This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
Within some Buddhist traditions, questioning the idea of the unconditioned can sound almost heretical. For practitioners steeped in conditionality — as in Reflective Meditation — the question may not even arise in the same way. But Linda has been sitting with it for years, and this morning she brings it into the open.
The teaching that troubled her
Early in her Buddhist study, Linda encountered a formulation she found both compelling and puzzling: those who awaken have gone beyond conditionality and reside in the unconditioned. In the suttas she heard at the time, people would listen to the Buddha speak and suddenly become liberated. There was never a full explanation of how this happened — just the repeated fact of it. And the unconditioned was contrasted with everything that arises through causes and circumstances: our bodies and minds, our histories, our languages, our cultures, our relationships.
Awakening, in this view, is something beyond all of that.
Linda found this beyond her comprehension, and, at times, troubling. What would it actually mean to go beyond conditionality, when everything about our human experience is conditioned? And she noticed a consequence of this framing that bothered her: ordinary conditioned experience becomes devalued. It becomes lesser. Awakening becomes something we reach for beyond the life we are actually living.
She kept the question. She didn’t force it to resolve. And recently, she found it opened in a new direction through the writing of Dharma teacher Bernard Font of Bodhi College.
Can an awakened person have prejudices?
Font begins with a historical case: after the Buddha’s death, five hundred male monastics, considered to have awakened — referred to as Arahants — gathered to recite the teachings and the monastic rules of their time. The Buddha had said that monastic rules could be abolished when appropriate, that they were situational, responsive to conditions. But the five hundred abolished none of them. They considered every rule still relevant and authoritative.
Centuries later, the lineage of ordained Buddhist women — which the Buddha himself established during his lifetime — had disappeared in the Theravada tradition, the tradition from which Reflective Meditation has grown. And when women in the modern era sought full ordination again, many monks said it simply couldn’t be done under the existing rules.
Font’s provocation: by refusing to adapt the rules, the tradition is allowing a historical accident — the disappearance of women’s ordination — to override what the Buddha himself chose to create. And if the five hundred awakened beings who fixed those rules had been truly free from cultural conditioning, why did their decisions so perfectly reflect the gender hierarchies of their time and place?
Which leads to a harder question: can an awakened person have prejudices?
A conundrum worth sitting with
When we look across Buddhist history, Linda observes, many teachers considered to have awakened held views about women, sexuality, social hierarchy, and violence that today we’d find deeply problematic. We can say those people weren’t truly awakened. But if nobody across 2,500 years was truly awakened, has anyone ever been?
And if we apply that standard consistently — if awakening requires complete freedom from every limitation of historical and cultural context — it starts to sound like omniscience. A state no human being has ever achieved or perhaps could achieve. The Buddha himself, as the tradition records, did not claim to be omniscient, and held some views of women and his cultural surroundings that we would consider, by modern standards, unenlightened.
Linda doesn’t present this as a takedown of the tradition. She presents it as a conundrum worth sitting with — honestly, lightly, with the same curiosity the practice brings to everything else.
Awakening as situated, not transcendent
Font’s suggestion, which Linda finds genuinely useful, is that awakening might be relative without being merely relativistic. Those two things sound similar but aren’t. Relativism, taken to an extreme, means whatever is true for me is true, full stop — there are no shared reference points. Relative in Font’s sense means situated: arising within particular conditions, shaped by particular history and language and culture, without claiming to be the final or universal account of reality.
This is the direction Reflective Meditation already moves in. Practitioners aren’t asked to reach for the unconditioned. They’re asked to stand near their own experience — to come to their own understanding, within their particular conditions, over time.
And here Linda finds something she values: if awakening happens within the boundaries of what we know, those boundaries can expand. We encounter experiences that challenge our assumptions. We meet people whose lives reveal aspects of reality our own experience hasn’t shown us. We sit together in a community where each person’s inner world adds something to the whole. Gradually, what we can see grows.
Questioning as practice
She ends with a perhaps. Perhaps awakening — from a Reflective Meditation perspective — isn’t about becoming someone who has finally escaped conditionality. Perhaps it’s something that happens within it, incrementally, imperfectly, in community, over a lifetime.
That’s not a smaller vision. It may actually be a more honest one.
