(23) Is “becoming awakened to the Buddha-nature in one’s psyche” tantamount to “attainment of Buddhahood”? That depends. If a practitioner has, in the long course of self-cultivation, succeeded in first acquiring and then fortifying his or her psyche with such valuable qualities as are indispensable to attaining Buddhahood, then at the very moment he or she becomes awakened to and fully apprehended the Buddha-nature that is inherent in his or her psyche, he or she attains Buddhahood stark there and then. In case a practitioner has, in the long course of self-cultivation, succeeded in reaping only inadequate amounts of such valuable qualities as are indispensable to attaining Buddhahood—say, he or she has succeeded merely in obtaining the fruition of Hinayana; in that case he or she would be still ignorant of the dimensions of a penetrating view of emptiness and lacking in such compassion as is universal in nature—and, thus, has his or her psyche only imperfectly fortified, then what such a practitioner can harvest at the very moment when he or she becomes “awakened” as a result of his or her self-cultivation would merely be the appearance, in his or her perception, of an image of the Buddha. According to the Buddhist Canon, in the era of incipient Buddhism when Sakyamuni himself was still alive, the actual import of the term, “awakening” was “appearance in a practitioner’s perception of an image of Buddha”. Between “appearance in a practitioner’s perception of an image of Buddha” and “attainment of Buddhahood” there is a very long intermediary process for a practitioner to plough through. To illustrate this, let us refer to Suramgama Samdhi Sutra (楞严经). In the beginning of the sutra is told a story of how Ananda, one of Sakyamuni’s cousins and also one—being renowned for his erudition and an amazingly perfect memory and having won for himself the title of “the Most Learned”—of the latter’s ten principal disciples, was lured almost into breaking his solemn vow of celibacy by a lewd girl, Bojiti by name, from the clan of Matanga. Given the accomplishment—in terms of religious self-cultivation—already secured by Ananda at the time he was lured by the lewd girl and given the long years he attended personally on Gautama Buddha, it was still very difficult for Ananda to foil her temptation. It would be only natural for us to infer that for a practitioner who has made barely appreciable progress in his endeavor of religious self-cultivation, a lapse or two to occur in the course of his pilgrimage to awakening should not be counted as something out of the blue. Even after a practitioner has landed on an awakening, the prospect beyond is not irreversibly radiant, as his Buddhahood career, once he has embarked it, would call for his new strenuous effort to acclimate and toughen himself to his new situation.（From My Heart My Buddha）