Delusion and Enlightenment is the usual pairing in Zen, and in Buddhism generally, it’s often Samsara and Nirvana.
Enlightenment/ Nirvana seem distinctly other, and difficult to reach, like trying to jump over a high barrier with your feet stuck in mud.
It’s difficult to relate them to actual practice, and I wonder if a better pairing might be Samskara/ Nirvana.
Samskara appears everywhere, but due, possibly, to accidents of translation, it’s often ignored. It’s one of the five skandas for instance, variously – and unhelpfully – rendered as ‘volition’ ‘willing’ ‘mental formation’, among others.
But it’s fundamental. It is our endless tendency to do something with our raw experience. Constructing desire, memory, a mind, a self, a world, endlessly.
Nirvana is just simply not doing that. Just letting everything be. It’s not a state, or a place, it’s a non doing. It’s here and now, not some place else, some other time.
Our practice is a wobbling between these two, and an illumination of that.