If everyone was miraculously awakened now, most would wish they could restore factory settings.

If you suck at meditation, do not despair. There are other ways. Some more challenging, some more fun.

As if yesterday, 20 years ago I enjoyed the work of Rick Fields and his narrative "How the Swans Came to the Lake", copious writings of Sangharakshita, and later in 2002 the "Westward Dharma" edited by Prebish and Baumann. Reading on Buddhism in the West makes you think of Western Buddhism. 20 years later, and in many ways, too little has changed.

Shingon is an esoteric school of Mahayana, and Mahayana is a bodhisattva doctrine. Bodhisattva is interested in awakening others and himself equally. The general classification of the bodhisattva stages, according to the exoteric teachings, is as follows...

Nirbhaya literally means "fearlessness" or simply "no fear." In Shingon, it means equanimity. However, it is also synonymous with ashvasa, meaning "to revive," so it implies a surge of regeneration. Nirbhaya signifies an awakening through freeing oneself from the bonds of klesha and thus awakening to realize one's inherent wakefulness (skt. bodhi). The six nirbhaya theory describes the process of gradual awakening in six progressive stages, each consisting of an exoteric and an esoteric interpretation.

In the Mahavairocana Sutra, we find the phrase "mind just as it is," synonymous to what the seminal Awakening of Faith calls "inherent wakefulness." Nirvana Sutra calls it buddha-nature (skt. tathagatagarbha or sugatagarbha or buddhadhatu), the Prajnaparamita literature calls it prajna, while the Sukhavativyuha literature calls it "pure land" (we might go as far as drawing a parallel to the esoteric meaning of "Kingdom of God").