Fear By Gary Soto I Need Help

If you could meet an enlightened person, what questions would you ask them?

Thank you to Marcus Ford for the ask to answer.Aha! To meet "an enlightened person" -- I shall indulge poetic fancy and write about Siddhartha Gotama, the historical Buddha.In his novel, Siddhartha (Suhrkamp hardback, 1922, p 33), Hesse wrote the following:"Und - so ist mein Gedanke, o Erhabener - keinem wird Erlösung zuteil durch Lehre! Keinem, o Ehrwűrdiger, wirst du in Worten und durch Lehre mitteilen und sagen können, was dir geschehen ist in der Stunde deiner Erleuctung!"And - this is my thought, oh Sublime One - deliverance is bestowed on none by doctrine. To none, oh Venerable Master, can you by words and deeds, reveal what happened to you in the hour of your enlightenment.I am a big fan of the old codger. In these two sentences, Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha, captures the epistemological problem of the doctrine. Hesse's German has a poetic quality lacking in my translation, in which I am already taking liberties.What I discovered to my delight, when I was teaching myself Sanskrit, was there were other contemporaneous languages, called Prakrits, or vernaculars, one of which was Māgadhī, the language the Buddha spoke. What has come down to us is transmitted in Pāḷī, a word which describes the medium rather than being the name of a language, effectively a literary form of the spoken vernacular.I also discovered that the words I was learning in Sanskrit and Pāḷī do not have direct semantic equivalents in English. Oh, no! This precipitated a spiritual and psychic crisis of confidence in me, that I had to completely rethink my assumptions and the whole basis of my knowledge about myself and the world. I can tell you, that was hard, and after 27 years my work is not done.For instance, दुक्ख (dukkha), a term that is used in his first discourse, "Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma", is not suffering. Sometimes it is translated as stress, or as dissatisfaction. None of these English terms captures what dukkha encompasses, as an existential state. If we use the word 'suffering', we are apt to start thinking in terms of mortification, or physical discomfort, because the English word has an etymology that would lead us that way. The technical terms of early Buddhism were often incorrectly translated, or, more or less wilfully misunderstood, But that's another story. So what? I would ask Siddhartha this question:Can you tell me the noble truth of liberation, in a way our posterity can understand?No doubt, he would tell me.