buddhist tradition, the date of the Buddha's death is 13 May 544 BCE. whereas in Thai tradition it is 11 March 545 BCE.

At his death, the Buddha is famously believed to have told his disciples to follow no leader. Mahakasyapa was chosen by the sangha to be the chairman of the First Buddhist Council, with the two chief disciples Maudgalyayana and Sariputta having died before the Buddha.

While in the Buddha's days he was addressed by the very respected titles Buddha, Shkyamuni, Shkyasimha, Bhante and Bho, he was known after his parinirvana nirvana as Arihant, Bhagav/Bhagavat/Bhagwn, Mahvira, Jina/Jinendra, Sstr, Sugata, and most popularly in scriptures as Tathgata.

After his death, Buddha's cremation relics were divided amongst 8 royal families and his disciples; centuries later they would be enshrined by King Ashoka into 84,000 stupas.[130] Many supernatural legends surround the history of alleged relics as they accompanied the spread of Buddhism and gave legitimacy to rulers.

An extensive and colourful physical description of the Buddha has been laid down in scriptures. A kshatriya by birth, he had military training in his upbringing, and by Shakyan tradition was required to pass tests to demonstrate his worthiness as a warrior in order to marry.[citation needed] He had a strong enough body to be noticed by one of the kings and was asked to join his army as a general.[citation needed] He is also believed by Buddhists to have "the 32 Signs of the Great Man".

The Brahmin Sonadanda described him as "handsome, good-looking, and pleasing to the eye, with a most beautiful complexion. He has a godlike form and countenance, he is by no means unattractive." (D, I:115)

"It is wonderful, truly marvellous, how serene is the good Gotama's appearance, how clear and radiant his complexion, just as the golden jujube in autumn is clear and radiant, just as a palm-tree fruit just loosened from the stalk is clear and radiant, just as an adornment of red gold wrought in a crucible by a skilled goldsmith, deftly beaten and laid on a yellow-cloth shines, blazes and glitters, even so, the good Gotama's senses are calmed, his complexion is clear and radiant." (A, I:181)

A disciple named Vakkali, who later became an arahant, was so obsessed by the Buddha's physical presence that the Buddha is said to have felt impelled to tell him to desist, and to have reminded him that he should know the Buddha through the Dhamma and not through physical appearances.

Although there are no extant representations of the Buddha in human form until around the 1st century CE (see Buddhist art), descriptions of the physical characteristics of fully enlightened buddhas are attributed to the Buddha in the Digha Nikaya's Lakkhaa Sutta (D, I:142). In addition, the Buddha's physical appearance is described by Yasodhara to their son Rahula upon the Buddha's first post-Enlightenment return to his former princely palace in the non-canonical Pali devotional hymn, Narasha Gth ("The Lion of Men").[134]

Among the 32 main characteristics it is mentioned that Buddha has blue eyes.

Recollection of nine virtues attributed to the Buddha is a common Buddhist meditation and devotional practice called Buddhnusmti. The nine virtues are also among the 40 Buddhist meditation subjects. The nine virtues of the Buddha appear throughout the Tipitaka,[136] and include:

In the Pali Canon, the Buddha uses many Brahmanical devices. For example, in Samyutta Nikaya 111, Majjhima Nikaya 92 and Vinaya i 246 of the Pali Canon, the Buddha praises the Agnihotra as the foremost sacrifice and the Gayatri mantra as the foremost meter:

aggihuttamukh ya svitt chandaso mukham.

Sacrifices have the Agnihotra as foremost; of meter, the foremost is the Svitr.

One method to obtain information on the oldest core of Buddhism is to compare the oldest versions of the Pali Canon and other texts, such as the surviving portions of Sarvastivada, Mulasarvastivada, Mahisasaka, Dharmaguptaka, and the Chinese Agamas.[citation needed] The reliability of these sources, and the possibility of drawing out a core of oldest teachings, is a matter of dispute.. According to Vetter, inconsistencies remain, and other methods must be applied to resolve those inconsistencies.[note 15]

According to Schmithausen, there are three positions held by scholars of Buddhism:

A core problem in the study of early Buddhism is the relation between dhyana and insight. Schmithausen notes that the mention of the four noble truths as constituting "liberating insight", which is attained after mastering the Rupa Jhanas, is a later addition to texts such as Majjhima Nikaya 36.

According to Tilmann Vetter, the core of earliest Buddhism is the practice of dhyna, as a workable alternative to painful ascetic practices.[note 20] Bronkhorst agrees that Dhyna was a Buddhist invention,[pageneeded] whereas Norman notes that "the Buddha's way to release [...] was by means of meditative practices." Discriminating insight into transiency as a separate path to liberation was a later development.

According to the Mahsaccakasutta,[note 21] from the fourth jhana the Buddha gained bodhi. Yet, it is not clear what he was awakened to.[pageneeded] According to Schmithausen and Bronkhorst, "liberating insight" is a later addition to this text, and reflects a later development and understanding in early Buddhism.[pageneeded] The mentioning of the four truths as constituting "liberating insight" introduces a logical problem, since the four truths depict a linear path of practice, the knowledge of which is in itself not depicted as being liberating:

[T]hey do not teach that one is released by knowing the four noble truths, but by practicing the fourth noble truth, the eightfold path, which culminates in right samadhi.

Although "Nibbna" (Sanskrit: Nirvna) is the common term for the desired goal of this practice, many other terms can be found throughout the Nikayas, which are not specified.[note 22]

According to Vetter, the description of the Buddhist path may initially have been as simple as the term "the middle way". In time, this short description was elaborated, resulting in the description of the eightfold path.

According to both Bronkhorst and Anderson, the four truths became a substitution for prajna, or "liberating insight", in the suttas[114][pageneeded] in those texts where "liberating insight" was preceded by the four jhanas. According to Bronkhorst, the four truths may not have been formulated in earliest Buddhism, and did not serve in earliest Buddhism as a description of "liberating insight". Gotama's teachings may have been personal, "adjusted to the need of each person."

The three marks of existence[note 23] may reflect Upanishadic or other influences. K.R. Norman supposes that these terms were already in use at the Buddha's time, and were familiar to his listeners.

The Brahma-vihara was in origin probably a brahmanic term; but its usage may have been common to the Sramana traditions.

In time, "liberating insight" became an essential feature of the Buddhist tradition. The following teachings, which are commonly seen as essential to Buddhism, are later formulations which form part of the explanatory framework of this "liberating insight":

Some Hindus regard Gautama as the 9th avatar of Vishnu.[note 11] However, Buddha's teachings deny the authority of the Vedas and the concepts of Brahman-Atman.[165][166][167] Consequently Buddhism is generally classified as a nstika school (heterodox, literally "It is not so"[note 24]) in contrast to the six orthodox schools of Hinduism.[170][171]

The Buddha is regarded as a prophet by the minority Ahmadiyya[173] sect of Muslimsa sect considered a deviant and rejected as apostate by mainstream Islam.[174][175] Some early Chinese Taoist-Buddhists thought the Buddha to be a reincarnation of Laozi.

Disciples of the Cao i religion worship the Buddha as a major religious teacher. His image can be found in both their Holy See and on the home altar. He is revealed during communication with Divine Beings as son of their Supreme Being (God the Father) together with other major religious teachers and founders like Jesus, Laozi, and Confucius.

The Christian Saint Josaphat is based on the Buddha. The name comes from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva via Arabic Bdhasaf and Georgian Iodasaph. The only story in which St. Josaphat appears, Barlaam and Josaphat, is based on the life of the Buddha. Josaphat was included in earlier editions of the Roman Martyrology (feast day 27 November)though not in the Roman Missaland in the Eastern Orthodox Church liturgical calendar (26 August).

In the ancient Gnostic sect of Manichaeism, the Buddha is listed among the prophets who preached the word of God before Mani.[181]

In Sikhism, Buddha is mentioned as the 23rd avatar of Vishnu in the Chaubis Avtar, a composition in Dasam Granth traditionally and historically attributed to Guru Gobind Singh.[182]

Based on stone inscriptions, there is also speculation that Lumbei, Kapileswar village, Odisha, at the east coast of India, was the site of ancient Lumbini. Hartmann discusses the hypothesis and states, "The inscription has generally been considered spurious (...)" He quotes Sircar: "There can hardly be any doubt that the people responsible for the Kapilesvara inscription copied it from the said facsimile not much earlier than 1928."

Kapilavastu was the place where he grew up:[note 9]

Dhammika:"There is disagreement amongst scholars concerning which Pali suttas correspond to some of the text. Vinaya samukose: probably the Atthavasa Vagga, Anguttara Nikaya, 1:98100. Aliya vasani: either the Ariyavasa Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya, V:29, or the Ariyavamsa Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya, II: 2728. Anagata bhayani: probably the Anagata Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya, III:100. Muni gatha: Muni Sutta, Sutta Nipata 207221. Upatisa pasine: Sariputta Sutta, Sutta Nipata 955975. Laghulavade: Rahulavada Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya, I:421."

The Buddha

Early Buddhism

Buddhism general

Originally posted here:
Gautama Buddha - Wikipedia

Causes

On the surface, the most apparent cause of the Enlightenmentwas the Thirty Years War. This horribly destructivewar, which lasted from 1618 to 1648,compelled German writers to pen harsh criticisms regarding the ideasof nationalism and warfare. These authors, such as HugoGrotius and John Comenius, were some of thefirst Enlightenment minds to go against tradition and propose bettersolutions.

At the same time, European thinkers interest in the tangible worlddeveloped into scientific study, while greater exploration of theworld exposed Europe to other cultures and philosophies. Finally,centuries of mistreatment at the hands of monarchies and the churchbrought average citizens in Europe to a breaking point, and themost intelligent and vocal finally decided to speak out.

The Enlightenment developed through a snowball effect:small advances triggered larger ones, and before Europe and theworld knew it, almost two centuries of philosophizing and innovationhad ensued. These studies generally began in the fields of earthscience and astronomy, as notables such as Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei tookthe old, beloved truths of Aristotle and disproved them. Thinkerssuch as Ren Descartes and Francis Bacon revisedthe scientific method, setting the stage for Isaac Newton andhis landmark discoveries in physics.

From these discoveries emerged a system for observingthe world and making testable hypotheses based on thoseobservations. At the same time, however, scientists faced ever-increasingscorn and skepticism from people in the religious community, whofelt threatened by science and its attempts to explain matters offaith. Nevertheless, the progressive, rebellious spirit of thesescientists would inspire a centurys worth of thinkers.

The first major Enlightenment figure in Englandwas Thomas Hobbes, who caused great controversywith the release of his provocative treatise Leviathan (1651).Taking a sociological perspective, Hobbes felt that by nature, peoplewere self-serving and preoccupied with the gathering of a limitednumber of resources. To keep balance, Hobbes continued, it was essentialto have a single intimidating ruler. A half century later, JohnLocke came into the picture, promoting the opposite typeof governmenta representative governmentin his Two Treatisesof Government (1690).

Although Hobbes would be more influential among his contemporaries,it was clear that Lockes message was closer to the English peopleshearts and minds. Just before the turn of the century, in 1688,English Protestants helped overthrow the Catholic king JamesII and installed the Protestant monarchs William andMary. In the aftermath of this Glorious Revolution,the English government ratified a new Bill of Rights that grantedmore personal freedoms.

Many of the major French Enlightenment thinkers, or philosophes, wereborn in the years after the Glorious Revolution, so Frances Enlightenmentcame a bit later, in the mid-1700s.The philosophes, though varying in style and area of particularconcern, generally emphasized the power of reason and sought todiscover the natural laws governing human society. The Baronde Montesquieu tackled politics by elaborating upon Locke'swork, solidifying concepts such as the separation of power bymeans of divisions in government. Voltaire took a morecaustic approach, choosing to incite social and political changeby means of satire and criticism. Although Voltaires satires arguablysparked little in the way of concrete change, Voltaire neverthelesswas adept at exposing injustices and appealed to a wide range ofreaders. His short novel Candide is regarded as oneof the seminal works in history.

Denis Diderot, unlike Montesquieu and Voltaire,had no revolutionary aspirations; he was interested merely in collectingas much knowledge as possible for his mammoth Encyclopdie.The Encyclopdie, which ultimately weighed in atthirty-five volumes, would go on to spread Enlightenment knowledgeto other countries around the world.

In reaction to the rather empirical philosophiesof Voltaire and others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote TheSocial Contract (1762),a work championing a form of government based on small, direct democracy thatdirectly reflects the will of the population. Later, at the endof his career, he would write Confessions, a deeplypersonal reflection on his life. The unprecedented intimate perspectivethat Rousseau provided contributed to a burgeoning Romantic erathat would be defined by an emphasis on emotion and instinct insteadof reason.

Another undercurrent that threatened the prevailing principlesof the Enlightenment was skepticism. Skeptics questionedwhether human society could really be perfected through the useof reason and denied the ability of rational thought to reveal universaltruths. Their philosophies revolved around the idea that the perceived worldis relative to the beholder and, as such, no one can be sure whetherany truths actually exist.

Immanuel Kant, working in Germany duringthe late eighteenth century, took skepticism to its greatest lengths,arguing that man could truly know neither observed objects nor metaphysicalconcepts; rather, the experience of such things depends upon thepsyche of the observer, thus rendering universal truths impossible. Thetheories of Kant, along with those of other skeptics such as DavidHume, were influential enough to change the nature of European thoughtand effectively end the Enlightenment.

Ultimately, the Enlightenment fell victim to competingideas from several sources. Romanticism was more appealing to less-educated commonfolk and pulled them away from the empirical, scientific ideas ofearlier Enlightenment philosophers. Similarly, the theories of skepticismcame into direct conflict with the reason-based assertions of theEnlightenment and gained a following of their own.

What ultimately and abruptly killed the Enlightenment,however, was the French Revolution. Begun with thebest intentions by French citizens inspired by Enlightenment thought,the revolution attempted to implement orderly representative assembliesbut quickly degraded into chaos and violence. Many people citedthe Enlightenment-induced breakdown of norms as the root cause of theinstability and saw the violence as proof that the masses could notbe trusted to govern themselves. Nonetheless, the discoveries andtheories of the Enlightenment philosophers continued to influenceWestern society for centuries.

View original post here:
SparkNotes: The Enlightenment (16501800): Brief Overview

Anthony Gottliebs landmark The Dream of Reason and its sequel challenge Bertrand Russells classic as the definitive history of Western philosophy.

Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb documented the first burst, which came in the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Now, in his sequel, The Dream of Enlightenment, Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short periodfrom the early 1640s to the eve of the French RevolutionDescartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and that of the birth of modern philosophy.

As Gottlieb explains, all these men were amateurs: none had much to do with any university. They tried to fathom the implications of the new science and of religious upheaval, which led them to question traditional teachings and attitudes. What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and for our ideas of God? How should a government deal with religious diversityand what, actually, is government for? Such questions remain our questions, which is why Descartes, Hobbes, and the others are still pondered today.

Yet it is because we still want to hear them that we can easily get these philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think they speak our language and live in our world; but to understand them properly, we must step back into their shoes. Gottlieb puts readers in the minds of these frequently misinterpreted figures, elucidating the history of their times and the development of scientific ideas while engagingly explaining their arguments and assessing their legacy in lively prose.

With chapters focusing on Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, and Voltaireand many walk-on partsThe Dream of Enlightenment creates a sweeping account of what the Enlightenment amounted to, and why we are still in its debt.

Read the original here:
Amazon.com: The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern ...