It is quite evident that the Chinese pictogram translated as 'enlightenment' has two different meanings.
For instance, when the Buddha's enlightenment is referred to it is usually described as 'complete and perfect Enlightenment'. Therefore we know that 'incomplete' and 'imperfect' enlightenment must have been recognised.
In the Sutra of Wei Lang, on the other hand, 'enlightenment' occurs to whole audiences at the end of a discourse, and to individuals as a result of the elucidation of minor problems.
I have heard it maintained that both cases are just examples of oriental hyperbole. That this is not so is proved by Section 20 of the Chün Chou Record of Huang Po, wherein the term is used three times to denote cases of enlightenment 'from without', of an evidently different, or at most partial, nature, and three times to describe cases of enlightenment 'from within the subject's own mind' or 'through the Dharma of Mind'.
If further proof were needed, Section 55 of the Wan Ling Record states that out of a thousand or ten thousand candidates only three or perhaps five succeed in passing the Gate - the only known statistics on the subject, supplied by the most qualified authority during the peak of the Zen movement (i.e. between 0.3 per cent and 0.05 per cent, or 1 in 333 and one in 2,000). These statistics are supported by the evident difficulty experienced by the Fifth Patriarch in finding a successor other than the apparently unsuitable and illiterate Corean youth who did not reach maturity until fifteen years after the Patriarch's death. At the same time it would appear that from the times of Bodhidharma until Hui Neng the teaching of the One Mind remained essentially a 'secret' doctrine, reserved for those few who could 'take' it, for, otherwise, the story of the persecution of Hui Neng is incomprehensible.
There can be no doubt, therefore, that the term was applied to purely intellectual comprehension as well as to the pure spiritual realisation which the term implies to us in this context. More probably it was a generic term, as, in fact, it is in colloquial English, and had no technical limitation whatever.
We should bear this in mind, for we have been led astray, here as about 'meditation', and considerable confusion and misunderstanding have resulted.
