The enlightenment of the Buddha was not primarily a religious discovery. It was not a mystical encounter with God or a god. It was not the reception of a divine mission to spread the Truth of God in the world. The Buddha's enlightenment was rather a human being's direct, exact, and comprehensive experience of the final nature and total structure of reality. It was the culmination for all time of the manifest ideals of any tradition of philosophical exploration or scientific investigation. Buddha is not a personal name; it is a title, meaning awakened, enlightened, and evolved. A Buddha's enlightenment is a perfect omniscience. A Buddha's mind is what theists have thought the mind of God would have to be like, totally knowing of every single detail of everything in an infinite universe, totally aware of everything--hence by definition inconceivable, incomprehensible to finite, ignorant, egocentric consciousness.
--Robert A.F. Thurman, Essential Tibetan Buddhism
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