Buddha’s Enlightenment Day Speech 2025

Dharma speech given on December 13, 2025, at Providence Zen Center, U.S.A.

[Raises the Zen stick over his head, then hits the table with the stick.]

Twinkle, Twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are!

Everybody wonders,
What am I?
What is this world?
What is life and death? 

What is this?

[Raises the Zen stick over his head, then hits the table with the stick.]

Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

But if, when you wonder, you make ideas,
Like “up above the world.” Like “diamond.”
Like philosophy, science, religion.
Then you lose your star.|Because true wondering has no answer.

What is this?

[Raises the Zen stick over his head, then hits the table with the stick.]

Twinkle, Twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are. 

For six years, Buddha sat under the Bodhi Tree.
Wondering.
Then, he saw the morning star.
What was it he experienced after all that time? 

KATZ!

Thank you for bringing all your twinkling eyes to the dharma room.

Happy Buddha’s Enlightenment Day, everyone.

What a gift that we found each other! We are so lucky, those of us who really wonder, to have found a group of other people who really wonder.

I’m going to talk a little about my version of the Buddha’s enlightenment story. What interests me is the mythology, how the Buddha story tells all of our stories, the tale of each of our challenges and development. 

So, as the story goes, Siddhartha Gautama was born in the fifth century before the Common Era. The prophets told his father that he would either be a great king or a great spiritual leader. To protect him, and to ensure he would be a king, Siddhartha’s father sheltered him from every sort of suffering. Siddhartha lived in a palace of pure pleasure.

He had everything he could want and nothing he didn’t want. Everything was beautiful and fun. That’s the life a lot of us want. Buddha actually had it. Everything he wanted. But still, Siddhartha was out of sorts. He sensed there must be something more than endless pleasure.

Have you ever had a moment like that? When everything was good but, first, you were worried that it would go away and, second, having everything you wanted wasn’t all it was cracked up to be? This is one element of the Buddha story that reflects the human experience: Even when we have everything, to be human is to wonder. What am I?

Anyway, Buddha sneaked out of the palace to find that something more. And what he encountered was kind of scary. 

First he saw a sick person. Then an old person. Then a dead person.

“Oh my God, is that going to happen to me? Help! Help!” But nothing in the pleasure palace can help you when you see these things. That is what it can be like when we finally come to practice and begin to lean into our wondering. The bottom falls out. We realize there is no security. We want to go back to the palace of ignorance, but it is too late. We cannot unsee what we have seen.

But, by the way, this is also the richness of life. What Buddha encountered was part of the richness of life: old age, sickness, death.

Then he also encountered a wandering ascetic who seemed to be trying to figure out the big questions. Maybe there is an answer, Buddha thought. Maybe there is a way out. That’s an interesting idea. Because suppose sickness, old age, and death are part of the richness of life. Do we really want a way out? 

What if we just forgive our lives and all the people and things in it? To forgive means to not judge. To not judge means to not know. What if instead of trying to get rid of the suffering and richness, we just don’t make richness and suffering? Don’t know. Another thing to wonder about.

So Buddha abandoned his princely life and began on a path of wondering, just like in the nursery rhyme we wonder about the twinkling star. Buddha saw something—the thing we call the suffering of life and death—and then he wondered what it was.

That is an interesting point. First we have to say life. Then we wonder what it is. First we have to say death. Then we wonder what it is. First we have to say suffering. Then we wonder what it is. What if we don’t make life and death and suffering, then what would we have to wonder about? There’s another thing to wonder about!

So Buddha searched, and first he found teachers. From them he learned philosophies and religions. 

That’s like us. When we first truly encounter what we have named the insecurity of life, we want explanations and stories to reassure us. OK, so we are going to die—but explain to me. What happens after I die? We will be sick, but explain to me the meaning of that.

Then, we feel better. We don’t feel insecure after all.

But just as a star is not a diamond in the sky, so life is not contained in the words used to explain it. Even when we use words to explain life, our explanations break down. A child dies. A war breaks out. Questions about our explanations begin to appear: If God is love, why does God let people starve? Even though we have fought wars to protect our explanations, those explanations eventually fail us. For a while we have managed to push away the suffering of life and death with our explanations, but now we have fallen into the suffering of naming and explaining.

So Buddha left the teachers behind and began his own search, grounded in his experience rather than the teachers’ explanations. He may not have known it at this stage, but he began to search for his true teachers: the clouds in the sky, a fox running across a field, a baby crying, even a grandchild dying. The richness of life that comes when you don’t name, explain, and judge it.

Years ago, I sat a retreat at Cambridge Zen Center with Zen Master Bon Haeng. He told me in my interview: “Our practice is about becoming comfortable with not knowing.”

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The bad news is you are falling from an infinite height to an infinite depth. The good news is there is nothing to hit.”

“Even if I could tell you the answers,” a teacher told me, “you wouldn’t believe me. You have to experience them for yourself.”

In the end, Buddha was determined to experience them for himself—to see and hear and touch and taste and feel. Buddha left behind all the teachers and all their explanations, just as you and I must leave behind Buddha.

Buddha sat underneath the Bodhi Tree for six years. And finally, after all that time, he did see. The morning star rose in the eastern sky and Buddha saw it—really saw it. By the way, speaking of the suffering of naming, we call it the morning star but it is not a star at all. It is the planet Venus.

Buddha saw the planet Venus. Then he said, “Wonder of wonders—all beings are enlightened exactly as they are.”

What a relief. All beings are enlightened exactly as they are. You are already complete. Perfect. Like a perfect circle. 

Let’s altogether take a deep breath in. Now let it out. Perfect. What a relief.

That is my version of the so-called story of so-called Buddha’s so-called enlightenment. This is a wonderful story, not just because it is the origin story of our tradition but because it is the story of each one of us. It is the story of us over the course of our lives but also a story that recurs over and over countless times in our lives and in our practice. We fall into the palace of delusion. We wake up to a star. We fall into the palace of delusion; we wake up to a star. Over and over.

This is the meaning of our practice: We must find our don’t-know center and make it strong. Slowly, slowly, we stop leaving our don’t-know center. We leave it less and less.

In each moment, in every situation and conundrum, each of us gets the chance, like Siddhartha, to take the lifepath of the king or the spiritual leader. That means we get to take the path of judgment or faith in not knowing.

“The great way is not difficult, just put down good and bad.”

In my mythological version of the Buddha story, choosing the path of a king, as Buddha’s father wanted, means that we try to be the rulers of our experience. We name it, we describe it, we call it good or bad, and then we do everything in our power to make it as we want it.

The problem is that even if we make it as think we want it, we end up like Siddhartha in his palace, with a sense of unease and the feeling that something is missing. We sense our delusion. We sense we are in what the Christians would call sin—that is, separation.

Think about it. Terrible things happen. Good things happen. But the very fact that we call them terrible things and good things separates us from those things. We wilt like a plant with no water. We become spiritually dead. We feel separate and scared of what will happen to us. We feel alone.

Then, there is the other path. Not to try to be king. This is the path of the spiritual leader in my telling of the Buddha myth. Not to try to control things like a king, but instead to try to understand them as they are. To understand ourselves as we are.

Of course, by understanding, we don’t mean explaining. We mean moment by moment understanding, which means experiencing. Seeing. Hearing. Touching. Tasting. We understand things as they are, experience them as they are. We don’t say life, death, sickness, old age, death. When we just reflect, then we understand our correct situation, relationship, and function. This is the path of the spiritual leader in the Buddha myth.

When sickness comes, only sick. When old age comes, only old age. When death comes, only death. And in each of those moments, if we are awake, which means not judging, what there is for us to do will do itself, just like this.

In an interview with Zen Master Soeng Hyang (Bobby Rhodes), she said to me, “Let me give you the best advice of your life. At the moment of your death, just ask ‘How may I help?’”

Which brings us to what, to me, on this day, is the most important part of Buddha’s enlightenment story: It is what comes after.

The real teaching, in my view, is not in the enlightenment story. It is what came after. Buddha taught for forty-five years. We call that mind “How may I help you?” Maybe Buddha’s greatest teaching is not what he said but that he bothered to say it. He could have gone to nirvana. But he stayed to help. 

When I was little sometimes I would pretend to be sick. I would get off school. But all my friends would be in school and I would have no friends to play with. What fun could nirvana possibly be if all our friends and families and strangers and enemies weren’t there?

In fact, that is the point. Nirvana is the place where all your friends and families and strangers and enemies are. In other words, nirvana is right here and right now. We did it! We got here! And since we did, since we no longer need anything at all, we might as well help everyone else to get here. How may I help you?

It’s so great. We don’t need the teachings of Buddha or Jesus or Moses or Muhammad. Instead, we can just be Buddha and Jesus and Moses and Muhammad.

You might say this is impossible—but only if you make Jesus, Moses, Buddha. Let’s just function together. Let’s just work in harmony. Realizing we are already complete, there is nothing to get. So only help. Show all the other kids how to fake a fever and get off school so we can all enter the playground together.

We call that “How may I help you?” Or if you like, you could call it seeing Buddha’s star. 

[Raises the Zen stick over his head, then hits the table with the stick.]

You are the star. The star is you.

[Raises the Zen stick over his head, then hits the table with the stick.]

No star. No you.

[Raises the Zen stick over his head, then hits the table with the stick.]

Star is star. You are you.

Which do you like?

KATZ

Have you heard this joke? A whole bunch of Buddhas, Jesuses, Muhammads, and Moseses walk into the dharma room at Providence Zen Center, and I gave a talk.

Thank you for listening.