An Awakened Mind: Omniscience Worth Wanting

The Buddhist path is aimed at awakening, and the mind of a buddha is often characterized as omniscient.  So, the Buddhist path is a path to omniscience.  But what is that omniscience like?  There is no consensus.  Some say that this omniscience consists in a complete cessation of thought, in a state of insentient automaticity.  Others say that it involves the simultaneous awareness of every detail of the universe, past, present and future. And some simply affirm that a buddha's mind is inconceivable.  I will address the question from the standpoint of those who would take the Buddhist path seriously in the context of contemporary Western culture: "What would any omniscience to which we could rationally aspire be like?"  I will argue that we can develop a recognizably Buddhist account of that omniscience that is consistent with what we know about human beings, but that is soteriologically non-trivial.