Enjoy can be a loaded word.
The arahants do freely enjoy the bliss of the deathless. As in ratana sutta:
Dedicated to Gotama’s dispensation,
Ye suppayuttā manasā daḷhena,
strong-minded, free of sense desire,
Nikkāmino gotamasāsanamhi;
they’ve attained the goal, plunged into freedom from death,
Te pattipattā amataṁ vigayha,
and enjoy the quenching they’ve freely gained.
Laddhā mudhā nibbutiṁ bhuñjamānā;
bhuñjamāna is the word here, it means eating/ consuming/ enjoying.
But indeed, for before arahanthood, they need to abandon the lesser enjoyment for the better one, according to classical Theravada, even a stream enterer needs to abandon the enjoyment of the fruition absorption of the stream entry to get to higher path and fruits.
And there’s the perception of non delight in the whole world.
There’s also the Jhānas which is said to be the bliss like nibbāna.
Burgs who’s a student of Pa Auk often says that Jhāna is temporary cessation of suffering. As Jhānas is still impermanent and thus subject to the suffering of change and conditionality, I have to assume he means at least gross suffering and the mental suffering from having a sense of self. As he put it, in Jhāna, there’s only one object for the mind, no bhavanga for the sense of self there. So the object, knower separation is gone, the mind is merged with the object.
He also said another state of meditation which is also a temporary cessation of suffering, which can be more blissful than Jhānas, which he calls just abiding in awareness itself. He uses the term dhammakāya, for this basic awareness, we call it consciousness. He got this from the tibetan teachers. Just rest effortlessly in the awareness. In the seen there is only the seen, in the heard, only the heard, in the sense, only the sensed and known only the known.
No sense of self in that experience, so there’s also no sense of separation between knower and known, even though the object is not single object.
Having seen a Facebook friend of mine having this state and been posting for years now, it’s not hard for me to believe that this state exist. Burgs also call this the awakened experience itself. It’s also commonly called non dual experience.
The trouble is, getting to this state doesn’t entail seeing nibbāna, that means one can be there but still not yet a stream winner, but due to the lack of sense of self (not all the time as that state is also impermanent), the practitioner may think that they are at least a stream enterer.
Nibbāna, according to Burgs is the cessation of conditioned things. Seeing nibbāna is seeing the conditioned things ceases, as well as their causes ceases, so no more arising. The is the awareness which witness this Nibbāna, which he call the dhammakāya, classical Theravada call it the lokuttara citta, path knowledge. Sutta calls it arising of the dhamma eye. It is this that makes one knows the true nature of parinibbāna, even though there’s no awareness which witness parinibbāna as it is also the ending of the awareness which knows both samsara and nibbāna.
It’s possible to have wrong views of the nature of parinibbāna, nibbāna, what is counted as stream entry, etc and thus one can reach deep levels of happiness without sense of self but still not gone beyond.
Arahants, having totally dismantled the sense of self, would have the mental bliss of nibbāna of just pure experience without a sense of self impinging on the experiences, but even then, they would call Jhānas and other absorptions, samadhi as happiness in the here and now.
Burgs clarified that dhammakāya is not nibbāna. Those who have seen dhammakāya may abide in them, but if they don’t take path knowledge, they are still having the underlying tendancy for the sense of self and all those suffering to come back and get entangled in samsara to suffer. So either they go become stream enterer or eventually drop back into suffering, there’s no permanent abiding in dhammakāya.
I believe many Mahayana practitioners or mahayana influenced practitioners may have made the same mistake of thinking that dhammakāya is safe ground. It could also explain why their “attained” bodhisattva, a
Arahants, even Buddhas can abide in dhammakāya until they come out and help people. From the Theravada perspective, these are not real attainments as they are still temporary, subject to fall away from.
Just in case dhammakāya becomes mystical, it’s just consciousness for us. Burgs called it the ground of being, that which all things arises from. When he uses this mahayana language he says the mind (the other 3 mental aggregates) appears in awareness (consciousness).
