Seeking a Way to Respond Both Wisely and Compassionately

Dancing Leaves, by Dkundzinsh

The Buddha's genius lies precisely in his imagination. I believe don't that when he experienced awakening, suddenly the four noble truths appeared—1, 2, 3, 4—in words of fire in the sky or anything like that. Rather, his awakening did not become real until he had to stammer it out to his first disciples, the five ascetics, in the Deer Park in Sarnath. The model of awakening in Mahayana Buddhism is that of a process which is perhaps never completed. The process of articulating the dharma goes on and on according to the needs of the different historical situations that it encounters. We could read the whole history of Buddhism, from the moment of the Buddha's awakening until now, as a process of seeking to imagine a way to respond both wisely and compassionately to the situation at hand,

~Stephen Batchelor, in Secular Buddhism