Return

".....The Buddha’s return is a pivotal movement, one of those rare events when the divine penetrates history and transfigures it. Like Moses returning from Mt.Sinai, like Jesus appearing in the crowd at the river Jordan to be baptized by John, a man who has left the world returns to serve it, no longer merely human but charged with transcendent power. As the scriptures record of Moses and Jesus, we can imagine how the Buddha must have shone that bright spring morning in the Himalayan foothills.

Dazzled by the radiance of his personality, it is said, people gathered about him and asked, " Are you a god?"
"No."
"Are you an angel?"
"No."
"What are you then?"
The Buddha smiled and answered simply, " I am awake" - the literal meaning of the word buddha, from the Sanskrit root budh, to wake up. "

from the Introduction to
'The Dhammapada'
Translated with a general introduction by Eknath Eswaran