Here's an angle I haven't come across before. This is Robert Thurman speaking of German-born Lama Govinda:

"I believe it is accurate to say that Lama Govinda was the first Western scholar-explorer-experimenter-practicioner to experience and articulate the radical individualism at the heart of the Buddhist tradition. To this day, I use his wonderful simile for the difference between Buddhist enlightenment and the mystical experience of oneness that Vedantic Hinduism and many other mysticisms anticipate. He said that those mysticisms perceive the ultimate goal as being the moment when the little individual drop of water - which has fallen from the rain cloud to the mountain top, melted down from the glacial snows, flowed with myriad others into streams and waterfalls and broad rivers - finally merges itself indivisibly in the vast and shining sea.

But Buddhist enlightenment is rather when the individual drop itself becomes the repository of the whole vast ocean, when the shining sea slips into the individual drop! I cannot get over my admiration for this insight; it teaches enlightenment as the inconceivable reconciliation of the seemingly absolute dichotomy between individual and universal. It reveals it to be the complex, ecstatic, yet responsible state of supreme awareness that it is, rather than some sort of escapist extinction of the individual into some oblivious collective security."

Very articulate man, Robert Thurman, nice analogy.

Very articulate man, Robert Thurman, nice analogy.

Yes, and a rather lovely daughter in Uma Thurman (Kill Bill and others)

Very nicely put.