'The bodhisattva ideal in both classical and contemporary views is a developmental one. Achieving full enlightenment and the marvelous qualities of extraordinary virtue takes time, and thus how deep or complete the wisdom or virtue achieved by a particular bodhisattva is an admit of degree. To keep things simple, as well as congenial to a defensible naturalistic Buddhism which is also consistent with a form of twenty-first century Socially Engaged Buddhism that many Westerners find attractive, conceive of the bodhisattva in this metaphysical minimalist way. She is enlightened insofar as she understands the causal dependence of everything (pratityasamutpada), the impermanence of all things (anicca), and the nature of herself as anatman, as possessed of no immutable essence that is her self. She conscientiously stays on the Noble Eightfold Path, overcomes the common mental afflictions (egoism, avarice, hatred, and the like), eventually embodies the four divine abodes, the six perfections (incredible patience, great mental acuity, extremely subtle perceptual sensitivity to the needs of others and so on). Armed with compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy and equanimity, she takes her battle for happiness and against suffering into the world. The bodhisattva is a courageous and virtuous moral activist, a warrior. She lives an active life of virtue, having become sufficiently enlightened to understand that in so doing she attempts to realise her full humanity and to achieve whatever excellence lies within the human range. She is flawed, incomplete, unsettled in her own skin and in her world in all the normal human ways. Being human, her being, her relations, her existence are fragile. She works to live without illusion....'
Ref:
Flanagan, O. (2011). The Bodhisattva's Brain. Boston: MIT Press. pg 29
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