General Introduction

In the Buddha’s Words - Introduction

This landmark collection is the definitive introduction to the Buddha’s teachings—in his own words.

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Uncovering the Structure of the Teaching

Though his teaching is highly systematic, there is no single text that can be ascribed to the Buddha in which he defines the architecture of the Dhamma, the scaffolding upon which he has framed his specific expressions of the doctrine. In the course of his long ministry, the Buddha taught in different ways as determined by occasion and circumstances. Sometimes he would enunciate invariable principles that stand at the heart of the teaching. Sometimes he would adapt the teaching to accord with the proclivities and aptitudes of the people who came to him for guidance. Sometimes he would adjust his exposition to fit a situation that required a particular response. But throughout the collections of texts that have come down to us as authorized “Word of the Buddha,” we do not find a single sutta, a single discourse, in which the Buddha has drawn together all the elements of his teaching and assigned them to their appropriate place within some comprehensive system.

While in a literate culture in which systematic thought is highly prized the lack of such a text with a unifying function might be viewed as a defect, in an entirely oral culture—as was the culture in which the Buddha lived and moved—the lack of a descriptive key to the Dhamma would hardly be considered significant. Within this culture neither teacher nor student aimed at conceptual completeness. The teacher did not intend to present a complete system of ideas; his pupils did not aspire to learn a complete system of ideas. The aim that united them in the process of learning—the process of transmission—was that of practical training, self-transformation, the realization of truth, and unshakable liberation of the mind. This does not mean, however, that the teaching was always expediently adapted to the situation at hand. At times the Buddha would present more panoramic views of the Dhamma that united many components of the path in a graded or wide-ranging structure. But though there are several discourses that exhibit a broad scope, they still do not embrace all elements of the Dhamma in one overarching scheme.

The purpose of the present book is to develop and exemplify such a scheme. I here attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of the Buddha’s teaching that incorporates a wide variety of suttas into an organic structure. This structure, I hope, will bring to light the intentional pattern underlying the Buddha’s formulation of the Dhamma and thus provide the reader with guidelines for understanding Early Buddhism as a whole. I have selected the suttas almost entirely from the four major collections or Nikāyas of the Pāli Canon, though I have also included a few texts from the Udāna and Itivuttaka, two small books of the fifth collection, the Khuddaka Nikāya. Each chapter opens with its own introduction, in which I explain the basic concepts of Early Buddhism that the texts exemplify and show how the texts give expression to these ideas.

I will briefly supply background information about the Nikāyas later in this introduction. First, however, I want to outline the scheme that I have devised to organize the suttas. Although my particular use of this scheme may be original, it is not sheer innovation but is based upon a threefold distinction that the Pāli commentaries make among the types of benefits to which the practice of the Dhamma leads: (1) welfare and happiness visible in this present life; (2) welfare and happiness pertaining to future lives; and (3) the ultimate good, Nibbāna (Skt: nirvāṇa).

Three preliminary chapters are designed to lead up to those that embody this threefold scheme. Chapter I is a survey of the human condition as it is apart from the appearance of a Buddha in the world. Perhaps this was the way human life appeared to the Bodhisatta—the future Buddha—as he dwelled in the Tusita heaven gazing down upon the earth, awaiting the appropriate occasion to descend and take his final birth. We behold a world in which human beings are driven helplessly toward old age and death; in which they are spun around by circumstances so that they are oppressed by bodily pain, cast down by failure and misfortune, made anxious and fearful by change and deterioration. It is a world in which people aspire to live in harmony, but in which their untamed emotions repeatedly compel them, against their better judgment, to lock horns in conflicts that escalate into violence and wholesale devastation. Finally, taking the broadest view of all, it is a world in which sentient beings are propelled forward, by their own ignorance and craving, from one life to the next, wandering blindly through the cycle of rebirths called saṃsāra.

Chapter II gives an account of the Buddha’s descent into this world. He comes as the “one person” who appears out of compassion for the world, whose arising in the world is “the manifestation of great light.” We follow the story of his conception and birth, of his renunciation and quest for enlightenment, of his realization of the Dhamma, and of his decision to teach. The chapter ends with his first discourse to the five monks, his first disciples, in the Deer Park near Bārāṇasī.

Chapter III is intended to sketch the special features of the Buddha’s teaching, and by implication, the attitude with which a prospective student should approach the teaching. The texts tell us that the Dhamma is not a secret or esoteric teaching but one which “shines when taught openly.” It does not demand blind faith in authoritarian scriptures, in divine revelations, or infallible dogmas, but invites investigation and appeals to personal experience as the ultimate criterion for determining its validity. The teaching is concerned with the arising and cessation of suffering, which can be observed in one’s own experience. It does not set up even the Buddha as an unimpeachable authority but invites us to examine him to determine whether he fully deserves our trust and confidence. Finally, it offers a step-by-step procedure whereby we can put the teaching to the test, and by doing so realize the ultimate truth for ourselves.

With chapter IV, we come to texts dealing with the first of the three types of benefit the Buddha’s teaching is intended to bring. This is called “the welfare and happiness visible in this present life” (diṭṭhadhamma-hitasukha), the happiness that comes from following ethical norms in one’s family relationships, livelihood, and communal activities. Although Early Buddhism is often depicted as a radical discipline of renunciation directed to a transcendental goal, the Nikāyas reveal the Buddha to have been a compassionate and pragmatic teacher who was intent on promoting a social order in which people can live together peacefully and harmoniously in accordance with ethical guidelines. This aspect of Early Buddhism is evident in the Buddha’s teachings on the duties of children to their parents, on the mutual obligations of husbands and wives, on right livelihood, on the duties of the ruler toward his subjects, and on the principles of communal harmony and respect.

The second type of benefit to which the Buddha’s teaching leads is the subject of chapter V, called the welfare and happiness pertaining to the future life (samparāyika-hitasukha). This is the happiness achieved by obtaining a fortunate rebirth and success in future lives through one’s accumulation of merit. The term “merit” (puñña) refers to wholesome kamma (Skt: karma) considered in terms of its capacity to produce favorable results within the round of rebirths. I begin this chapter with a selection of texts on the teaching of kamma and rebirth. This leads us to general texts on the idea of merit, followed by selections on the three principal “bases of merit” recognized in the Buddha’s discourses: giving (dāna), moral discipline (sīla), and meditation (bhāvanā). Since meditation figures prominently in the third type of benefit, the kind of meditation emphasized here, as a basis for merit, is that productive of the most abundant mundane fruits, the four “divine abodes” (brahmavihāra), particularly the development of loving-kindness.

Chapter VI is transitional, intended to prepare the way for the chapters to follow. While demonstrating that the practice of his teaching does indeed conduce to happiness and good fortune within the bounds of mundane life, in order to lead people beyond these bounds, the Buddha exposes the danger and inadequacy in all conditioned existence. He shows the defects in sensual pleasures, the shortcomings of material success, the inevitability of death, and the impermanence of all conditioned realms of being. To arouse in his disciples an aspiration for the ultimate good, Nibbāna, the Buddha again and again underscores the perils of saṃsāra. Thus this chapter comes to a climax with two dramatic texts that dwell on the misery of bondage to the round of repeated birth and death.

The following four chapters are devoted to the third benefit that the Buddha’s teaching is intended to bring: the ultimate good (paramattha), the attainment of Nibbāna. The first of these, chapter VII, gives a general overview of the path to liberation, which is treated analytically through definitions of the factors of the Noble Eightfold Path and dynamically through an account of the training of the monk. A long sutta on the graduated path surveys the monastic training from the monk’s initial entry upon the life of renunciation to his attainment of arahantship, the final goal.

Chapter VIII focuses upon the taming of the mind, the major emphasis in the monastic training. I here present texts that discuss the obstacles to mental development, the means of overcoming these obstacles, different methods of meditation, and the states to be attained when the obstacles are overcome and the disciple gains mastery over the mind. In this chapter I introduce the distinction between samatha and vipassanā, serenity and insight, the one leading to samādhi or concentration, the other to paññā or wisdom. However, I include texts that treat insight only in terms of the methods used to generate it, not in terms of its actual contents.

Chapter IX, titled “Shining the Light of Wisdom,” deals with the content of insight. For Early Buddhism, and indeed for almost all schools of Buddhism, insight or wisdom is the principal instrument of liberation. Thus in this chapter I focus on the Buddha’s teachings about such topics pivotal to the development of wisdom as right view, the five aggregates, the six sense bases, the eighteen elements, dependent origination, and the Four Noble Truths. This chapter ends with a selection of texts on Nibbāna, the ultimate goal of wisdom.

The final goal is not achieved abruptly but by passing through a series of stages that transforms an individual from a worldling into an arahant, a liberated one. Thus chapter X, “The Planes of Realization,” offers a selection of texts on the main stages along the way. I first present the series of stages as a progressive sequence; then I return to the starting point and examine three major milestones within this progression: stream-entry, the stage of nonreturner, and arahantship. I conclude with a selection of suttas on the Buddha, the foremost among the arahants, here spoken of under the epithet he used most often when referring to himself, the Tathāgata.

The Origins of the Nikāyas

The texts I have drawn upon to fill out my scheme are, as I said above, all selected from the Nikāyas, the main sutta collections of the Pāli Canon. Some words are needed to explain the origin and nature of these sources.

The Buddha did not write down any of his teachings, nor were his teachings recorded in writing by his disciples. Indian culture at the time the Buddha lived was still predominantly preliterate.1 The Buddha wandered from town to town in the Ganges plain, instructing his monks and nuns, giving sermons to the householders who flocked to hear him speak, answering the questions of curious inquirers, and engaging in discussions with people from all classes of society. The records of his teachings that we have do not come from his own pen or from transcriptions made by those who heard the teaching from him, but from monastic councils held after his parinibbāna—his passing away into Nibbāna—for the purpose of preserving his teaching.

It is unlikely that the teachings that derive from these councils reproduce the Buddha’s words verbatim. The Buddha must have spoken spontaneously and elaborated upon his themes in countless ways in response to the varied needs of those who sought his guidance. Preserving by oral transmission such a vast and diverse range of material would have bordered on the impossible. To mold the teachings into a format suitable for preservation, the monks responsible for the texts would have had to collate and edit them to make them better fit for listening, retention, recitation, memorization, and repetition—the five major elements in oral transmission. This process, which may have already been started during the Buddha’s lifetime, would have led to a fair degree of simplification and standardization of the material to be preserved.

During the Buddha’s life, the discourses were classified into nine categories according to literary genre: sutta (prose discourses), geyya (mixed prose and verse), veyyākaraṇa (answers to questions), gāthā (verse), udāna (inspired utterances), itivuttaka (memorable sayings), jātaka (stories of past births), abbhutadhamma (marvelous qualities), and vedalla (catechism). At some point after his passing, this older system of classification was superceded by a new scheme that ordered the texts into larger collections called Nikāyas in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition, ﬁgamas in the North Indian Buddhist schools. Exactly when the Nikāya-Āgama scheme became ascendant is not known with certainty, but once it appeared it almost completely replaced the older system.

The Cullavagga, one of the books of the Pāli Vinaya Piṭaka, gives an account of how the authorized texts were compiled at the first Buddhist council, held three months after the Buddha’s parinibbāna. According to this report, shortly after the Buddha’s death the Elder Mahākassapa, the de facto head of the Saṅgha, selected five hundred monks, all arahants or liberated ones, to meet and compile an authoritative version of the teachings. The council took place during the rains retreat at Rājagaha (modern Rajgir), the capital of Magadha, then the dominant state of Middle India. Mahākassapa first requested the Venerable Upāli, the foremost specialist on disciplinary matters, to recite the Vinaya. On the basis of this recitation, the Vinaya Piṭaka, the Compilation on Discipline, was compiled. Mahākassapa then asked the Venerable Ānanda to recite “the Dhamma,” that is, the discourses, and on the basis of this recitation, the Sutta Piṭaka, the Compilation of Discourses, was compiled.

The Cullavagga states that when Ānanda recited the Sutta Piṭaka, the Nikāyas had the same contents as they do now, with the suttas arranged in the same sequence as they now appear in the Pāli Canon. This narrative doubtlessly records past history through the lens of a later period. The ﬁgamas of the Buddhist schools other than the Theravāda correspond to the four main Nikāyas, but they classify suttas differently and arrange their contents in a different order from the Pāli Nikāyas. This suggests that if the Nikāya-Āgama arrangement did arise at the first council, the council had not yet assigned suttas to their definitive places within this scheme. Alternatively, it is possible that this scheme arose at a later time. It could have arisen at some point after the first council but before the Saṅgha split into different schools. If it arose during the age of sectarian divisions, it might have been introduced by one school and then been borrowed by others, so that the different schools would assign their texts to different places within the scheme.

While the Cullavagga’s account of the first council may include legendary material mixed with historical fact, there seems no reason to doubt Ānanda’s role in the Ānanda preservation of the discourses. As the Buddha’s personal attendant, Ānanda had learned the discourses from him and the other great disciples, kept them in mind, and taught them to others. During the Buddha’s life he was praised for his retentive capacities and was appointed “foremost of those who have learned much” (etadaggaṃ bahussutānaṃ). Few monks might have had memories that could equal Ānanda’s, but already during the Buddha’s lifetime individual monks must already have begun to specialize in particular texts. The standardization and simplification of the material would have facilitated memorization. Once the texts became classified into the Nikāyas or ﬁgamas, the challenges of preserving and transmitting the textual heritage were solved by organizing the textual specialists into companies dedicated to specific collections. Different companies within the Saṅgha could thus focus on memorizing and interpreting different collections and the community as a whole could avoid placing excessive demands on the memories of individual monks. It is in this way that the teachings would continue to be transmitted for the next three or four hundred years, until they were finally committed to writing.

In the centuries following the Buddha’s death, the Saṅgha became divided over disciplinary and doctrinal issues until by the third century after the parinibbāna there were at least eighteen schools of Sectarian Buddhism. Each sect probably had its own collection of texts regarded more or less as canonical, though it is possible that several closely affiliated sects shared the same collection of authorized texts. While the different Buddhist schools may have organized their collections differently and though their suttas show differences of detail, the individual suttas are often remarkably similar, sometimes almost identical, and the doctrines and practices they delineate are essentially the same. The doctrinal differences between the schools did not arise from the suttas themselves but from the interpretations the textual specialists imposed upon them. Such differences hardened after the rival schools formalized their philosophical principles in treatises and commentaries expressive of their distinctive standpoints on doctrinal issues. So far as we can determine, the refined philosophical systems had only minimal impact on the original texts themselves, which the schools seemed disinclined to manipulate to suit their doctrinal agendas. Instead, by means of their commentaries, they endeavored to interpret the suttas in such a way as to draw out ideas that supported their own views. It is not unusual for such interpretations to appear defensive and contrived, apologetic against the words of the original texts themselves.

The Pāli Canon

Sadly, the canonical collections belonging to most of the early mainstream Indian Buddhist schools were lost when Indian Buddhism was devastated by the Muslims that invaded northern India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These invasions effectively sounded the death knell for Buddhism in the land of its birth. Only one complete collection of texts belonging to one of the early Indian Buddhist schools managed to survive intact. This is the collection preserved in the language that we know as Pāli. This collection belonged to the ancient Theravāda school, which had been transplanted to Sri Lanka in the third century b.c.e. and thus managed to escape the havoc wrought upon Buddhism in the motherland. About the same time, the Theravāda also spread to southeast Asia and in later centuries became dominant throughout the region.

The Pāli Canon is the collection of texts the Theravāda regards as Word of the Buddha (buddhavacana). The fact that the texts of this collection have survived as a single canon does not mean that they can all be dated from the same period; nor does it mean that the texts forming its most archaic nucleus are necessarily more ancient than their counterparts from the other Buddhist schools, many of which have survived in Chinese or Tibetan translation as parts of entire canons or, in a few cases, as isolated texts in another Indian language. Nevertheless, the Pāli Canon has a special importance for us, and that is so for at least three reasons.

First, it is a complete collection all belonging to a single school. Even though we can detect clear signs of historical development between different portions of the canon, this alignment with a single school gives the texts a certain degree of uniformity. Among the texts stemming from the same period, we can even speak of a homogeneity of contents, a single flavor underlying the manifold expressions of the doctrine. This homogeneity is most evident in the four Nikāyas and the older parts of the fifth Nikāya and gives us reason to believe that with these texts—allowing for the qualification expressed above, that they have counterparts in other extinct Buddhist schools—we have reached the most ancient stratum of Buddhist literature discoverable.

Second, the entire collection has been preserved in a Middle IndoAryan language, one closely related to the language (or, more likely, the various regional dialects) that the Buddha himself spoke. We call this language Pāli, but the name for the language actually arose through a misunderstanding. The word pāli properly means “text,” that is, the canonical text as distinct from the commentaries. The commentators refer to the language in which the texts are preserved as pālibhāsā, “the language of the texts.” At some point, the term was misunderstood to mean “the Pāli language,” and once the misconception arose, it took root and has been with us ever since. Scholars regard this language as a hybrid showing features of several Prakrit dialects used around the third century b.c.e., subjected to a partial process of Sanskritization.8 While the language is not identical with any the Buddha himself would have spoken, it belongs to the same broad linguistic family as those he might have used and originates from the same conceptual matrix. This language thus reflects the thought-world that the Buddha inherited from the wider Indian culture into which he was born, so that its words capture the subtle nuances of that thoughtworld without the intrusion of alien influences inevitable in even the best and most scrupulous translations. This contrasts with Chinese, Tibetan, or English translations of the texts, which reverberate with the connotations of the words chosen from the target languages.

The third reason the Pāli Canon has special importance is that this collection is authoritative for a contemporary Buddhist school. Unlike the textual collections of the extinct schools of Early Buddhism, which are purely of academic interest, this collection still brims with life. It inspires the faith of millions of Buddhists from the villages and monasteries of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Southeast Asia to the cities and meditation centers of Europe and the Americas. It shapes their understanding, guides them in the face of difficult ethical choices, informs their meditative practices, and offers them the keys to liberating insight.

The Pāli Canon is commonly known as the Tipiṭaka, the “Three Baskets” or “Three Compilations.” This threefold classification was not unique to the Theravāda school but was in common use among the Indian Buddhist schools as a way to categorize the Buddhist canonical texts. Even today the scriptures preserved in Chinese translation are known as the Chinese Tripiṭaka. The three compilations of the Pāli Canon are:

The Vinaya Piṭaka, the Compilation of Discipline, which contains the rules laid down for the guidance of the monks and nuns and the regulations prescribed for the harmonious functioning of the monastic order.
The Sutta Piṭaka, the Compilation of Discourses, which contains the suttas, the discourses of the Buddha and those of his chief disciples as well as inspirational works in verse, verse narratives, and certain works of a commentarial nature.
The Abhidhamma Piṭaka, the Compilation of Philosophy, a collection of seven treatises which subject the Buddha’s teachings to rigorous philosophical systematization.

The Abhidhamma Piṭaka is obviously the product of a later phase in the evolution of Buddhist thought than the other two Piṭakas. The Pāli version represents the Theravāda school’s attempt to systematize the older teachings. Other early schools apparently had their own Abhidhamma systems. The Sarvāstivāda system is the only one whose canonical texts have survived intact in their entirety. Its canonical collection, like the Pāli version, also consists of seven texts. These were originally composed in Sanskrit but are preserved in full only in Chinese translation. The system they define differs significantly from that of its Theravāda counterpart in both formulation and philosophy.

The Sutta Piṭaka, which contains the records of the Buddha’s discourses and discussions, consists of five collections called Nikāyas. In the age of the commentators they were also known as ﬁgamas, like their counterparts in northern Buddhism. The four major Nikāyas are:

The Dīgha Nikāya: the Collection of Long Discourses, thirty-four suttas arranged into three vaggas, or books.
The Majjhima Nikāya: the Collection of Middle Length Discourses, 152 suttas arranged into three vaggas.
The Saṃyutta Nikāya: the Collection of Connected Discourses, close to three thousand short suttas grouped into fifty-six chapters, called saṃyuttas, which are in turn collected into five vaggas.
The Aṅguttara Nikāya: the Collection of Numerical Discourses (or, perhaps, “Incremental Discourses”), approximately 2,400 short suttas arranged into eleven chapters, called nipātas.

The Dīgha Nikāya and Majjhima Nikāya, at first glance, seem to be established principally on the basis of length: the longer discourses go into the Dīgha, the middle-length discourses into the Majjhima. Careful tabulations of their contents, however, suggest that another factor might underlie the distinction between these two collections. The suttas of the Dīgha Nikāya are largely aimed at a popular audience and seem intended to attract potential converts to the teaching by demonstrating the superiority of the Buddha and his doctrine. The suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya are largely directed inward toward the Buddhist community and seem designed to acquaint newly ordained monks with the doctrines and practices of Buddhism.9 It remains an open question whether these pragmatic purposes are the determining criteria behind these two Nikāyas or whether the primary criterion is length, with these pragmatic purposes following as incidental consequences of their respective differences in length.

The Saṃyutta Nikāya is organized by way of subject matter. Each subject is the “yoke” (saṃyoga) that connects the discourses into a saṃyutta or chapter. Hence the title of the collection, the “connected (saṃyutta) discourses.” The first book, the Book with Verses, is unique in being compiled on the basis of literary genre. It contains suttas in mixed prose and verse, arranged in eleven chapters by way of subject. The other four books each contain long chapters dealing with the principal doctrines of Early Buddhism. Books II, III, and IV each open with a long chapter devoted to a theme of major importance, respectively, dependent origination (chapter 12: Nidānasaṃyutta); the five aggregates (chapter 22: Khandhasaṃyutta); and the six internal and external sense bases (chapter 35: Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta). Part V deals with the principal groups of training factors that, in the post-canonical period, come to be called the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment (bodhipakkhiyā dhammā). These include the Noble Eightfold Path (chapter 45: Maggasaṃyutta), the seven factors of enlightenment (chapter 46: Bojjhaṅgasaṃyutta), and the four establishments of mindfulness (chapter 47: Satipaṭṭhānasaṃyutta). From its contents, we might infer that the Saṃyutta Nikāya was intended to serve the needs of two groups within the monastic order. One consisted of the doctrinal specialists, those monks and nuns who sought to explore the deep implications of the Dhamma and to elucidate them for their companions in the religious life. The other consisted of those devoted to the meditative development of insight.

The Aṅguttara Nikāya is arranged according to a numerical scheme derived from a peculiar feature of the Buddha’s pedagogic method. To facilitate easy comprehension and memorization, the Buddha often formulated his discourses by way of numerical sets, a format that helped to ensure that the ideas he conveyed would be easily retained in mind. The Aṅguttara Nikāya assembles these numerical discourses into a single massive work of eleven nipātas or chapters, each representing the number of terms upon which the constituent suttas have been framed. Thus there is the Chapter of the Ones (ekakanipāta), the Chapter of the Twos (dukanipāta), the Chapter of the Threes (tikanipāta), and so forth, up to and ending with the Chapter of the Elevens (ekādasanipāta). Since the various groups of path factors have been included in the Saṃyutta, the Aṅguttara can focus on those aspects of the training that have not been incorporated in the repetitive sets. The Aṅguttara includes a notable proportion of suttas addressed to lay followers dealing with the ethical and spiritual concerns of life within the world, including family relationships (husbands and wives, children and parents) and the proper ways to acquire, save, and utilize wealth. Other suttas deal with the practical training of monks. The numerical arrangement of this collection makes it particularly convenient for formal instruction, and thus it could easily be drawn upon by elder monks when teaching their pupils and by preachers when giving sermons to the laity.

Besides the four major Nikāyas, the Pāli Sutta Piṭaka includes a fifth Nikāya, called the Khuddaka Nikāya. This name means the Minor Collection. Perhaps it originally consisted merely of a number of minor works that could not be included in the four major Nikāyas. But as more and more works were composed over the centuries and added to it, its dimensions swelled until it became the most voluminous of the five Nikāyas. At the heart of the Khuddaka, however, is a small constellation of short works composed either entirely in verse (namely, the Dhammapada, the Theragāthā, and the Therīgāthā) or in mixed prose and verse (the Suttanipāta, the Udāna, and the Itivuttaka) whose style and contents suggest that they are of great antiquity. Other texts of the Khuddaka Nikāya—such as the Paṭisambhidāmagga and the two Niddesas—represent the standpoint of the Theravāda school and thus must have been composed during the period of Sectarian Buddhism, when the early schools had taken their separate paths of doctrinal development.

The four Nikāyas of the Pāli Canon have counterparts in the ﬁgamas of the Chinese Tripiṭaka, though these are from different early schools. Corresponding to each respectively there is a Dirghāgama, probably stemming from the Dharmaguptaka school, originally translated from a Prakrit; a Madhyamāgama and Samyuktāgama, both stemming from the Sarvāstivāda school and translated from Sanskrit; and an Ekottarāgama, corresponding to the Aṅguttara Nikāya, generally thought to have belonged to a branch of the Mahāsāṅghika school and to have been translated from a dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan or a mixed dialect of Prakrit with Sanskrit elements. The Chinese Tripiṭaka also contains translations of individual sūtras from the four collections, perhaps from still other unidentified schools, and translations of individual books from the Minor Collection, including two translations of a Dhammapada (one said to be very close to the Pāli version) and parts of the Suttanipāta, which, as a unified work, does not exist in Chinese translation.

A Note on Style

Readers of the Pāli suttas are often annoyed by the repetitiveness of the texts. It is difficult to tell how much of this stems from the Buddha himself, who as an itinerant preacher must have used repetition to reinforce his points, and how much is due to the compilers. It is obvious, however, that a high proportion of the repetitiveness derives from the process of oral transmission.

To avoid excessive repetitiveness in the translation I have had to make ample use of elisions. In this respect I follow the printed editions of the Pāli texts, which are also highly abridged, but a translation intended for a contemporary reader requires still more compression if it is to avoid risking the reader’s wrath. On the other hand, I have been keen to see that nothing essential to the original text, including the flavor, has been lost due to the abridgment. The ideals of considerateness to the reader and fidelity to the text sometimes make contrary demands on a translator.

The treatment of repetition patterns in which the same utterance is made regarding a set of items is a perpetual problem in translating Pāli suttas. When translating a sutta about the five aggregates, for example, one is tempted to forgo the enumeration of the individual aggregates and instead turn the sutta into a general statement about the aggregates as a class. To my mind, such an approach risks turning translation into paraphrase and thereby losing too much of the original. My general policy has been to translate the full utterance in relation to the first and last members of the set and merely to enumerate the intermediate members separated by ellipsis points. Thus, in a sutta about the five aggregates, I render the statement in full only for form and consciousness, and in between have “feeling … perception … volitional formations …,” implying thereby that the full statement likewise applies to them.

This approach has required the frequent use of ellipsis points, a practice that also invites criticism. When faced with repetitive passages in the narrative framework, I have sometimes condensed them rather than use ellipsis points to show where text is being elided. However, with texts of doctrinal exposition I adhere to the practice described in the preceding paragraph. I think the translator has the responsibility, when translating passages of doctrinal significance, to show exactly where text is being elided, and for this ellipsis points remain the best tool at hand.

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© Bhikkhu Bodhi, In the Buddha's Words (Wisdom Publications, 2005)

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I. The Human Condition

Introduction

In the Buddha’s Words - Selections

Introduction to Part I, “The Human Condition”

Like other religious teachings, the Buddha’s teaching originates as a response to the strains at the heart of the human condition. What distinguishes his teaching from other religious approaches to the human condition is the directness, thoroughness, and uncompromising realism with which he looks at these strains. The Buddha does not offer us palliatives that leave the underlying maladies untouched beneath the surface; rather, he traces our existential illness down to its most fundamental causes, so persistent and destructive, and shows us how these can be totally uprooted. However, while the Dhamma will eventually lead to the wisdom that eradicates the causes of suffering, it does not begin there but with observations about the hard facts of everyday experience. Here too its directness, thoroughness, and tough realism are evident. The teaching begins by calling upon us to develop a faculty called yoniso manasikāra, careful attention. The Buddha asks us to stop drifting thoughtlessly through our lives and instead to pay careful attention to simple truths that are everywhere available to us, clamoring for the sustained consideration they deserve.

One of the most obvious and inescapable of these truths is also among the most difficult for us to fully acknowledge, namely, that we are bound to grow old, fall ill, and die. It is commonly assumed that the Buddha beckons us to recognize the reality of old age and death in order to motivate us to enter the path of renunciation leading to Nibbāna, complete liberation from the round of birth and death. However, while this may be his ultimate intention, it is not the first response he seeks to evoke in us when we turn to him for guidance. The initial response the Buddha intends to arouse in us is an ethical one. By calling our attention to our bondage to old age and death, he seeks to inspire in us a firm resolution to turn away from unwholesome ways of living and to embrace instead wholesome alternatives.

Again, the Buddha grounds his initial ethical appeal not only upon a compassionate feeling for other beings, but also upon our instinctive concern for our own long-term welfare and happiness. He tries to make us see that to act in accordance with ethical guidelines will enable us to secure our own well-being both now and in the long-term future. His argument hinges on the important premise that actions have consequences. If we are to alter our accustomed ways, we must be convinced of the validity of this principle. Specifically, to change from a self-stultifying way of life to one that is truly fruitful and inwardly rewarding, we must realize that our actions have consequences for ourselves, consequences that can rebound upon us both in this life and in subsequent lives.

The three suttas that constitute the first section of this chapter establish this point eloquently, each in its own way. Text I,1(1) enunciates the inevitable law that all beings who have taken birth must undergo aging and death. Although at first glance the discourse seems to be stating a mere fact of nature, by citing as examples members of the upper strata of society (wealthy rulers, brahmins, and householders) and liberated arahants, it insinuates a subtle moral message into its words. Text I,1(2) brings out this message more explicitly with its impressive simile of the mountain, which drives home the point that when “aging and death are rolling in” on us, our task in life is to live righteously and do wholesome and meritorious deeds. The sutta on the “divine messengers”—Text I,1(3)—establishes the corollary to this: when we fail to recognize the “divine messengers” in our midst, when we miss the hidden warning signals of old age, illness, and death, we become negligent and behave recklessly, creating unwholesome kamma with the potential to yield dreadful consequences.

The realization that we are bound to grow old and die breaks the spell of infatuation cast over us by sensual pleasures, wealth, and power. It dispels the mist of confusion and motivates us to take fresh stock of our purposes in life. We may not be ready to give up family and possessions for a life of homeless wandering and solitary meditation, but this is not an option the Buddha generally expects of his householder disciples. Rather, as we saw above, the first lesson he draws from the fact that our lives end in old age and death is an ethical one interwoven with the twin principles of kamma and rebirth. The law of kamma stipulates that our unwholesome and wholesome actions have consequences extending far beyond this present life: unwholesome actions lead to rebirth in states of misery and bring future pain and suffering; wholesome actions lead to a pleasant rebirth and bring future well-being and happiness. Since we have to grow old and die, we should be constantly aware that any present prosperity we might enjoy is merely temporary. We can enjoy it only as long as we are young and healthy; and when we die, our newly acquired kamma will gain the opportunity to ripen and bring forth its own results. We must then reap the due fruits of our deeds. With an eye to our long-term future welfare, we should scrupulously avoid evil deeds that result in suffering and diligently engage in wholesome deeds that generate happiness here and in future lives.

In the second section, we explore three aspects of human life that I have collected under the heading “The Tribulations of Unreflective Living.” These types of suffering differ from those connected with old age and death in an important respect. Old age and death are bound up with bodily existence and are thus unavoidable, common to both ordinary people and liberated arahants—a point made in the first text of this chapter. In contrast, the three texts included in this section all distinguish between the ordinary person, called “the uninstructed worldling” (assutavā puthujjana), and the wise follower of the Buddha, called the “instructed noble disciple” (sutavā ariyasāvaka).

The first of these distinctions, drawn in Text I,2(1), revolves around the response to painful feelings. Both the worldling and the noble disciple experience painful bodily feelings, but they respond to these feelings differently. The worldling reacts to them with aversion and therefore, on top of the painful bodily feeling, also experiences a painful mental feeling: sorrow, resentment, or distress. The noble disciple, when afflicted with bodily pain, endures such feeling patiently, without sorrow, resentment, or distress. It is commonly assumed that physical and mental pain are inseparably linked, but the Buddha makes a clear demarcation between the two. He holds that while bodily existence is inevitably bound up with physical pain, such pain need not trigger the emotional reactions of misery, fear, resentment, and distress with which we habitually respond to it. Through mental training we can develop the mindfulness and clear comprehension necessary to endure physical pain courageously, with patience and equanimity. Through insight we can develop sufficient wisdom to overcome our dread of painful feelings and our need to seek relief in distracting binges of sensual selfindulgence.

Another aspect of human life that brings to the fore the differences between the worldling and the noble disciple is the changing vicissitudes of fortune. The Buddhist texts neatly reduce these to four pairs of opposites, known as the eight worldly conditions (aṭṭha lokadhammā): gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Text I,2(2) shows how the worldling and the noble disciple differ in their responses to these changes. While the worldling is elated by success in achieving gain, fame, praise, and pleasure, and dejected when confronted with their undesired opposites, the noble disciple remains unperturbed. By applying the understanding of impermanence to both favorable and unfavorable conditions, the noble disciple can abide in equanimity, not attached to favorable conditions, not repelled by unfavorable ones. Such a disciple gives up likes and dislikes, sorrow and distress, and ultimately wins the highest blessing of all: complete freedom from suffering.

Text I,2(3) examines the plight of the worldling at a still more fundamental level. Because they misconceive things, worldlings are agitated by change, especially when that change affects their own bodies and minds. The Buddha classifies the constituents of body and mind into five categories known as “the five aggregates subject to clinging” (pañc’upādānakkhandhā): form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness (for details, see pp. 305–07). These five aggregates are the building blocks that we typically use to construct our sense of personal identity; they are the things that we cling to as being “mine,” “I,” and “my self.” Whatever we identify with, whatever we take to be a self or the possessions of a self, can all be classified among these five aggregates. The five aggregates are thus the ultimate grounds of “identification” and “appropriation,” the two basic activities by which we establish a sense of selfhood. Since we invest our notions of selfhood and personal identity with an intense emotional concern, when the objects to which they are fastened—the five aggregates—undergo change, we naturally experience anxiety and distress. In our perception, it is not mere impersonal phenomena that are undergoing change, but our very identities, our cherished selves, and this is what we fear most of all. However, as the present text shows, a noble disciple has clearly seen with wisdom the delusive nature of all notions of permanent selfhood and thus no longer identifies with the five aggregates. Therefore the noble disciple can confront their change without anxious concern, unperturbed in the face of their alteration, decay, and destruction.

Agitation and turmoil afflict human life not only at the personal and private level, but also in our social interactions. From the most ancient times, our world has always been one of violent confrontations and conflict. The names, places, and instruments of destruction may change, but the forces behind them, the motivations, the expressions of greed and hate, remain fairly constant. The Nikāyas testify that the Buddha was intensely aware of this dimension of the human condition. Although his teaching, with its stress on ethical self-discipline and mental self-cultivation, aims primarily at personal enlightenment and liberation, the Buddha also sought to offer people a refuge from the violence and injustice that rack human lives in such cruel ways. This is apparent in his emphasis on loving-kindness and compassion; on harmlessness in action and gentleness in speech; and on the peaceful resolution of disputes.

The third section of this chapter includes four short texts dealing with the underlying roots of violent conflict and injustice. We can see from these texts that the Buddha does not clamor for changes merely in the outer structures of society. He demonstrates that these dark phenomena are external projections of the unwholesome proclivities of the human mind and thus points to the need for inner change as a parallel condition for establishing peace and social justice. Each of the four texts included in this section traces conflict, violence, political oppression, and economic injustice back to their causes; each in its own way locates these causes within the mind.

Text I,3(1) explains conflicts between laypeople as arising from attachment to sensual pleasures, conflicts between ascetics as arising from attachment to views. Text I,3(2), a dialogue between the Buddha and Sakka, the pre-Buddhistic Indian ruler of the devas, traces hatred and enmity to envy and niggardliness; from there the Buddha traces them back to fundamental distortions that affect the way our perception and cognition process the information provided by the senses. Text I,3(3) offers another version of the famous chain of causation, which proceeds from feeling to craving, and from craving via other conditions to “the taking up of clubs and weapons” and other types of violent behavior. Text I,3(4) depicts how the three roots of evil— greed, hatred, and delusion—have terrible repercussions on a whole society, issuing in violence, the lust for power, and the unjust infliction of suffering. All four texts imply that any significant and lasting transformations of society require significant changes in the moral fiber of individual human beings; for as long as greed, hatred, and delusion run rampant as determinants of conduct, the consequences are bound to be consistently detrimental.

The Buddha’s teaching addresses a fourth aspect of the human condition which, unlike the three we have so far examined, is not immediately perceptible to us. This is our bondage to the round of rebirths. From the selection of texts included in the final section in this chapter, we see that the Buddha teaches our individual lifespan to be merely a single phase within a series of rebirths that has been proceeding without any discernible beginning in time. This series of rebirths is called saṃsāra, a Pāli word which suggests the idea of directionless wandering. No matter how far back in time we may seek a beginning to the universe, we never find an initial moment of creation. No matter how far back we may trace any given individual sequence of lives, we can never arrive at a first point. According to Texts I,4(1) and I,4(2), even if we were to trace the sequence of our mothers and fathers across world systems, we would only come upon still more mothers and fathers stretching back into the far horizons.

Moreover, the process is not only beginningless but is also potentially endless. As long as ignorance and craving remain intact, the process will continue indefinitely into the future with no end in sight. For the Buddha and Early Buddhism, this is above all the defining crisis at the heart of the human condition: we are bound to a chain of rebirths, and bound to it by nothing other than our own ignorance and craving. The pointless wandering on in saṃsāra occurs against a cosmic background of inconceivably vast dimensions. The period of time that it takes for a world system to evolve, reach its phase of maximum expansion, contract, and then disintegrate is called a kappa (Skt: kalpa), an eon. Text I,4(3) offers a vivid simile to suggest the eon’s duration; Text I,4(4), another vivid simile to illustrate the incalculable number of the eons through which we have wandered.

As beings wander and roam from life to life, shrouded in darkness, they fall again and again into the chasm of birth, aging, sickness, and death. But because their craving propels them forward in a relentless quest for gratification, they seldom pause long enough to step back and attend carefully to their existential plight. As Text I,4(5) states, they instead just keep revolving around the “five aggregates” in the way a dog on a leash might run around a post or pillar. Since their ignorance prevents them from recognizing the vicious nature of their condition, they cannot discern even the tracks of a path to deliverance. Most beings live immersed in the enjoyment of sensual pleasures. Others, driven by the need for power, status, and esteem, pass their lives in vain attempts to fill an unquenchable thirst. Many, fearful of annihilation at death, construct belief systems that ascribe to their individual selves, their souls, the prospect of eternal life. A few yearn for a path to liberation but do not know where to find one. It was precisely to offer such a path that the Buddha has appeared in our midst.

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© Bhikkhu Bodhi, In the Buddha's Words (Wisdom Publications, 2005)

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II. The Bringer of Light

Introduction

In the Buddha’s Words - Selections

Introduction to Part II, “The Bringer of Light”

The picture of the human condition that emerges from the Nikāyas, as sketched in the preceding chapter, is the background against which the manifestation of the Buddha in the world acquires a heightened and deepened significance. Unless we view the Buddha against this multi-dimensional background, extending from the most personal and individual exigencies of the present to the vast, impersonal rhythms of cosmic time, any interpretation we may arrive at about his role is bound to be incomplete. Far from capturing the viewpoint of the compilers of the Nikāyas, our interpretation will be influenced as much by our own presuppositions as by theirs, perhaps even more so. Depending on our biases and predispositions, we may choose to regard the Buddha as a liberal ethical reformer of a degenerate Brahmanism, as a great secular humanist, as a radical empiricist, as an existential psychologist, as the proponent of a sweeping agnosticism, or as the precursor of any other intellectual fashion that meets our fancy. The Buddha who stares back at us from the texts will be too much a reflection of ourselves, too little an image of the Enlightened One.

Perhaps in interpreting a body of ancient religious literature we can never fully avoid inserting ourselves and our own values into the subject we are interpreting. However, though we may never achieve perfect transparency, we can limit the impact of personal bias upon the process of interpretation by giving the words of the texts due respect. When we pay this act of homage to the Nikāyas, when we take seriously their own account of the background to the Buddha’s manifestation in the world, we will see that they ascribe to his mission nothing short of a cosmic scope. Against the background of a universe with no conceivable bounds in time, a universe within which living beings enveloped in the darkness of ignorance wander along bound to the suffering of old age, sickness, and death, the Buddha arrives as the “torchbearer of humankind” (ukkādhāro manussānaṃ) bringing the light of wisdom. In the words of Text II,1, his arising in the world is “the manifestation of great vision, of great light, of great radiance.” Having discovered for himself the perfect peace of liberation, he kindles for us the light of knowledge, which reveals both the truths that we must see for ourselves and the path of practice that culminates in this liberating vision.

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha Gotama is not merely one unique individual who puts in an unprecedented appearance on the stage of human history and then bows out forever. He is, rather, the fulfillment of a primordial archetype, the most recent member of a cosmic “dynasty” of Buddhas constituted by numberless Perfectly Enlightened Ones of the past and sustained by Perfectly Enlightened Ones continuing indefinitely onward into the future. Early Buddhism, even in the archaic root texts of the Nikāyas, already recognizes a plurality of Buddhas who all conform to certain fixed patterns of behavior, the broad outlines of which are described in the opening sections of the Mahāpadāna Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 14, not represented in the present anthology). The word “Tathāgata,” which the texts use as an epithet for a Buddha, points to this fulfillment of a primordial archetype. The word means both “the one who has come thus” (tathā āgata), that is, who has come into our midst in the same way that the Buddhas of the past have come; and “the one who has gone thus” (tathā gata), that is, who has gone to the ultimate peace, Nibbāna, in the same way that the Buddhas of the past have gone.

Though the Nikāyas stipulate that in any given world system, at any given time, only one Perfectly Enlightened Buddha can arise, the arising of Buddhas is intrinsic to the cosmic process. Like a meteor against the blackness of the night sky, from time to time a Buddha will appear against the backdrop of boundless space and time, lighting up the spiritual firmament of the world, shedding the brilliance of his wisdom upon those capable of seeing the truths that he illuminates. The being who is to become a Buddha is called, in Pāli, a bodhisatta, a word better known in the Sanskrit form, bodhisattva. According to common Buddhist tradition, a bodhisatta is one who undertakes a long course of spiritual development consciously motivated by the aspiration to attain future Buddhahood. Inspired and sustained by great compassion for living beings mired in the suffering of birth and death, a bodhisatta fulfills, over many eons of cosmic time, the difficult course needed to fully master the requisites for supreme enlightenment. When all these requisites are complete, he attains Buddhahood in order to establish the Dhamma in the world. A Buddha discovers the long-lost path to liberation, the “ancient path” traveled by the Buddhas of the past that culminates in the boundless freedom of Nibbāna. Having found the path and traveled it to its end, he then teaches it in all its fullness to humanity so that many others can enter the way to final liberation.

This, however, does not exhaust the function of a Buddha. A Buddha understands and teaches not only the path leading to the supreme state of ultimate liberation, the perfect bliss of Nibbāna, but also the paths leading to the various types of wholesome mundane happiness to which human beings aspire. A Buddha proclaims both a path of mundane enhancement that enables sentient beings to plant wholesome roots productive of happiness, peace, and security in the worldly dimensions of their lives, and a path of world-transcendence to guide sentient beings to Nibbāna. His role is thus much wider than an exclusive focus on the transcendent aspects of his teaching might suggest. He is not merely a mentor of ascetics and contemplatives, not merely a teacher of meditation techniques and philosophical insights, but a guide to the Dhamma in its full range and depth: one who reveals, proclaims, and establishes all the principles integral to correct understanding and wholesome conduct, whether mundane or transcendental. Text II,1 highlights this wide-ranging altruistic dimension of a Buddha’s career when it praises the Buddha as the one person who arises in the world “for the welfare of the multitude, for the happiness of the multitude, out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of devas and humans.”

The Nikāyas offer two perspectives on the Buddha as a person, and to do justice to the texts it is important to hold these two perspectives in balance, without letting one cancel out the other. A correct view of the Buddha can only arise from the merging of these two perspectives, just as the correct view of an object can arise only when the perspectives presented by our two eyes are merged in the brain into a single image. One perspective, the one highlighted most often in modernist presentations of Buddhism, shows the Buddha as a human being who, like other human beings, had to struggle with the common frailties of human nature to arrive at the state of an Enlightened One. After his enlightenment at the age of thirty-five, he walked among us for fortyfive years as a wise and compassionate human teacher, sharing his realization with others and ensuring that his teachings would remain in the world long after his death. This is the side of the Buddha’s nature that figures most prominently in the Nikāyas. Since it corresponds closely with contemporary agnostic attitudes toward the ideals of religious faith, it has an immediate appeal to those nurtured by modern modes of thought.

The other aspect of the Buddha’s person is likely to seem strange to us, but it looms large in Buddhist tradition and serves as the bedrock for popular Buddhist devotion. Though secondary in the Nikāyas, it occasionally surfaces so conspicuously that it cannot be ignored, despite the efforts of Buddhist modernists to downplay its significance or rationalize its intrusions. From this perspective, the Buddha is seen as one who had already made preparations for his supreme attainment over countless past lives and was destined from birth to fulfill the mission of a world teacher. Text II,2 is an example of how the Buddha is viewed from this perspective. Here, it is said, the future Buddha descends fully conscious from the Tusita heaven into his mother’s womb; his conception and birth are accompanied by wonders; deities worship the newborn infant; and as soon as he is born he walks seven steps and announces his future destiny. Obviously, for the compilers of such a sutta as this, the Buddha was already destined to attain Buddhahood even prior to his conception and thus his struggle for enlightenment was a battle whose outcome was already predetermined. The final paragraph of the sutta, however, ironically hearkens back to the realistic picture of the Buddha. What the Buddha himself considers to be truly wondrous are not the miracles accompanying his conception and birth, but his mindfulness and clear comprehension in the midst of feelings, thoughts, and perceptions.

The three texts in section 3 are biographical accounts consistent with this naturalistic point of view. They offer us a portrait of the Buddha stark in its realism, bare in its naturalism, striking in its ability to convey deep psychological insights with minimal descriptive technique. In Text II,3(1) we read about his renunciation, his training under two famous meditation teachers, his disillusionment with their teachings, his solitary struggle, and his triumphant realization of the Deathless. Text II,3(2) fills in the gaps of the above narrative with a detailed account of the bodhisatta’s practice of self-mortification, strangely missing from the previous discourse. This text also gives us the classic description of the enlightenment experience as involving the attainment of the four jhānas, states of deep meditation, followed by the three vijjās or higher types of knowledge: the knowledge of the recollection of past lives, the knowledge of the passing away and rebirth of beings, and the knowledge of the destruction of the taints. While this text may convey the impression that the last knowledge broke upon the Buddha’s mind as a sudden and spontaneous intuition, Text II,3(3) corrects this impression with an account of the Bodhisatta on the eve of his enlightenment reflecting deeply upon the suffering of old age and death. He then methodically traces this suffering back to its conditions by a process that involves, at each step, “careful attention” (yoniso manasikāra) leading to “a breakthrough by wisdom” (paññāya abhisamaya). This process of investigation culminates in the discovery of dependent origination, which thereby becomes the philosophical cornerstone of his teaching.

It is important to emphasize that, as presented here and elsewhere in the Nikāyas (see below, pp. 353-59), dependent origination does not signify a joyous celebration of the interconnectedness of all things but a precise articulation of the conditional pattern in dependence upon which suffering arises and ceases. In the same text, the Buddha declares that he discovered the path to enlightenment only when he found the way to bring dependent origination to an end. It was thus the realization of the cessation of dependent origination, and not merely the discovery of its origination aspect, that precipitated the Buddha’s enlightenment. The simile of the ancient city, introduced later in the discourse, illustrates the point that the Buddha’s enlightenment was not a unique event but the rediscovery of the same “ancient path” that had been followed by the Buddhas of the past.

Text II,4 resumes the narrative of Text II,3(1), which I had divided by splicing in the two alternative versions of the bodhisatta’s quest for the path to enlightenment. We now rejoin the Buddha immediately after his enlightenment as he ponders the weighty question whether to attempt to share his realization with the world. Just at this point, in the midst of a text that has so far appeared so convincingly naturalistic, a deity named Brahmā Sahampati descends from the heavens to plead with the Buddha to wander forth and teach the Dhamma for the benefit of those “with little dust in their eyes.” Should this scene be interpreted literally or as a symbolic enactment of an internal drama taking place in the Buddha’s mind? It is hard to give a definitive answer to this question; perhaps the scene could be understood as occurring at both levels at once. In any event, Brahmā’s appearance at this point marks a shift from the realism that colors the earlier part of the sutta back toward the mythical-symbolic mode. The transition again underscores the cosmic significance of the Buddha’s enlightenment and his future mission as a teacher.

Brahmā’s appeal eventually prevails and the Buddha agrees to teach. He chooses as the first recipients of his teaching the five ascetics who had attended on him during his years of ascetic practices. The narrative culminates in a brief statement that the Buddha instructed them in such a way that they all attained the deathless Nibbāna for themselves. However, it gives no indication of the specific teaching that the Buddha imparted to them when he first met them after his enlightenment. That teaching is the First Discourse itself, known as “The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dhamma.”

This sutta is included here as Text II,5. When the sutta opens, the Buddha announces to the five ascetics that he has discovered “the middle way,” which he identifies with the Noble Eightfold Path. In the light of the preceding biographical account, we can understand why the Buddha should begin his discourse in this way. The five ascetics had initially refused to acknowledge the Buddha’s claim to enlightenment and spurned him as one who had betrayed the higher calling to revert to a life of luxury. Thus he first had to assure them that, far from reverting to a life of self-indulgence, he had discovered a new approach to the timeless quest for enlightenment. This new approach, he told them, remains faithful to the renunciation of sensual pleasures yet eschews tormenting the body as pointless and unproductive. He then explained to them the true path to liberation, the Noble Eightfold Path, which avoids the two extremes and thereby gives rise to the light of wisdom and culminates in the destruction of all bondage, Nibbāna.

Once he has cleared up their misunderstanding, the Buddha then proclaims the truths he had realized on the night of his enlightenment. These are the Four Noble Truths. Not only does he enunciate each truth and briefly define its meaning, but he describes each truth from three perspectives. These constitute the three “turnings of the wheel of the Dhamma” referred to later in the discourse. With respect to each truth, the first turning is the wisdom that illuminates the particular nature of that noble truth. The second turning is the understanding that each noble truth imposes a particular task to be accomplished. Thus the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, is to be fully understood; the second truth, the truth of suffering’s origin or craving, is to be abandoned; the third truth, the truth of the cessation of suffering, is to be realized; and the fourth truth, the truth of the path, is to be developed. The third turning is the understanding that the four functions regarding the Four Noble Truths have been completed: the truth of suffering has been fully understood; craving has been abandoned; the cessation of suffering has been realized; and the path has been fully developed. It was only when he understood the Four Noble Truths in these three turnings and twelve modes, he says, that he could claim that he had attained unsurpassed perfect enlightenment.

The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta illustrates once again the blending of the two stylistic modes I referred to earlier. The discourse proceeds almost entirely in the realistic-naturalistic mode until we approach the end. When the Buddha completes his sermon, the cosmic significance of the event is illuminated by a passage showing how the deities in each successive celestial realm applaud the discourse and shout the good news up to the deities in the next higher realm. At the same time, the entire world system quakes and shakes, and a great light surpassing the radiance of the gods appears in the world. Then, at the very end, we return from this glorious scene back to the prosaic human realm, to behold the Buddha briefly congratulating the ascetic Koṇḍañña for gaining “the dust-free, stainless vision of the Dhamma.” In one split-second, the Lamp of the Doctrine has passed from master to disciple, to begin its journey throughout India and across the world.

How to cite this document:
© Bhikkhu Bodhi, In the Buddha's Words (Wisdom Publications, 2005)

Creative Commons License
This selection from In the Buddha's Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.wisdompubs.org/book/buddha’s-words.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.wisdompubs.org/terms-use.

III. Approaching the Dhamma

Introduction

III. Approaching the Dhamma INTRODUCTION

One of the most distressing predicaments any earnest, open-minded spiritual seeker might face is the sheer difficulty of choosing from among the bewildering diversity of religious and spiritual teachings available. By their very nature, spiritual teachings make claims upon our allegiance that are absolute and all-encompassing. Adherents of a particular creed are prone to assert that their religion alone reveals the final truth about our place in the universe and our ultimate destiny; they boldly propose that their path alone offers the sure means to eternal salvation. If we could suspend all belief commitments and compare the competing doctrines impartially, submitting them to empirical tests, we would have a sure-fire method of deciding between them, and then our ordeal would be over. But it isn’t that simple. Rival religions all propose—or presuppose—doctrines that we cannot directly validate by personal experience; they advocate tenets that call for some degree of trust. So, as their tenets and practices clash, we run up against the problem of finding some way to decide between them and negotiate their competing claims to truth.
One solution to this problem is to deny that there is any real conflict between alternative belief systems. The adherents of this approach, which we might call religious universalism, say that at their core all spiritual traditions teach essentially the same thing. Their formulations may differ but their inner core is the same, expressed differently merely to accord with different sensibilities. What we need to do, the universalist says, when faced with different spiritual traditions, is to extract the kernel of inner truth from the pods of their exoteric creeds. From ground level our goals look different, but from the heights we will find the goal is the same; it is like the view of the moon from different mountain peaks. Universalists in matters of doctrine often endorse eclecticism in practice, holding that we can select whatever practices we prefer and combine them like dishes at a buffet.
This solution to the problem of religious diversity has an immediate appeal to those disillusioned with the exclusive claims of dogmatic religion. Honest critical reflection, however, would show that on the most vital issues the different religions and spiritual traditions take different standpoints. They give us very different answers to our questions concerning the basic grounds and goals of the spiritual quest and often these differences are not merely verbal. To sweep them away as being merely verbal may be an effective way of achieving harmony between followers of different belief systems, but it cannot withstand close examination. In the end, it is as little tenable as saying that, because they have beaks and wings, eagles, sparrows, and chickens are essentially the same type of creature, the differences between them being merely verbal.
It is not only theistic religions that teach doctrines beyond the range of immediate empirical confirmation. The Buddha too taught doctrines that an ordinary person cannot directly confirm by everyday experience, and these doctrines are fundamental to the structure of his teaching. We saw, for example, in the introductions to chapters I and II, that the Nikāyas envisage a universe with many domains of sentient existence spread out in boundless space and time, a universe in which sentient beings roam and wander from life to life on account of their ignorance, craving, and kamma. The Nikāyas presuppose that throughout beginningless time, Buddhas without number have arisen and turned the wheel of the Dhamma, and that each Buddha attains enlightenment after cultivating spiritual perfections over long periods of cosmic time. When we approach the Dhamma we are likely to resist such beliefs and feel that they make excessive demands on our capacity for trust. Thus we inevitably run up against the question whether, if we wish to follow the Buddha’s teaching, we must take on board the entire package of classical Buddhist doctrine.
For Early Buddhism, all the problems we face in deciding how far we should go in placing faith can be disposed of at a single stroke. That single stroke involves reverting to direct experience as the ultimate basis for judgment. One of the distinctive features of the Buddha’s teaching is the respect it accords to direct experience. The texts of Early Buddhism do not teach a secret doctrine, nor do they leave scope for anything like an esoteric path reserved for an élite of initiates and withheld from others. According to Text III,1, secrecy in a religious teaching is the hallmark of wrong views and confused thinking. The teaching of the Buddha shines openly, as radiant and brilliant as the light of the sun and moon. Freedom from the cloak of secrecy is integral to a teaching that gives primacy to direct experience, inviting each individual to test its principles in the crucible of his or her own experience.
This does not mean that an ordinary person can fully validate the Buddha’s doctrine by direct experience without special effort. To the contrary, the teaching can only be fully realized through the achievement of certain extraordinary types of experience that are far beyond the range of the ordinary person enmeshed in the concerns of mundane life. However, in sharp contrast to revealed religion, the Buddha does not demand that we begin our spiritual quest by placing faith in doctrines that lie beyond the range of our immediate experience. Rather than ask us to wrestle with issues that, for us in our present condition , no amount of experience can decide, he instead asks us to consider a few simple questions pertaining to our immediate welfare and happiness, questions that we can answer on the basis of personal experience. I highlight the expression “for us in our present condition,” because the fact that we cannot presently validate such matters does not constitute grounds for rejecting them as invalid or even as irrelevant. It only means that we should put them aside for the time being and concern ourselves with issues that come within the range of direct experience.
The Buddha says that his teaching is about suffering and the cessation of suffering. This statement does not mean that the Dhamma is concerned only with our experience of suffering in the present life, but it does imply that we can use our present experience, backed by intelligent observation, as a criterion for determining what is beneficial and what detrimental to our spiritual progress. Our most insistent existential demand, springing up deep within us, is the need for freedom from harm, sorrow, and distress; or, positively stated, the need to achieve well-being and happiness. However, to avoid harm and to secure our well-being, it is not sufficient for us merely to hope. We first have to understand the conditions on which they depend. According to the Buddha, whatever arises, arises through appropriate causes and conditions, and this applies with equal force to suffering and happiness. Thus we must ascertain the causes and conditions that lead to harm and suffering, and likewise the causes and conditions that lead to well-being and happiness. Once we have extracted these two principles— the conditions leading to harm and suffering, and the conditions leading to well-being and happiness—we have at our disposal an outline of the entire process that leads to the ultimate goal, final liberation from suffering.
One text offering an excellent example of this approach is a short discourse in the Aṅguttara Nikāya popularly known as the Kālāma Sutta, included as Text III,2. The Kālāmas were a people living in a remote area of the Ganges plain. Various religious teachers would come to visit them and each would extol his own doctrine and tear down the doctrines of his rivals. Confused and perplexed by this conflict of belief systems, the Kālāmas did not know whom to trust. When the Buddha passed through their town, they approached him and asked him to clear away their doubts. Though the text does not specify what particular issues were troubling the Kālāmas, the later part of the discourse makes it clear that their perplexities revolved around the questions of rebirth and kamma.
The Buddha began by assuring the Kālāmas that under such circumstances it was proper for them to doubt, for the issues that troubled them were indeed common sources of doubt and perplexity. He then told them not to rely on ten sources of belief. Four of these pertain to established scriptural authority (oral tradition, lineage of teaching, hearsay, and collections of texts); four to rational grounds (logic, inferential reasoning, reasoned cogitation, and the acceptance of a view after pondering it); and two to authoritative persons (impressive speakers and respected teachers). This advice is sometimes quoted to prove that the Buddha rejected all external authorities and invited each individual to fashion his or her own personal path to truth. Read in context, however, the message of the Kālāma Sutta is quite different. The Buddha is not advising the Kālāmas—who, it must be stressed, had at this point not yet become his own disciples—to reject all authoritative guides to spiritual understanding and fall back solely on their personal intuition. Rather, he is offering them a simple and pragmatic outlet from the morass of doubt and perplexity in which they are immersed. By the use of skillful methods of inquiry, he leads them to understand a number of basic principles that they can verify by their own experience and thereby acquire a sure starting point for further spiritual development.1
Always underlying the Buddha’s questions and their replies is the tacit premise that people are primarily motivated to act by a concern for their own welfare and happiness. In asking this particular set of questions, the Buddha’s purpose is to lead the Kālāmas to see that, even when we suspend all concern with future lives, unwholesome mental states such as greed, hatred, and delusion, and unwholesome actions such as killing and stealing, eventually redound to one’s own harm and suffering right here and now. Conversely, wholesome mental states and wholesome actions promote one’s long-term welfare and happiness here and now. Once this much is seen, the immediately visible harmful consequences to which unwholesome mental states lead become a sufficient reason for abandoning them, while the visible benefits to which wholesome mental states lead become a sufficient motivation for cultivating them. Then, whether or not there is a life after death, one has adequate reasons in the present life to abandon unwholesome mental states and cultivate wholesome mental states. If there is an afterlife, one’s recompense is simply that much greater.
A similar approach underlies Text III,3, in which the Buddha demonstrates how present suffering arises and ceases in correlation with present craving. This short sutta, addressed to a lay follower, concisely articulates the causal principle that lies behind the Four Noble Truths, but rather than doing so in the abstract, it adopts a concrete, down-to-earth approach that has a remarkably contemporary appeal. By using powerful examples drawn from the life of a layman deeply attached to his wife and son, the sutta makes a deep and lasting impression on us.
The fact that such texts as this sutta and the Kālāma Sutta do not dwell on the doctrines of kamma and rebirth does not mean, as is sometimes assumed, that such teachings are mere cultural accretions to the Dhamma that can be deleted or explained away without losing anything essential. It means only that, at the outset, the Dhamma can be approached in ways that do not require reference to past and future lives. The Buddha’s teaching has many sides, and thus, from certain angles, it can be directly evaluated against our concern for our present well-being and happiness. Once we see that the practice of the teaching does indeed bring peace, joy, and inner security in this very life, this will inspire our trust and confidence in the Dhamma as a whole, including those aspects that lie beyond our present capacity for personal verification. If we were to undertake certain practices—practices that require highly refined skills and determined effort—we would be able to acquire the faculties needed to validate those other aspects, such as the law of kamma, the reality of rebirth, and the existence of supersensible realms (see Text VII,4 §§23–24 and Text VII,5 §§19–20).
Another major problem that often besets spiritual seekers is the demands that teachers place upon their capacity for trust. This problem has become especially acute in our own time, when the news media gleefully spotlight the frailties of numberless gurus and jump at the chance to show up any modern-day saint as nothing better than a swindler in robes. But the problem of rogue gurus is a perennial one by no means peculiar to our age. Whenever one person exercises spiritual authority over others, it is only too easy for that person to be tempted to exploit the trust others place in him in ways that can be seriously detrimental to himself and his disciples. When a pupil approaches a teacher who claims to be perfectly enlightened and thus capable of teaching the path to final liberation, the pupil must have some criteria at hand for testing the teacher to determine whether the teacher truly measures up to the lofty claims he makes about himself—or that others make about him.
In the Vīmaṃsaka Sutta—Text III,4—the Buddha lays down guidelines by which a monk can test “the Tathāgata,” that is, the Buddha, to evaluate his claim to be perfectly enlightened. One benchmark of perfect enlightenment is freedom of the mind from all defilements. If a monk cannot directly see into the Buddha’s own mind, he can nevertheless rely on indirect evidence to ascertain that the Buddha is freed from defilements; that is, by evaluating the Buddha’s bodily deeds and speech he can infer that the Buddha’s mental states are exclusively pure, uninfluenced by greed, hatred, and delusion. In addition to such observational inference, the Buddha further encourages the monk to approach him and directly inquire about his mental states.
Once the pupil gains confidence that the Buddha is a qualified teacher, he then puts the Master to the ultimate test. He learns his teaching, enters upon the practice, and penetrates the Dhamma by direct knowledge. This act of penetration—here equivalent at minimum to the attainment of stream-entry—brings the gain of “invincible faith,” the faith of one who is established upon the irreversible path leading to final release.
Taken in isolation, the Vīmaṃsaka Sutta might give the impression that one acquires faith only after gaining realization of the teaching, and since realization is self-validating, faith would then become redundant. This impression, however, would be one-sided. The point the sutta is making is that faith becomes invincible as a result of realization, not that faith first enters the spiritual path only when one attains realization. Faith is the first of the five spiritual faculties, and in some degree, as trusting confidence in the Buddha’s enlightenment and in the main principles of his teaching, it is a prerequisite for the higher training. We see faith functioning in this preparatory role in Text III,5, a long excerpt from the Caṅkī Sutta. Here, the Buddha explains that a person who has faith in something “preserves truth” when he says “this is my faith.” He “preserves truth” because he merely states what he believes without jumping to the conclusion that what he believes is definitely true and anything else contrary to it false. The Buddha contrasts the “preservation of truth” (saccānurakkhanā) with the “discovery of truth” (saccānubodha), which begins by placing faith in a teacher who has proved himself worthy of trust. Having gained faith in such a teacher, one then approaches him for instruction, learns the Dhamma, practices it (according to a series of steps more finely calibrated than in the preceding text), and finally sees the supreme truth for oneself.
This does not yet mark the end of the road for the disciple, but only the initial breakthrough to the truth, again corresponding to the attainment of stream-entry. Having achieved the vision of truth, to reach the “final arrival at truth” (saccānupatti)—that is, the attainment of arahantship or final liberation—one must repeat, develop, and cultivate the same series of steps until one has fully absorbed and assimilated the supreme truth disclosed by that initial vision. Thus the entire process of training in the Dhamma is rooted in personal experience. Even faith should be rooted in investigation and inquiry and not based solely upon emotional leanings and blind belief. Faith alone is insufficient but is the door to deeper levels of experience. Faith serves as a spur to practice; practice leads to experiential understanding; and when one’s understanding matures, it blossoms in full realization.

IV. The Happiness Visible in This Present Life

Introduction

In the Buddha’s Words - Selections

Introduction to Part IV, “The Happiness Visible in This Present Life”

Is it the case, as some scholars hold, that the Buddha’s original message was exclusively one of world-transcending liberation, with little relevance for people stuck in the routines of worldly life? Did the ancient Buddhists believe that it was only in the monastery that the real practice of the Dhamma began and that only those who left the world were considered proper receptacles of the teaching? Did the Buddha’s teachings for the laity have no more than a token significance? Were they mainly injunctions to acquire merit by offering material support to the monastic order and its members so that they could become monks and nuns (preferably monks) in future lives and then get down to the real practice?

At certain periods, in almost all traditions, Buddhists have lent support to the assumptions that underlie these questions. They have spurned concern with the present life and dismissed the world as a valley of tears, a deceptive illusion, convinced that the sign of spiritual maturity is an exclusive focus on emancipation from the round of birth and death. Monks have sometimes displayed little interest in showing those still stuck in the world how to use the wisdom of the Dhamma to deal with the problems of ordinary life. Householders in turn have seen little hope of spiritual progress in their own chosen mode of life and have thus resigned themselves merely to gaining merit by offering material support to the monks.

While the Nikāyas reveal the crown of the Buddha’s teachings to lie in the path to final release from suffering, it would be a mistake to reduce the teachings, so diverse in the original sources, to their transcendent pinnacle. We must again recall the statement that a Buddha arises “for the welfare of the multitude, for the happiness of the multitude … out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of devas and humans” (p. 50). The function of a Buddha is to discover, realize, and proclaim the Dhamma in its full range and depth, and this involves a comprehensive understanding of the varied applications of the Dhamma in all its multiple dimensions. A Buddha not only penetrates to the unconditioned state of perfect bliss that lies beyond saṃsāra, outside the pale of birth, aging, and death; he not only proclaims the path to full enlightenment and final liberation; but he also illuminates the many ways the Dhamma applies to the complex conditions of human life for people still immersed in the world.

The Dhamma, in its broadest sense, is the immanent, invariable order of the universe in which truth, lawful regularity, and virtue are inextricably merged. This cosmic Dhamma is reflected in the human mind as the aspiration for truth, spiritual beauty, and goodness; it is expressed in human conduct as wholesome bodily, verbal, and mental action. The Dhamma has institutional embodiments as well as expressions in the lives of individuals who look upon it as their source of guidance in the proper conduct of life. These embodiments are both secular and spiritual. Buddhist tradition sees the responsibility for upholding the Dhamma in the secular domain as falling to the legendary wheel-turning monarch (rājā cakkavattī). The wheel-turning monarch is the benevolent ruler who governs his kingdom in accordance with the highest ethical norms (dhammiko dhammarājā) and thereby peacefully unites the world under a reign of universal justice and prosperity. As Text IV,1(1) shows, within the spiritual domain, the Buddha is the counterpart of the wheel-turning monarch. Like the latter, the Buddha relies on the Dhamma and reveres the Dhamma, but whereas the wheel-turning monarch relies upon the Dhamma as principle of righteousness to rule his kingdom, the Buddha relies upon the Dhamma as ethical and spiritual norm to teach and transform human beings and guide them toward proper conduct of body, speech, and mind. Neither the wheel-turning monarch nor the Buddha creates the Dhamma they uphold, yet neither can perform their respective functions without it; for the Dhamma is the objective, impersonal, everexistent principle of order that serves as the source and standard for their respective policies and promulgations.

As the king of the Dhamma, the Buddha takes up the task of promoting the true good, welfare, and happiness of the world. He does so by teaching the people of the world how to live in accordance with the Dhamma and behave in such a way that they can attain realization of the same liberating Dhamma that he realized through his enlightenment. The Pāli commentaries demonstrate the broad scope of the Dhamma by distinguishing three types of benefit that the Buddha’s teaching is intended to promote, graded hierarchically according to their relative merit:

welfare and happiness directly visible in this present life (diṭṭhadhamma-hitasukha), attained by fulfilling one’s moral commitments and social responsibilities;
welfare and happiness pertaining to the next life (samparāyikahitasukha), attained by engaging in meritorious deeds;
the ultimate good or supreme goal (paramattha), Nibbāna, final release from the cycle of rebirths, attained by developing the Noble Eightfold Path.

While many Western writers on Early Buddhism have focused on this last aspect as almost exclusively representing the Buddha’s original teaching, a balanced presentation should give consideration to all three aspects. Therefore, in this chapter and those to follow, we will be exploring texts from the Nikāyas that illustrate each of these three facets of the Dhamma.

The present chapter includes a variety of texts on the Buddha’s teachings that pertain to the happiness directly visible in this present life. The most comprehensive Nikāya text in this genre is the Sigālaka Sutta (DN 31, also known as the Siṅgalovāda Sutta), sometimes called “The Layperson’s Code of Discipline.” The heart of this sutta is the section on “worshipping the six directions”—Text IV,1(2)—in which the Buddha freely reinterprets an ancient Indian ritual, infusing it with a new ethical meaning. The practice of “worshipping the six directions,” as explained by the Buddha, presupposes that society is sustained by a network of interlocking relationships that bring coherence to the social order when its members fulfill their reciprocal duties and responsibilities in a spirit of kindness, sympathy, and good will. The six basic social relationships that the Buddha draws upon to fill out his metaphor are: parents and children, teacher and pupils, husband and wife, friend and friend, employer and workers, lay follower and religious guides. Each is considered one of the six directions in relation to its counterpart. For a young man like Sigālaka, his parents are the east, his teachers the south, his wife and children the west, his friends the north, his workers the nadir, and religious guides the zenith. With his customary sense of systematic concision, the Buddha ascribes to each member of each pair five obligations with respect to his or her counterpart; when each member fulfills these obligations, the corresponding “direction” comes to be “at peace and free from fear.” "Thus, for Early Buddhism, the social stability and security that contribute to human happiness are most effectively achieved when every member of society fulfills the various duties that befall them as determined by their social relationships. Each person rises above the demands of narrow self-interest and develops a sincere, large-hearted concern for the welfare of others and the greater good of the whole."

From this general code of lay Buddhist ethics, we turn to texts that offer more specific points of advice, beginning with a selection of suttas on “The Family.” This has separate sections on “Parents and Children” (IV,2(1)) and “Husbands and Wives” (IV,2(2)). In keeping with the norms of Indian society—in fact, of virtually all traditional agrarian societies—the Buddha regards the family as the basic unit of social integration and acculturation. It is especially the close, loving relationship between parents and children that fosters the virtues and sense of humane responsibility essential to a cohesive social order. Within the family, these values are transmitted from one generation to the next, and thus a harmonious society is highly dependent on harmonious relations between parents and children. The Buddha emphasizes filial piety—Text IV,2(1)(a)—and the gratitude of children to their parents, a debt they can adequately repay only by establishing their parents in the proper Dhamma—Text IV,2(1)(b).

Wholesome relations between parents and children depend in turn upon the mutual affection and respect of husband and wife, and thus the Buddha also offers guidelines for proper relationships between married couples. These again emphasize a common commitment to ethical conduct and spiritual ideals. Of special interest to us, at a time when many marriages end so soon in divorce, is the Buddha’s advice to the loving couple Nakulapitā and Nakulamātā—Text IV,2(2)(b)—on how the love between a husband and his wife can be sustained so strongly that they can be reunited in their future lives. This discourse also shows that far from demanding that his lay disciples spurn the desires of the world, the Buddha was ready to show those still under the sway of worldly desire how to obtain the objects of their desire. The one requirement he laid down was that the fulfillment of desire be regulated by ethical principles.

Next come a number of texts dealing with different aspects of household life united by an emphasis on right livelihood. Two characteristics of the Buddha’s injunctions to his lay followers regarding the pursuit of mundane happiness stand out from these texts.

First, in seeking “the good visible in this present life,” the lay follower should consistently adhere to principles of right conduct, especially to the five precepts and the rules of right livelihood. Thus, for example, he stipulates that wealth must be “acquired by energetic striving … righteous wealth righteously gained”—Text IV,3. Again, he asks his lay followers to use the wealth they obtain not only to gratify themselves but also to benefit their dependents and others who live on charity, particularly virtuous ascetics and brahmins—Text IV,4(2).

Second, the lay follower should not rest content with the mere pursuit of temporal well-being and happiness but should also seek the well-being and happiness pertaining to the future life. This is to be done by fostering those qualities that lead to a happy rebirth and the attainment of Nibbāna. According to Texts IV,3 and IV,5, the principal virtues a lay follower should possess, leading to future welfare, are: (1) faith (in the Buddha as the Enlightened One), (2) moral discipline (as unbroken observance of the five precepts), (3) generosity (as application to charity, giving, and sharing), and (4) wisdom (as insight into the arising and passing away of phenomena). For Early Buddhism, the ideal householder is not merely a devout supporter of the monastic order but a noble person who has attained at least the first of the four stages of realization, the fruition of stream-entry (sotāpatti).

Finally, with section 6, we come to a selection of texts on “the Community.” I use this word to refer broadly to both the Saṅgha, the monastic order, and the civil society in which any branch of the monastic order must be rooted. From the Nikāyas, it is clear that while the Buddha principally aimed at guiding people toward moral and spiritual progress, he was fully aware that their capacity for moral and spiritual development depends upon the material conditions of the society in which they live. He acutely realized that when people are mired in poverty and oppressed by hunger and want, they will find it hard to hold to a path of moral rectitude. The sheer pain of hunger, and the need to ward off the elements and provide for their families, will compel them to stoop to types of behavior they would avoid if they could obtain fair employment and adequate remuneration for their services. Thus he saw that the provision of economic justice is integral to social harmony and political stability.

The first two texts included here prescribe two sets of guidelines for the monastic order. Both are excerpts from a long discourse the Buddha spoke shortly after the death of Mahāvīra, the leader of the Jains. According to the Nikāyas, following their leader’s death, the Jain monastic order was already beginning to split up, and the Buddha must have felt compelled to lay down guidelines to protect his own order from sharing the same fate after his passing. Text IV,6(1) enumerates six qualities that lead to quarrels and disputes, which the monks should be wary of and strive to eliminate when they discover them within themselves. Although these guidelines are laid down for the monks, they can easily be given a wider application to any organization, secular or religious, for it is the same six factors that lie at the bottom of all conflicts. The positive counterpart to this set of cautionary guidelines is Text IV,6(2), which enumerates “six principles of cordiality” that lead to love, respect, and harmony among the members of the community. Again, with appropriate adaptation, these principles— loving acts of body, speech, and mind; sharing of possessions; common observance of precepts; and unity of views—can be given an extended application beyond a monastic order to the wider community. The same sutta provides more detailed guidelines for preserving harmony in the monastic order after the Buddha’s death, but these deal with aspects of monastic discipline too specialized for the present anthology.

Text IV,6(3), a long excerpt from the Assalāyana Sutta, captures the Buddha in debate with a precocious brahmin pundit about the brahmins’ claims on behalf of the caste system. In the Buddha’s age the caste system was only beginning to take shape in northeast India and had not yet spawned the countless subdivisions and rigid regulations that were to manacle Indian society through the centuries. Society was divided into four broad social classes: the brahmins, who performed the priestly functions prescribed in the Vedas; the khattiyas, the nobles, warriors, and administrators; the vessas, the merchants and agriculturalists; and the suddas, the menials and serfs. There were also those outside the pale of the four main classes, who were regarded as even lower than the suddas. From the Nikāyas it appears that the brahmins, while vested with authority in religious matters, had not yet attained the unchallengeable hegemony they were to gain after the appearance of such works as the Laws of Manu, which laid down the fixed rules of the caste system. They had, however, already embarked on their drive for domination over the rest of Indian society and did so by propagating the thesis that brahmins are the highest caste, the divinely blessed offspring of Brahmā who are alone capable of purification.

Contrary to certain popular notions, the Buddha did not agitate for the abolition of the Indian class system and attempt to establish a classless society. Within the Saṅgha, however, all caste distinctions were abrogated from the moment of ordination. People from any of the four social classes who went forth under the Buddha renounced their class titles and prerogatives, becoming known simply as disciples of the Sakyan son (that is, of the Buddha, who was from the Sakyan clan). Whenever the Buddha and his disciples confronted the brahmins’ claim to superiority, they argued vigorously against them. As our text shows, the Buddha maintained that all such claims were groundless. Purification, he contended, was the result of conduct, not of birth, and was thus accessible to those of all four castes. The Buddha even stripped the term “brahmin” of its hereditary accretions, and hearkening back to its original connotation of holy man, defined the true brahmin as the arahant (see MN 98, not included in this anthology).

The next two selections suggest guidelines for political administration. During the Buddha’s time two distinct forms of government prevailed among the states of northern India in which the Buddha moved and taught, monarchical kingdoms and tribal republics. As a spiritual teacher, the Buddha did not prefer one type of government to the other, nor did he actively interfere in affairs of state. But his followers included leaders from both types of state, and thus he occasionally offered them guidance intended to ensure that they would govern their realms in accordance with ethical norms.

The opening scene of the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, the narrative of the Buddha’s last days—Text IV,6(4)—gives us a glimpse into this tumultuous phase of Indian history when Magadha, the rising star among the northern monarchies, was expanding in influence and absorbing its neighboring tribal republics. In the passage reproduced here we see King Ajātasattu, the ruler of Magadha, setting his sights on the Vajjian confederacy, the largest and best organized of the tribal republics. When the sutta opens, he sends his chief minister to inquire from the Buddha whether he has any chance of success in waging war against the Vajjians. The Buddha questions Ānanda about seven conditions of social stability that he had earlier taught the Vajjians, concluding that “as long as they keep to these seven principles, as long as these principles remain in force, the Vajjians may be expected to prosper and not decline.” He then convenes a meeting of the monks and teaches them seven analogous principles of stability applicable to the monastic order.

Since the eventual triumph of the monarchical type of government seemed inevitable, the Buddha sought to establish a model of kingship that could curb the arbitrary exercise of power and subordinate the king to a higher authority. He did so by setting up the ideal of the “wheel-turning monarch,” the righteous king who rules in compliance with the Dhamma, the impersonal law of righteousness (see Text IV,1(1)). The Dhamma that he obeys is the ethical basis for his rule. Symbolized by the sacred wheel-treasure, the Dhamma enables him to subdue without force all the nations of the world and establish a universal reign of peace and virtue based on observance of the five precepts—see Text IV,6(5).

The wheel-turning monarch rules for the welfare and happiness of his subjects and extends protection to all within his realm, even to the birds and beasts. Among his duties is to prevent crime from erupting in his kingdom, and to keep the kingdom safe from crime he must give wealth to those in need, for in the view of the Nikāyas poverty is the breeding ground of criminality. This theme, mentioned among the duties of the wheel-turning monarch in Text IV,6(5), is elaborated in Text IV,6(6). We here see a wise chaplain advise a king that the correct way to end the plague of theft and brigandage in his realm is not by imposing harsher punishments and stricter law enforcement, but by giving the citizens the means to earn their living. Once the people enjoy a satisfactory standard of living, they will lose all interest in harming others, and the country will enjoy peace and tranquility.

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V. The Way to a Fortunate Rebirth

Introduction

In the Buddha’s Words - Selections

Introduction to Part V, “The Way to a Fortunate Rebirth”

In his account of his “noble quest,” the Buddha says that when he gazed out upon the world soon after his enlightenment, he saw that sentient beings are like lotus flowers at various stages of growth within a pond (see p. 71). While some beings are like lotuses at or near the surface of the pond, capable of awakening merely by being exposed to his world-transcending teachings, the vast majority of people who encounter the Dhamma are like the lotuses growing deep below the surface. These lotuses benefit from the sunlight and use its energy to sustain their life, yet still need time to reach the surface and blossom. So too, the great multitude of people who hear the Buddha’s teachings and establish faith must still nurture their wholesome qualities with the radiant energy of the Dhamma before their mindstreams become mature enough to attain direct realization. This process ordinarily requires many lives, and thus such people have to take a long-term approach to their spiritual development. While practicing the way to liberation, they must avoid a rebirth in the unfortunate realms and win successive rebirths blessed with material security, happiness, and opportunities for further spiritual progress.

These benefits, the enhancing conditions for spiritual development in the Dhamma, come about by the acquisition of puñña or “merit,” a word that signifies the capacity of wholesome action to yield beneficial results within the cycle of rebirths. According to the Buddha’s teaching, the cosmos, with its many realms of sentient existence, is governed at all levels by immutable laws, physical, biological, psychological, and ethical. The process by which sentient beings migrate from one state of existence to another is likewise lawful. It is regulated by a law that works in two principal ways: first, it connects our actions with a particular realm of rebirth that corresponds to our actions; and second, it determines the relations between our actions and the quality of our experience within the particular realm into which we have been reborn.

The governing factor in this process, the factor that makes the entire process a lawful one, is a force called kamma (Skt: karma). The word “kamma” literally means action, but technically it refers to volitional action. As the Buddha says: “It is volition (cetanā) that I call kamma; for having willed (cetayitvā), one acts by body, speech, and mind.” Kamma thus denotes deeds that originate from volition. Such volition may remain purely mental, generating mental kamma that occurs as thoughts, plans, and desires; or it may come to expression outwardly through manifest bodily and verbal actions.

It may seem that our deeds, once performed, perish and vanish without leaving behind any traces apart from their visible impact on other people and our environment. However, according to the Buddha, all morally determinate volitional actions create a potential to bring forth results (vipāka) or fruits (phala) that correspond to the ethical quality of those actions. This capacity of our deeds to produce the morally appropriate results is what is meant by kamma. Our deeds generate kamma, a potential to produce fruits that correspond to their own intrinsic tendencies. Then, when internal and external conditions are suitable, the kamma ripens and produces the appropriate fruits. In ripening, the kamma rebounds upon us for good or for harm depending on the moral quality of the original action. This may happen either later in the same life in which the action was done, in the next life, or in some distant future life. The one thing that is certain is that as long as we remain within saṃsāra any stored-up kamma of ours will be capable of ripening so long as it has not yet produced its due results.

On the basis of its ethical quality, the Buddha distinguishes kamma into two major categories: the unwholesome (akusala) and the wholesome (kusala). Unwholesome kamma is action that is spiritually detrimental to the agent, morally reprehensible, and potentially productive of an unfortunate rebirth and painful results. The criterion for judging an action to be unwholesome is its underlying motives, the “roots” from which it springs. There are three unwholesome roots: greed, hatred, and delusion. From these there arises a wide variety of secondary defilements—states such as anger, hostility, envy, selfishness, arrogance, pride, presumption, and laziness—and from the root defilements and secondary defilements arise defiled actions.

Wholesome kamma, on the other hand, is action that is spiritually beneficial and morally commendable; it is action that ripens in happiness and good fortune. Its underlying motives are the three wholesome roots: nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion, which may be expressed more positively as generosity, loving-kindness, and wisdom. Whereas actions springing from the unwholesome roots are necessarily bound to the world of repeated birth and death, actions springing from the wholesome roots may be of two kinds, mundane and world-transcending. The mundane (lokiya) wholesome actions have the potential to produce a fortunate rebirth and pleasant results within the round of rebirths. The world-transcending or supramundane (lokuttara) wholesome actions—namely, the kamma generated by developing the Noble Eightfold Path and the other aids to enlightenment—lead to enlightenment and to liberation from the round of rebirths. This is the kamma that dismantles the entire process of karmic causation.

The correlation between kamma and its results is indicated in a general way in Text V,1(1). This sutta refers to unwholesome action as “dark kamma” and mundane wholesome action as “bright kamma.” It also refers to a type of kamma that is both dark and bright. Strictly speaking, this does not denote a single action that simultaneously partakes of both unwholesome and wholesome characteristics; technically such a thing is impossible, for an action must be one or the other. The combined kamma refers to the conduct of a person who intermittently engages in both unwholesome and wholesome behavior. Finally, the sutta speaks of a fourth type of kamma that is neither dark nor bright. This is the action of developing the Noble Eightfold Path, the wholesome world-transcending kamma.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that for Early Buddhism an understanding and acceptance of this principle of kamma and its fruit is an essential component of right view. Right view has two aspects, the world-bound or mundane aspect, which pertains to life within the world, and the supramundane or world-transcending aspect, which pertains to the path to liberation. The world-transcending right view includes an understanding of the Four Noble Truths, dependent origination, and the three marks of impermanence, suffering, and nonself. For Early Buddhism this world-transcending right view cannot be taken up in isolation from mundane right view. Rather, it presupposes and depends upon the sound support of mundane right view, which means a firm conviction in the validity of the law of kamma and its unfolding through the process of rebirths.

To accept the law of kamma entails a radical transformation in our understanding of our relationship to the world. The twin doctrines of kamma and rebirth enable us to see that the world in which we live is, in important respects, an external reflection of the internal cosmos of the mind. This does not mean that the external world can be reduced to a mental projection in the way proposed by certain types of philosophical idealism. However, taken in conjunction, these two doctrines do show that the conditions under which we live closely correspond to the karmic tendencies of our minds. The reason why a living being is reborn into a particular realm is because in a previous life that being has generated the kamma, or volitional action, that leads to rebirth into that realm. Thus, in the final analysis, all the realms of existence have been formed, fashioned, and sustained by the mental activity of living beings. As the Buddha says: “For beings obstructed by ignorance and hindered by craving, kamma is the field, consciousness the seed, and craving the moisture, for consciousness to be established in a new realm of existence—either inferior, middling, or superior” (AN 3:76; I 223). The next selection, Text V,1(2), draws a finer distinction among the types of unwholesome and wholesome kamma. The text enumerates ten primary instances of each class. Here they are called respectively “unrighteous conduct, conduct not in accordance with the Dhamma” and “righteous conduct, conduct in accordance with the Dhamma” but they are usually known as the ten pathways of unwholesome and wholesome kamma. The ten are subdivided by way of the three “doors of action”—body, speech, and mind. Taking the unwholesome first, there are three kinds of bodily misconduct: killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct; four kinds of verbal misconduct: lying, malicious speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter (or gossip); and three kinds of mental misconduct: covetousness, ill will, and wrong view. The ten courses of wholesome action are their exact opposites: abstinence from the three kinds of bodily misconduct; abstinence from the four kinds of verbal misconduct; and noncovetousness, goodwill, and right view. According to the sutta, the ten types of unwholesome kamma are the reason that beings are reborn in the bad destinations after death; the ten types of wholesome kamma are the reason that beings are reborn in the good destinations after death. As the sutta shows, the ten types of wholesome kamma are the support, not only for a heavenly rebirth, but also for “the destruction of the taints,” the attainment of liberation. The concluding paragraphs of this sutta give us a brief survey of Buddhist cosmology. The Buddhist cosmos is divided into three broad realms—the sense-sphere realm (kāmadhātu), the form realm (rūpadhātu), and the formless realm (arūpadhātu)—each comprising a range of subsidiary planes.

The sense-sphere realm, our realm, is so called because the beings reborn here are strongly driven by sensual desire. The realm is divided into two levels, the bad destinations and the good destinations. The bad destinations or “states of misery” (apāya) are three in number: the hells, states of intense torment (see MN 129 and 130, not included in this anthology); the animal kingdom; and the sphere of spirits (pettivisaya), beings afflicted with incessant hunger, thirst, and other sufferings. These are the realms of retribution for the ten unwholesome paths of kamma. The good destinations in the sense-sphere realm are the human world and the six sensual heavenly planes. The latter are: the devas in the heaven of the Four Great Kings, who are presided over by four powerful devas (namely, the Four Great Kings); the Tāvatiṃsa devas presided over by Sakka, a devotee of the Buddha who is faithful but prone to negligence (see the Sakkasaṃyutta, SN chapter 11); the Yāma devas; the devas of the Tusita heaven, the abode of a bodhisatta before his final birth; the Nimmānaratī devas (“the gods who delight in creating”); and the Paranimmitavasavattī devas (“the gods who control what is created by others”). The karmic cause for rebirth into the good destinations of the sense-sphere realm is the practice of the ten courses of wholesome action.

In the form realm the grosser types of material form are absent. Its denizens, known as brahmās, enjoy bliss, power, luminosity, and vitality far superior to the beings in the sense-sphere realm. The form realm consists of sixteen planes. These are the objective counterparts of the four jhānas. Attainment of the first jhāna leads to rebirth among Brahmā’s assembly, the ministers of Brahmā, and the Mahābrahmās, according to whether it is developed to an inferior, middling, or superior degree. The second jhāna, attained in the same three degrees, leads respectively to rebirth among the devas of limited radiance, of measureless radiance, and of streaming radiance. The third jhāna, attained in the same three degrees, leads respectively to rebirth among the devas of limited glory, of measureless glory, and of refulgent glory. The fourth jhāna ordinarily leads to rebirth among the devas of great fruit, but if developed with a feeling of disgust for perception, it will conduce to rebirth among the “nonpercipient beings,” beings who lack perception. The form realm also comprises five planes reserved exclusively for the rebirth of nonreturners (see pp. 379–80), called the pure abodes: aviha, atappa, sudassa, sudassī, and akaniṭṭha. In each of the subtle form planes, the lifespan is said to be of enormous duration and to increase significantly with each higher plane. In the third realm of existence, material form is nonexistent and bare mental processes exist; hence it is called the formless realm. This realm consists of four planes, which are the objective counterparts of the four formless meditative attainments, after which they are named: the base of the infinity of space, the base of the infinity of consciousness, the base of nothingness, and the base of neither-perception-nornonperception. The lifespans ascribed to these realms are respectively 20,000; 40,000; 60,000; and 84,000 great eons. (For the duration of one eon, see Text I,4(3).)

For Buddhist cosmology, existence in every realm, being the product of a kamma with a finite potency, is necessarily impermanent. Beings take rebirth into a realm appropriate for their kamma or deeds, experience the good or bad results, and then, when the generative kamma has spent its force, they pass away to take rebirth elsewhere as determined by still another kamma that has found the opportunity to ripen. Hence the torments of hell as well as the joys of heaven, no matter how long they may last, are bound to pass. The Buddha guides those whose spiritual faculties are still tender to aspire for a human or heavenly rebirth and teaches them the lines of conduct that conduce to the fulfillment of their aspirations. But he urges those with mature faculties to make a determined effort to put an end to the aimless wandering of saṃsāra and reach the Deathless, Nibbāna, which transcends all conditioned planes of being.

While the first two texts in this chapter establish a general correlation between kamma and spheres of rebirth, Text V,1(3) specifies the underlying karmic causes for the manifest differences in human life. It does so with reference to a well-known saying of the Buddha: “Beings are owners of their kamma, heirs of their kamma; they originate from their kamma, are bound to their kamma, have their kamma as their refuge. It is kamma that distinguishes beings as inferior and superior.” The sutta proposes to explain this statement with regard to seven pairs of contrasting qualities observed among people. This text also introduces a distinction between two types of consequences that an unwholesome kamma can have: the more powerful is rebirth in a bad destination; the other is unpleasant fruits within the human state, for example, a short lifespan for one who in an earlier life killed living beings. An analogous distinction obtains among the consequences that a wholesome kamma can have: the more powerful is rebirth in a heavenly world; the other is pleasant fruits within the human state.

The next section deals with merit (puñña), wholesome kamma capable of yielding favorable results within the cycle of rebirths. Merit produces mundane benefits, such as a good rebirth, wealth, beauty, and success. It also serves as an enhancing condition for supramundane benefits, that is, for attaining the stages along the path to enlightenment. Hence, as seen in Text V,2(1), the Buddha urges his disciples to cultivate merit, referring to his own cultivation of merit over many previous lives as an example.

The Nikāyas concisely organize the types of merit into three “bases of meritorious deeds” (puññakiriyavatthu): giving, moral discipline, and meditation. Text V,2(2) connects the bases of merit with the types of rebirth to which they lead. In the Indian religious context, the practice of meritorious deeds revolves around faith in certain objects regarded as sacred and spiritually empowering, capable of serving as a support for the acquisition of merit. For followers of the Buddha’s teaching these are the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha. Text V,2(3) extols these as each supreme in its particular sphere: the Buddha is supreme among persons, the Dhamma among teachings, and the Saṅgha among religious communities. The text proposes an interesting twofold distinction of the Dhamma Jewel: among all conditioned things (dhammā saṅkhatā), the Noble Eightfold Path is supreme; among all things conditioned or unconditioned (dhammā saṅkhatā vā asaṅkhatā vā), Nibbāna is supreme. Merely having confidence in the Three Jewels, that is, reverential trust and devotion toward them, is itself a basis of merit; but as the verses attached to the sutta make clear, the Buddha and the Saṅgha additionally function as the recipients of gifts, and in this role they further enable donors to acquire merit leading to the fulfillment of their virtuous wishes. More will be said about this aspect of merit just below.

The following sections of this chapter elaborate on the three bases of merit individually, beginning in section 3 with giving or generosity (dāna). The Buddha often treated giving as the most rudimentary virtue of the spiritual life, for giving serves to break down the egocentric frame of mind on the basis of which we habitually interact with others. Contrary to what a Western reader might expect, however, “giving” for Early Buddhism does not mean simply philanthropic charity directed toward the poor and disadvantaged. While it includes this, the practice of giving has a more context-specific meaning rooted in the social structure of Indian religiosity. In India during the Buddha’s time, those who sought to fathom the deepest truths of existence and attain release from the round of birth and death usually renounced home and family, relinquished their secure place in the cohesive Indian social order, and adopted the precarious life of the homeless wanderer. With shaved heads or matted locks, clad in ochre or white robes or going naked, they would move from place to place without fixed abode, except during the three months of the rainy season, when they would settle in simple huts, caves, or other lodgings. Such homeless wanderers, known as samaṇas (“ascetics”) or paribbājakas (“wanderers”), did not perform any remunerative services but depended upon the charity of householders for their livelihood. The lay devotees provided them with their material requisites—robes, food, lodgings, and medicines—doing so in the confidence that such services were a source of merit that would help them advance a few steps farther in the direction of final emancipation.

When the Buddha appeared on the scene, he adopted this mode of life for himself. Once he commenced his work as a spiritual teacher, he established his Saṅgha on the same principle: the bhikkhus and bhikkhunīs, the monks and nuns, would depend on the charity of others for their material support, and they would reciprocate by offering their donors the more precious gift of the Dhamma, the teaching of the lofty path that leads to happiness, peace, and final liberation. Text V,3(5) testifies to this principle of mutual support. By accepting the gifts of lay people, the monastics give them the opportunity to acquire merit. Since the volume of merit generated by the act of giving is considered to be proportional to the worthiness of the recipient, when the recipients are the Buddha and those following in his footsteps, the merit becomes immeasurable (see MN 142, not included in this anthology). For this reason, the sāvakasaṅgha, the spiritual community of noble disciples, is called “the unsurpassed field of merit for the world” (anuttaraṃ puññakhettaṃ lokassa). Gifts to the Saṅgha, it is said, conduce to great blessings; they lead to one’s welfare and happiness for a long time and can bring rebirth in the heavenly worlds. But as Text V,3(6) reminds us, this is true “only for the morally pure, not for the immoral.”

This leads to the next base of merit, “moral discipline” (sīla), which for Early Buddhism requires the undertaking of precepts. The most basic moral guidelines inculcated in the Nikāyas are the five precepts, the training rules to abstain from taking life, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, and the use of intoxicants. These are mentioned in Text V,4(1), which, by an interesting twist in terminology, speaks of them as “pristine, traditional, ancient gifts,” thus implicitly subsuming sīla under dāna. The reason the observance of precepts is a form of giving is because one who undertakes precepts will be “giving to immeasurable beings freedom from fear, hostility, and oppression,” and as a karmic consequence “he himself will enjoy immeasurable freedom from fear, hostility, and oppression.”

While the Buddha enjoins observance of the five precepts upon lay followers as a full-time obligation, he recommends a more stringent type of moral practice for the uposatha, the observance days determined by the lunar calendar: the full-moon day, the new-moon day, and the two half-moon days. (Of the four, in Buddhist countries today it is the full-moon day that is given priority.) On these occasions, devout lay Buddhists undertake eight precepts: the usual five, but with the third changed to complete sexual abstinence, augmented by three other precepts that emulate the training rules of a novice monk or nun. The eight precepts, enumerated in Text V,4(2), augment the training in sīla as a moral observance with a training in self-restraint, simplicity, and contentment. In this respect they prepare the disciple for the training of the mind undertaken in the practice of meditation, the third base of merit.

The practice of meditation is not only the heart of the path to liberation but a source of merit in its own right. Wholesome meditation practices, even those that do not directly lead to insight, help to purify the grosser levels of mental defilement and uncover deeper dimensions of the mind’s potential purity and radiance. Text V,5(1) declares that the type of meditation that is most fruitful for the production of mundane merit is the development of loving-kindness (mettābhāvanā). The practice of loving-kindness, however, is only one among a set of four meditations called the “divine abodes” (brahmavihāra) or “immeasurable states” (appamaññā): the development of loving-kindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity, which are to be extended boundlessly to all sentient beings. Briefly, loving-kindness (mettā) is the wish for the welfare and happiness of all beings; compassion (karuṇā), the feeling of empathy for all those afflicted with suffering; altruistic joy (muditā), the feeling of happiness at the success and good fortune of others; and equanimity (upekkhā), a balanced reaction to joy and misery, which protects one from emotional agitation.

These meditations are said to be the means to rebirth in the brahma world; see Text V,5(2). While the brahmins regarded the brahma world as the highest attainment, for the Buddha it was just one exalted sphere of rebirth. The concentration arisen from these meditations, however, can also be used as a basis for cultivating the wisdom of insight, and insight culminates in liberation. Text V,5(3), the last selection of this chapter, thus grades the different types of merit according to their fruits: from giving (with the various kinds of gifts ranked according to the spiritual status of the recipients) through the going for refuge and the five precepts to the meditation on loving-kindness. Then, at the very end, it declares that the most fruitful deed among them all is the perception of impermanence. The perception of impermanence, however, belongs to a different order. It is so fruitful not because it yields pleasant mundane results within the round of rebirths, but because it leads to the wisdom of insight that cuts the chains of bondage and brings the realization of complete emancipation, Nibbāna.

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VI. Deepening One’s Perspective on the World

Introduction

Introduction to Part VI, “Deepening One’s Perspective on the World”

In interpreting suttas, we have to take account of the circumstances under which they were spoken and the persons to whom they were addressed. During the course of his long ministry, the Buddha had to adjust his teaching to people with different capacities and needs. He taught those given to reckless behavior to abandon their self-defeating ways and engage in wholesome actions that yield pleasant fruits. He taught those inclined to resign themselves to fate that present effort determines our present quality of life as well as our future destiny. He taught those convinced that personal existence ceases with bodily death that living beings survive the breakup of the body and re-arise in accordance with their kamma. He taught those not yet ripe enough for higher attainments to aspire for rebirth among the devas, the celestial beings, and to enjoy the bliss and glory of the heavens.

A blissful heavenly rebirth, however, is not the final purpose for which the Buddha taught the Dhamma. At best it is only a temporary waystation. The ultimate goal is the cessation of suffering, and the bliss of the heavens, no matter how blissful, is not the same as the cessation of suffering. According to the Buddha’s teaching, all states of existence within the round of rebirths, even the heavens, are transient, unreliable, bound up with pain. Thus the ultimate aim of the Dhamma is nothing short of liberation, which means total release from the round of birth and death.

What lies beyond the round of rebirths is an unconditioned state called Nibbāna. Nibbāna transcends the conditioned world, yet it can be attained within conditioned existence, in this very life, and experienced as the extinction of suffering. The Buddha realized Nibbāna through his enlightenment, and for the next forty-five years of his life he endeavored to help others realize it for themselves. The realization of Nibbāna comes with the blossoming of wisdom and brings perfect peace, untarnished happiness, and the stilling of the mind’s compulsive drives. Nibbāna is the destruction of thirst, the thirst of craving. It is also the island of safety amid the raging currents of old age, sickness, and death.

To guide his spiritually mature disciples toward Nibbāna, the Buddha had to steer them beyond the blissful rewards that could be won in a future life by performing wholesome deeds. He did so through the “world-transcending” facets of his teaching, those aspects designed to lead disciples beyond the “triple world” of sense-sphere existence, form-sphere existence, and formless existence. Again and again throughout the discourses, the Buddha offered an uncompromising, razor-sharp exposure of the dangers inherent in all conditioned states of being. He sounded a clear warning signal that all states of existence are perilous and fraught with pain. He insisted, unambiguously, that the one hope of lasting security lies in complete purification and liberation of the mind. He presented a path that cuts through ignorance and craving in their entirety and dispels attachment even to the most refined states of meditative absorption.

In his “graduated discourse on the Dhamma,” given to introduce receptive newcomers to his teaching, the Buddha regularly began by discussing such practices as giving and moral discipline. He would extol the beauty of such virtues as generosity, harmlessness, honesty, and self-restraint, explaining how such meritorious deeds lead to the joys of a heavenly rebirth. At this point, he would reveal “the danger, degradation, and defilement in sensual pleasures and the blessings of renunciation.” Having thus gradually “ripened” the minds of his audience, he would next expound the doctrine distinctive of his own teaching, the Four Noble Truths: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path. When the Buddha himself taught the Four Noble Truths, his purpose was not to give his listeners an introductory course in “basic Buddhism,” but to awaken in them the “vision of the Dhamma,” the first direct realization of the transcendent truth that sets the disciple on the irreversible path to liberation.

Though we sometimes read in the suttas that disciples attained their first experience of awakening merely by listening to the Buddha preach, this does not mean that the Dhamma is easy to understand. Such disciples could penetrate the truth with such apparent ease because their faculties were mature, perhaps too because they had accumulated sufficient supporting conditions from previous lives. But by its very nature, the world-transcending Dhamma goes against the grain of the mundane mind. The Buddha describes the Dhamma as “subtle, deep, and difficult to see,” and one of the things that makes it so difficult to see is its thesis that the highest happiness cannot be won by yielding to the longings of the heart but only by subduing them. This thesis runs utterly counter to the thought, attitudes, and actions of people fully immersed in the world. As long as we are infatuated with the seductive lures of sensual enjoyment, as long as we take delight in being this or becoming that, we will regard the sublime Dhamma as a mystery and a puzzle. The Buddha therefore realized that the first major challenge he would face in establishing his worldtranscending Dhamma was to break the grip that sensual pleasure and worldly attachment have upon the mind. He had to knock the mind out of its accustomed ruts and set it moving in an altogether different direction. He had to steer his disciples away from the lures of sensuality and worldly attachment and guide them toward disenchantment, complete dispassion, and awakening.

The requirements of this task drew upon all the Buddha’s skills as a teacher. It demanded that he make ample use of his ability to precisely adjust his teaching to the mental proclivities of the people who came to him for instruction. It demanded that he speak up frankly and candidly, even when candor bred resentment. It demanded that he enter the fray of debate, even though he much preferred the peace of seclusion. It demanded that he use similes, metaphors, and parables whenever concrete illustrations could give his arguments stronger appeal. It demanded that he uphold his principles strongly whether his adversaries were hostile ascetics or miscreant monks within the ranks of his own order (see the opening sections of MN 22 and MN 38, not included in this anthology). That the Buddha succeeded so well in fulfilling this difficult task is counted among his truly wonderful and marvelous accomplishments. This is a point to which Text VI,1 bears eloquent testimony.

The Buddha’s task at this stage in the unfolding of his doctrine is to impart to us a radically new education in the art of seeing. To follow the Buddha in the direction he wants to lead us, we have to learn to see beneath the surface glitter of pleasure, position, and power that usually enthralls us, and at the same time, to learn to see through the deceptive distortions of perception, thought, and views that habitually cloak our vision. Ordinarily, we represent things to ourselves through the refractory prism of subjective biases. These biases are shaped by our craving and attachments, which they in turn reinforce. We see things that we want to see; we blot out things that threaten or disturb us, that shake our complacency, that throw into question our comforting assumptions about ourselves and our lives. To undo this process involves a commitment to truth that is often unsettling, but in the long run proves exhilarating and liberating.

The education that the Buddha imparts to us brings about a deepening of our perspective on the world. To help us transform our understanding and deepen our perspective on the world, he offers us three standpoints from which we can appraise the values by which we order our lives. These three standpoints also represent three “moments” or steps in an unfolding process of insight that starts from our commonsense attitudes and moves strategically toward higher knowledge, enlightenment, and release. The three moments are: gratification (assāda), danger (ādīnava), and escape (nissaraṇa). In Texts VI,2(1)–(3), this scheme is applied to the world as a whole. Elsewhere in the Nikāyas, the scheme is applied more specifically to the four material elements (SN 14:31–33), the five aggregates (SN 22:26–28), and the six internal and external sense bases (SN 35:13–18). The Buddha underscores the importance of this scheme with the bold pronouncement that until he was able to fully evaluate the world (or, in the texts referred to just above, the elements, aggregates, and sense bases) in this way, he did not claim that he had attained the unsurpassed perfect enlightenment.

In advancing systematically through this scheme, one begins by recognizing the indubitable fact that such worldly phenomena as sense objects, forms, and feelings give us some degree of gratification. This gratification consists in the pleasure and joy (sukha-somanassa) we experience when we succeed in fulfilling our desires. Once we acknowledge this fact, we can then probe deeper by asking whether such pleasure and joy are entirely satisfactory. If we address this question with utter honesty, in a dispassionate frame of mind, we will realize that such pleasure and joy are far from satisfactory. To the contrary, they are saddled with drawbacks and defects ranging from the trifling to the catastrophic, defects that we perpetually hide from ourselves so that we can continue unhindered in our quest for gratification. This is their danger, the second moment or step of observation. The most pervasive danger lurking behind the innocent façade of our worldly pleasures is their inherent nature of being impermanent (anicca), bound up with suffering and discontent (dukkha), and subject to inevitable change and decay (vipariṇāmadhamma).

The third moment, the moment of escape, follows from the second. “Escape” here is not escapism, a word that implies an anxious attempt to avoid facing one’s problems by pretending they don’t exist and losing oneself in distractions. True escape is quite the opposite: the sanest, most rational, most judicious course of action we can take when we accurately recognize a genuine danger. It is our search for an exit from a burning building, our visit to the doctor when we’re beset by a persistent fever, our decision to give up smoking when we understand how it jeopardizes our health. Once we see that the objects of our attachment are flawed, beset with hidden dangers, we then realize that the way of escape lies in dropping our attachment to them. This is “the removal of desire and lust, the abandoning of desire and lust” (chandarāga-vinaya, chandarāga-pahāna) referred to in the texts.

The Pāli commentators, not surprisingly, connect these three moments with the Four Noble Truths. “Gratification” implies the second noble truth, for pleasure and joy arouse craving, the origin of suffering. “Danger” is the truth of suffering itself. And “escape” is the truth of the cessation of suffering, which also implies the Noble Eightfold Path, the fourth truth, the way to the cessation of suffering.

In Text VI,3 the Buddha uses this threefold scheme to make a detailed appraisal of three major objects of attachment: sensual pleasures, bodily form, and feelings. The major portion of the sutta is devoted to an examination of the dangers in sensual pleasures. It begins with a close-up view of the tribulations that a “clansman”—a young householder pursuing the ancient Indian counterpart of a professional career—might undergo in his quest for sensual gratification. As the discourse unfolds, the scope of the examination widens from the personal to the collective, encompassing the broader social and political consequences of this quest. It reaches its climax in striking images of the warfare and human devastation that follow from the frenzied mass drive for sensual gratification. “Form” is the physical body. The Buddha begins his treatment of form by asking the monks to consider a beautiful young girl. He then traces the progressive stages of her physical decay, through old age, sickness, death, and the eventual disintegration of the corpse until it is reduced to powdered bone. To show the danger in “feeling,” the Buddha selects the feelings of a meditating monk in the jhānas, the meditative absorptions, the most refined mundane experiences of pleasure and peace. He points out that even these lofty feelings are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and subject to change.

Although the following texts do not explicitly apply the threefold scheme, its underlying presence is obvious. Emphasis falls on the aspect of danger. The two texts presented in section 4 again accentuate the pitfalls in sensual pleasures, but do so differently from the text of the preceding section. In Text VI,4(1), the Buddha appears in dialogue with a pompous householder who imagines that he has “cut off all worldly affairs.” To dispel his complacency, the Buddha uses a series of similes that expose the deceptiveness of sensual pleasures to show him what the “cutting off of affairs” means in his own system of training. The use of similes prevails in Text VI,4(2) as well, which pits the Buddha against a hedonist named Māgandiya. The Buddha here contends that sensual pleasures seem to be pleasurable only through a distortion of perception, but when seen rightly are like the fire in a burning charcoal pit—”painful to touch, hot, and scorching.” This passage includes some of the most powerful similes in the Nikāyas, and there can be little doubt that the Buddha has not used them lightly.

The use of imagery also figures prominently in Text VI,5, whose theme is the transience of human life. Buddhist literature frequently advises us to contemplate the certainty of death and the uncertainty of the time of its arrival. This recommendation is not made to induce an attitude of chronic morbidity but to help us break our infatuation with life and develop detachment. For this reason, recollection of death has become one of the most important subjects of Buddhist meditation. The Buddha elsewhere says that the recollection of death “when developed and cultivated, gains a foothold in the Deathless and culminates in the Deathless” (AN 7:46; IV 47–48). Here the transience of life is underscored by counting up the number of days, seasons, and even meals in a single life.

Text VI,6 is an excerpt from the Raṭṭhapāla Sutta, which recounts the life of the disciple the Buddha called “the foremost of those who have gone forth out of faith.” Raṭṭhapāla was a young man from a wellestablished family who was so deeply stirred upon hearing the Buddha preach that he at once decided to embrace the homeless life of a monk. The Buddha asked him to obtain his parents’ permission, but his parents, being strongly attached to their only son, adamantly refused to give their consent. Raṭṭhapāla thereupon lay down on the ground and refused to eat or drink, determined to die right there or receive the going forth. His parents finally relented and permitted him to become a monk on the condition that he later return to visit them. Years later, when he visited his parents, they tried to entice him back to the household life, but since he had already attained arahantship he was now beyond any possibility of disrobing. After leaving their home, he went to the royal pleasure garden, where he gave a discourse to King Koravya on “four summaries of the Dhamma.” This discourse conveys his profound insights into the depth and universality of suffering, explaining in simple and lucid words why he, like countless other capable men and women in the prime of life, chose to leave the comforts of the household for the uncertainties of the homeless state. Craving for sensual pleasures is one trap that keeps beings bound to the round of rebirths. Another major trap is attachment to views. Thus, to clear the path to Nibbāna, the Buddha not only had to dispel infatuation with sensual pleasures but also to expose the danger in views.

This is the theme of section 7.

The most dangerous of wrong views are those that deny or undermine the foundations of ethics. Text VI,7(1) draws together a number of perils posed by this type of wrong view; prominent among them is rebirth in the lower realms. Views also lead to one-sided, biased interpretations of reality that we cling to as accurate and complete. People who cling tenaciously to their own views of a particular situation often come into conflict with those who view the same situation in a different light. Views thus give rise to conflicts and disputes. Perhaps no text in all of world literature has depicted this danger in dogmatic clinging more succinctly than the famous parable of the blind men and the elephant, included here as Text VI,7(2).

Text VI,7(3) draws a contrast between the pair of distorted views

known as eternalism (sassatavāda) and annihilationism (ucchedavāda), also called, respectively, the view of existence (bhavadiṭṭhi) and the view of nonexistence (vibhavadiṭṭhi). Eternalism affirms an eternal component in the individual, an indestructible self, and an eternal ground of the world, such as an all-powerful creator God. Annihilationism denies that there is any survival beyond death, holding that the individual comes to a complete end with the demise of the physical body. Eternalism, according to the Buddha, leads to delight in existence and binds beings to the cycle of existence. Annihilationism is often accompanied by a disgust with existence that, paradoxically, binds its adherents to the same existence that they loathe. As we will see below, the Buddha’s teaching of dependent origination avoids both these futile ends (see IX, pp. 356–57).

Text VI,8 highlights a particular problem posed by eternalist views. Such views can inspire meditators to attain states of deep meditative bliss, which they interpret as union with a divine reality or realization of an eternal self. From the perspective of the Buddha’s teaching, however, such attainments merely create the karmic potential for rebirth into a realm in which that meditative experience becomes the fundamental condition of consciousness. In other words, the attainment of these states in the human realm generates rebirth into the corresponding planes in the realm of subtle form or the formless realm. While many religions point to a divine realm as the final answer to the human predicament, the Buddha’s teaching holds that these worlds offer no final outlet from the impermanence and misery of saṃsāra.

The text cited here shows that certain meditators attain the four “divine abodes” and take rebirth in the corresponding planes of the brahma world, where they might abide even for as long as five hundred great eons. Eventually, however, they must inevitably pass away and may then fall into the unfortunate realms of rebirth. Similar texts not included here (AN 3:114, 4:124) say the same respectively about realms of rebirth corresponding to the jhānas and the formless attainments.

The two suttas that constitute the final section of this chapter again take up the unsatisfactoriness and insecurity of conditioned existence, reinforcing their message with dramatic imagery. In Text VI,9(1), the Buddha declares that the amount of tears we have shed while wandering through the round of rebirths is greater than the water in the four great oceans. In Text VI,9(2), he tells a group of thirty monks that the amount of blood they have shed when they were slaughtered and executed in the round of rebirths is greater than the water in the four great oceans. According to the compilers of the sutta, the impact of this discourse upon the thirty monks was so powerful that all attained full liberation on the spot.

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© Bhikkhu Bodhi, In the Buddha's Words (Wisdom Publications, 2005)

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VII. The Path to Liberation

Introduction

Introduction to Part VII, “The Path to Liberation”

In this chapter, we come to the unique distinguishing feature of the Buddha’s teaching, its “supramundane” or “world-transcending” (lokuttara) path to liberation. This path builds upon the transformed understanding and deepened perspective on the nature of the world that arise from our recognition of the perils in sensual pleasures, the inevitability of death, and the vicious nature of saṃsāra, themes that we surveyed in the previous chapter. It aims to lead the practitioner to the state of liberation that lies beyond all realms of conditioned existence, to the same sorrowless and stainless bliss of Nibbāna that the Buddha himself attained on the night of his enlightenment.

This chapter presents texts that offer a broad overview of the Buddha’s world-transcending path; the following two chapters will bring together texts that focus more finely on the training of the mind and the cultivation of wisdom, the two major branches of the worldtranscending path. I begin, however, with several suttas that are intended to clarify the purpose of this path, illuminating it from different angles. Text VII,1(1), The Shorter Discourse to Māluṅkyāputta (MN 63), shows that the Buddhist path is not designed to provide theoretical answers to philosophical questions. In this sutta the monk Māluṅkyāputta approaches the Buddha and demands answers to ten speculative questions, threatening to leave the Saṅgha if this demand is not satisfied. Scholars have debated whether the Buddha refused to answer such questions because they are in principle unanswerable or simply because they are irrelevant to a practical resolution of the problem of suffering. Two collections of suttas in the Saṃyutta Nikāya—SN 33:1–10 and SN 44:7–8—make it clear that the Buddha’s “silence” had a deeper basis than mere pragmatic concerns. These suttas show that all such questions are based on an underlying assumption that existence is to be interpreted in terms of a self and a world in which the self is situated. Since these premises are invalid, no answer framed in terms of these premises can be valid, and thus the Buddha must reject the very questions themselves.

However, while the Buddha had philosophical grounds for refusing to answer these questions, he also rejected them because he considered the obsession with their solutions to be irrelevant to the quest for release from suffering. This reason is the evident point of the discourse to Māluṅkyāputta, with its well-known simile of the man shot by the poisoned arrow. Whether any of these views is true or not, the Buddha says, “there is birth, there is aging, there is death, there are sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair, the destruction of which I prescribe here and now.” Against the picture of the saṃsāric background sketched at the end of the previous chapter, this statement now takes on an expanded meaning: the “destruction of birth, aging, and death” is not merely the end of suffering in a single lifetime, but the end of the immeasurable suffering of repeated birth, aging, and death that we have undergone in the countless eons of saṃsāra.

Text VII,1(2), The Greater Discourse on the Simile of the Heartwood (MN 29), clarifies from a different angle the Buddha’s purpose in expounding his world-transcending Dhamma. The sutta is about a “clansman” who has gone forth from the household life into homelessness intent on reaching the end of suffering. Though earnest in purpose at the time of his ordination, once he attains some success, whether a lower achievement like gain and honor or a superior one like concentration and insight, he becomes complacent and neglects his original purpose in entering the Buddha’s path. The Buddha declares that none of these stations along the way—not moral discipline, concentration, or even knowledge and vision—is the final goal of the spiritual life. The goal, its heartwood or essential purpose, is “unshakable liberation of the mind,” and he urges those who have entered the path not to be satisfied with anything less.

Text VII,1(3) is a selection of suttas from “The Connected Discourses on the Path” (Maggasaṃyutta). These suttas state that the purpose of practicing the spiritual life under the Buddha is “the fading away of lust, … final Nibbāna without clinging,” the Noble Eightfold Path being the way to attain each of these aims.

The Noble Eightfold Path is the classical formulation of the way to liberation, as is already clear from the Buddha’s first sermon, in which he calls the Eightfold Path the way to the cessation of suffering. Text VII,2 gives formal definitions of the individual path factors but does not show concretely how their practice is to be integrated into the life of a disciple. The detailed application will be filled out later in this chapter and in chapters VIII and IX.

Text VII,3 throws a different spotlight on the path than we are accustomed to hear in standard Buddhist rhetoric. While we are often told that the practice of the Buddhist path depends entirely on personal effort, this sutta emphasizes the importance of spiritual friendship. The Buddha declares that spiritual friendship is not merely “half the spiritual life” but the whole of it, for the endeavor to attain spiritual perfection is not a purely solitary enterprise but occurs in dependence on close personal ties. Spiritual friendship gives the practice of the Dhamma an inescapably human dimension and welds the body of Buddhist practitioners into a community united both vertically by the relationship of teacher to students and horizontally by friendships among peers treading a shared path.

Contrary to a common assumption, the eight path factors are not steps to be followed in sequence, one after another. They are more appropriately described as components than as steps. Optimally, all eight factors should be present simultaneously, each making its own distinctive contribution, like eight interwoven strands of a cable that give the cable maximum strength. However, until that stage is reached, it is inevitable that the factors of the path exhibit some degree of sequence in their development. The eight factors are commonly distributed into three groups as follows:

the moral discipline group (sīlakkhandha), made up of right speech, right action, and right livelihood;
the concentration group (samādhikkhandha), made up of right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration;
the wisdom group (paññākkhandha), made up of right view and right intention.

Within the Nikāyas, however, this correlation occurs only once (at MN 44; I 301), where it is ascribed to the nun Dhammadinnā, not to the Buddha himself. It might be said that the two wisdom factors are placed at the beginning because a preliminary right view and right intention are required at the outset of the path, right view providing the conceptual understanding of Buddhist principles that guides the development of the other path factors, right intention the proper motivation and direction for the development of the path.

In the Nikāyas, the Buddha often expounds the practice of the path as a gradual training (anupubbasikkhā) that unfolds in stages from the first step to the final goal. This gradual training is a finer subdivision of the threefold division of the path into moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom. Invariably in the suttas the exposition of the gradual training begins with the going forth into homelessness and the adoption of the lifestyle of a bhikkhu, a Buddhist monk. This immediately calls attention to the importance of the monastic life in the Buddha’s pragmatic vision. In principle the entire practice of the Noble Eightfold Path is open to people from any mode of life, monastic or lay, and the Buddha confirms that many among his lay followers were accomplished in the Dhamma and had attained the first three of the four stages of awakening, up to nonreturning (anāgāmī; Theravāda commentators say that lay followers can also attain the fourth stage, arahantship, but they do so either on the verge of death or after attainment immediately seek the going forth). The fact remains, however, that the household life inevitably fosters a multitude of mundane concerns and personal attachments that impede the singlehearted quest for liberation. Thus when the Buddha set out on his own noble quest he did so by going into homelessness, and after his enlightenment, as a practical way to help others, he established the Saṅgha, the order of monks and nuns, for those who want to devote themselves fully to the Dhamma unhindered by the cares of household life.

The gradual training occurs in two versions: a longer version in the Dīgha Nikāya and a middle-length version in the Majjhima Nikāya. The principal differences are: (1) the longer version has a more detailed treatment of the observances that pertain to monastic etiquette and ascetic self-restraint; (2) the longer version includes eight types of higher knowledge while the middle-length version has three types. However, as these three types are the ones mentioned in the Buddha’s account of his own enlightenment (see Text II,3(2)), they are by far the most important. The main paradigm for the longer version of the gradual training is found at DN 2; the middle-length version is at MN 27 and MN 51, with variants at MN 38, MN 39, MN 53, MN 107, and MN 125. Here, Text VII,4 includes the whole of MN 27, which embeds the training in the simile of the elephant’s footprint that gives the sutta its name. Text VII,5, an excerpt from MN 39, repeats the higher stages of the training as described in MN 27, but includes the impressive similes not included in the latter version.

The sequence opens with the appearance of a Tathāgata in the world and his exposition of the Dhamma. Having heard this, the disciple acquires faith and follows the Teacher into homelessness. He then undertakes the rules of discipline that promote the purification of conduct and the right livelihood of an ascetic. The next three steps—contentment, restraint of the sense faculties, and mindfulness and clear comprehension—internalize the process of purification and thereby bridge the transition from moral discipline to concentration.

The section on the abandonment of the five hindrances deals with the preliminary training in concentration. The five hindrances—sensual desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and remorse, and doubt—are the principal obstacles to meditative development, and thus they must be removed for the mind to become collected and unified. The stock passage on the gradual training treats the overcoming of the hindrances only schematically, but other texts in the Nikāyas provide more practical instructions, while the Pāli commentaries offer even more details. The similes in the version of MN 39—see Text VII,5—illustrate the joyful sense of freedom that one wins by overcoming the hindrances.

The next stage in the sequence describes the attainment of the jhānas, profound states of concentration in which the mind becomes fully absorbed in its object. The Buddha enumerates four jhānas, named simply after their numerical position in the series, each more refined and elevated than its predecessor. The jhānas are always described by the same formulas, which in several suttas are augmented by similes of great beauty; again, see Text VII,5. Although wisdom rather than concentration is the critical factor in the attainment of enlightenment, the Buddha invariably includes the jhānas in the gradual training for at least two reasons: first, because they contribute to the intrinsic perfection of the path; and second, because the deep concentration they induce serves as a basis for the arising of insight. The Buddha calls the jhānas the “footsteps of the Tathāgata” (MN 27.19–22) and shows them to be precursors of the bliss of Nibbāna that lies at the end of the training.

From the fourth jhāna three alternative lines of further development become possible. In a number of texts outside the stock passage on the gradual training the Buddha mentions four meditative states that continue the mental unification established by the jhānas. These states, described as “the liberations that are peaceful and formless,” are further refinements of concentration. Distinguished from the jhānas by their transcendence of the subtle mental image that serves as the object in the jhānas, they are named the base of the infinity of space, the base of the infinity of consciousness, the base of nothingness, and the base of neither-perception-nor-nonperception.

A second line of development is the acquisition of supernormal knowledge. The Buddha frequently refers to a set of six types, which come to be called the six kinds of direct knowledge (chaḷabhiññā). The last of these, the knowledge of the destruction of the taints, is “supramundane” or world-transcending and thus marks the culmination of the third line of development. But the other five are all mundane, products of the extraordinarily powerful mental concentration achieved in the fourth jhāna: the supernormal powers, the divine ear, the ability to read the minds of others, the recollection of past lives, and the knowledge of the passing away and rebirth of beings (see Text VIII,4).

The jhānas and the formless attainments by themselves do not issue in enlightenment and liberation. Though lofty and peaceful, they can only silence the defilements that sustain the round of rebirths but cannot eradicate them. To uproot the defilements at the most fundamental level, and thereby arrive at enlightenment and liberation, the meditative process must be directed to a third line of development. This is the contemplation of “things as they really are,” which results in increasingly deeper insights into the nature of existence and culminates in the final goal, the attainment of arahantship.

This line of development is the one the Buddha pursues in the passage on the gradual training. He prefaces it with descriptions of two of the direct knowledges, the recollection of past lives and the knowledge of the passing away and rebirth of beings. The three together figured prominently in the Buddha’s own enlightenment—as we saw in Text II,3(2)—and are collectively called the three true knowledges (tevijjā). Although the first two are not essential to the realization of arahantship, the Buddha probably includes them here because they reveal the truly vast and profound dimensions of suffering in saṃsāra, thereby preparing the mind for the penetration of the Four Noble Truths by which that suffering is diagnosed and surmounted.

The passage on the gradual training does not explicitly show the process of contemplation by which the meditator develops insight. The whole process is only implied by the mention of its final fruit, called the knowledge of the destruction of the taints (āsavakkhayañāṇa). The āsavas or taints are a classification of defilements considered in their role of sustaining the forward movement of the process of birth and death. The commentaries derive the word from a root su meaning “to flow.” Scholars differ as to whether the flow implied by the prefix ā is inward or outward; hence some have rendered it as “influxes” or “influences,” others as “outflows” or “effluents.” A stock passage in the suttas indicates the term’s real significance independently of etymology when it describes the āsavas as states “that defile, bring renewal of existence, give trouble, ripen in suffering, and lead to future birth, aging, and death” (MN 36.47; I 250). Thus other translators, bypassing the literal meaning, have rendered it “cankers,” “corruptions,” or “taints.” The three taints mentioned in the Nikāyas are respectively synonyms for craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, and ignorance. When the disciple’s mind is liberated from the taints by the completion of the path of arahantship, he reviews his newly won freedom and roars his lion’s roar: “Birth is destroyed, the spiritual life has been lived, what had to be done has been done; there is no more coming back to any state of being.”

How to cite this document:
© Bhikkhu Bodhi, In the Buddha's Words (Wisdom Publications, 2005)

Creative Commons License
This selection from In the Buddha's Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.wisdompubs.org/book/buddha’s-words.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.wisdompubs.org/terms-use.

VIII. Mastering the Mind

Introduction

Introduction to Part VIII, “Mastering the Mind”

Having presented a broad overview of the world-transcending path in the previous chapter, in this chapter and the next I intend to focus more specifically on two aspects of this path as described in the Nikāyas, meditation and wisdom. As we have seen, the gradual training is divided into the three sections of moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom (see pp. 225–26). Moral discipline begins with the observance of precepts, which anchor one’s actions in principles of conscientious behavior and moral restraint. The undertaking of precepts—for the Nikāyas, particularly the full code of monastic precepts—is called the training in the higher moral discipline (adhisīlasikkhā). Moral discipline, consistently observed, infuses the mind with the purifying force of moral virtue, generating joy and deeper confidence in the Dhamma.

Established upon moral discipline, the disciple takes up the practice of meditation, intended to stabilize the mind and clear away the obstacles to the unfolding of wisdom. Because meditation elevates the mind beyond its normal level, this phase of practice is called the training in the higher mind (adhicittasikkhā). Because it brings inner stillness and quietude, it is also called the development of serenity (samathabhāvanā). Successful practice results in deep concentration or mental unification (samādhi), also known as internal serenity of mind (ajjhattaṃ cetosamatha). The most eminent types of concentration recognized in the Nikāyas are the four jhānas, which constitute right concentration (sammā samādhi) of the Noble Eightfold Path. Beyond the jhānas lie the four formless attainments (arūpasamāpatti), which carry the process of mental unification to still subtler levels.

The third stage of practice is the training in the higher wisdom (adhipaññāsikkhā), designed to awaken direct insight into the true nature of things as disclosed by the Buddha’s teaching. This will be dealt with in detail in the following chapter.

The first selection below, Text VIII,1, is a miscellany of short epigrams that stress the need for mental cultivation. The sayings occur in pairs. In each pair, the first member signals the dangers of the uncultivated mind, the second extols the benefits of the cultivated mind. The uncultivated mind is easy prey to the defilements—greed, hatred, and delusion and their offshoots. The defilements generate unwholesome kamma, which brings painful results both in this life and in future lives. Since the defilements are the cause of our suffering and bondage, the path to liberation necessarily involves a meticulous process of mental training intended to subdue them and ultimately uproot them from their nesting place in the deep recesses of the mind. From development of the mind arise happiness, freedom, and peace.

Development of the mind, for the Nikāyas, means the development of serenity (samatha) and insight (vipassanā). Text VIII,2(1) says that when serenity is developed, it leads to concentration and the liberation of the mind from such emotional defilements as lust and ill will. When insight is developed, it leads to the higher wisdom of insight into the true nature of phenomena and permanently liberates the mind from ignorance. Thus the two things most needed to master the mind are serenity and insight.

Since concentration is the basis for wisdom, the Nikāyas usually treat the development of serenity as the precursor to the development of insight. However, because the aptitudes of meditators differ, several suttas allow for alternative approaches to this sequence. Text VIII,2(2) speaks of four approaches to mental cultivation:

The first approach, the classical one, is to develop serenity first and insight afterward. By “serenity” is meant the jhānas or (according to the Pāli commentaries) a state bordering on the jhānas called “access” or “threshold” concentration (upacārasamādhi).
A second approach is to develop insight first and serenity afterward. Since there can be no real insight without concentration, such meditators—presumably people with sharp intellectual faculties— must initially use concentration as the basis for acquiring insight into the true characteristics of phenomena. However, it seems that such concentration, though sufficient for insight, is not strong enough to allow for a breakthrough to the supramundane path. These meditators must therefore return to the task of unifying the mind before resuming the work of insight. Such insight, based on concentration, culminates in the supramundane path.
A third approach is to develop serenity and insight in tandem. Meditators who take this approach first attain a particular level of concentration, such as a jhāna or formless attainment, and then employ it as a basis for insight. Having developed insight, they then return to concentration, attain a different jhāna or formless attainment, and use that as a basis for insight. Thus they proceed until they reach the supramundane path.
The description of the fourth approach is somewhat obscure. The sutta says that “a monk’s mind is seized by agitation about the teachings,” and then, some time later, he gains concentration and attains the supramundane path. This statement suggests a person initially driven by such intense desire to understand the Dhamma that he or she cannot focus clearly upon any meditation object. Later, with the aid of certain supporting conditions, this person manages to subdue the mind, gain concentration, and attain the supramundane path.

Text VIII,2(3) again confirms that both serenity and insight are necessary, and also indicates the skills needed for their respective practice. The cultivation of serenity requires skill in steadying, composing, unifying, and concentrating the mind. The cultivation of insight requires skill in observing, investigating, and discerning conditioned phenomena, spoken of as “formations” (saṅkhārā). In line with the preceding text, this sutta confirms that some meditators begin by developing internal serenity of mind, others by developing the higher wisdom of insight into phenomena, others by developing both in tandem. But while meditators may start off differently, eventually they must all strike a healthy balance between serenity and insight. The exact point of balance between the two will differ from one person to another, but when a meditator achieves the appropriate balance, serenity and insight join forces to issue in the knowledge and vision of the Four Noble Truths. This knowledge and vision—the world-transcending wisdom—occurs in four distinct “installments,” the four stages of realization which, in sequence, permanently destroy ignorance along with the affiliated defilements. Text VIII,2(2) subsumes these defilements under the expression “the fetters and underlying tendencies.”

The main impediments to the development of serenity and insight are collectively called the “five hindrances,” which we already met in the extended account of the gradual training (see Text VII,4 §18). Text VIII,3 states that just as different impurities of water prevent us from clearly seeing the reflection of our face in a bowl of water, so the five hindrances prevent us from properly understanding our own good and the good of others. A meditator’s initial efforts therefore have to be devoted to the task of overcoming the hindrances. Once these are overcome, success is assured in the practice of serenity and insight.

Text VIII,4 compares the successive stages in the purification of the mind to the refinement of gold. The meditating monk begins by removing the gross impurities of bodily, verbal, and mental conduct; this is achieved by moral discipline and vigilant introspection. Then he eliminates the middle-level impurities of unwholesome thoughts: thoughts of sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness. Next come the subtle impurities of meandering thoughts. Finally, he must eliminate thoughts about the Dhamma, the subtlest obstacle. When all such distracting thoughts are removed, the monk attains “mental unification” (ekodibhāva), the basis for the six “direct knowledges” (abhiññā) culminating in arahantship, the knowledge of the destruction of the taints. The Nikāyas sometimes compare the process of training the mind to the taming of a wild animal. Just as an animal trainer has to use various techniques to bring the animal under control, the meditator has to draw upon various methods to subdue the mind. It is not enough to be acquainted with one meditation technique; one must be skilled in a number of methods intended as antidotes to specific mental obstructions. In Text VIII,5 the Buddha explains five ancillary techniques— here called “signs” (nimitta)—that a monk might deploy to eliminate unwholesome thoughts connected with lust, hatred, and delusion. One who succeeds in overcoming distracting thoughts by the use of these techniques is called “a master of the courses of thought.”

The suttas teach various techniques of meditation aimed at inducing concentration. One popular formula pits specific meditation subjects against the unwholesome mental states they are intended to rectify. Thus the meditation on the unattractive nature of the body (see Text VIII,8 §10) is the remedy for sensual lust; loving-kindness is the remedy for ill will; mindfulness of breathing is the remedy for restlessness; and the perception of impermanence is the remedy for the conceit “I am.” The perception of impermanence is a subject of insight meditation, the other three subjects of serenity meditation. Loving-kindness is the first of the four divine abodes (brahmavihāra) or immeasurable states (appamaññā) briefly discussed in chapter V: boundless lovingkindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity. These are respectively the antidotes to ill will, harmfulness, discontent, and partiality.

Since we already introduced the standard canonical passage on the divine abodes in connection with meditation as a basis for merit—see Text V,5(2)—to shed a different spotlight on this practice I have included here, as Text VIII,6, the famous Simile of the Saw, a passage that shows loving-kindness in action.

Through the centuries the most popular meditation subjects among lay Buddhists have probably been the six recollections (anussati): of the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Saṅgha, morality, generosity, and the devas. Text VIII,7 is an important canonical source for these meditations. Their themes are especially close to the hearts and everyday experiences of people living household lives in a culture imbued with Buddhist values. These meditation practices in turn enrich and uplift their lives, bringing them into closer spiritual contact with the ideals of religious faith. The first three are primarily devotional recollections that build upon confidence in the Three Jewels; but while they begin with faith, they temporarily cleanse the mind of defilements and conduce to sustained concentration. The meditation on moral discipline develops from one’s observance of the precepts, a practice aimed at self-benefit; the recollection of generosity builds upon one’s practice of giving, an altruistic practice; the recollection of the devas is a contemplation of the fruits of one’s faith, morality, generosity, and wisdom as they mature in future lives.

The discourse generally considered to offer the most comprehensive instructions on meditation practice is the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. Two versions of this sutta exist, a longer version in the Dīgha Nikāya, a middlelength version in the Majjhima Nikāya. The former differs from the latter only by its extended analysis of the Four Noble Truths, which may have originally been an early commentary incorporated into the discourse. The middle-length version is included here as Text VIII,8. An entire chapter in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Satipaṭṭhānasaṃyutta, is also devoted to this system of meditation.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta does not recommend a single meditation subject nor even a single method of meditation. Its purpose, rather, is to explain how to establish the mode of contemplation needed to arrive at realization of Nibbāna. The appropriate frame of mind to be established, as implied by the title of the sutta, is called an “establishment of mindfulness.” The word satipaṭṭhāna should probably be understood as a compound of sati, mindfulness, and upaṭṭhāna, establishment; hence “establishment of mindfulness” would be the rendering that best captures the original meaning. According to the standard formula that accompanies each exercise, a satipaṭṭhāna is a mode of dwelling (viharati). This mode of dwelling involves observation of objects in the proper frame of mind. The frame of mind consists of three positive qualities: energy (ātāpa, “ardor”), mindfulness (sati), and clear comprehension (sampajañña). The word sati originally meant memory, but in the present context it signifies recollection of the present, a sustained awareness of what is happening to us and within us on each occasion of experience. Mindfulness, in its initial stages, is concerned with keeping the contemplative mind continually on its object, which means keeping the object continually present to the mind. Mindfulness prevents the mind from slipping away, from drifting off under the sway of random thoughts into mental proliferation and forgetfulness. Mindfulness is often said to occur in close conjunction with “clear comprehension,” a clear knowledge and understanding of what one is experiencing.

The opening formula of the sutta says that one engages in this practice after “having subdued longing and dejection in regard to the world” (vineyya loke abhijjhā-domanassaṃ). The expression “having subdued” need not be taken to imply that one must first overcome longing and dejection—which, according to the commentary, signify greed and aversion and thus represent the five hindrances—before one can start to practice satipaṭṭhāna. The expression might be understood to mean that the practice is itself the means of overcoming longing and dejection. Thus, while subduing the obstructive influences of greed and aversion, the meditator arouses the positive qualities of energy, mindfulness, and clear comprehension, and contemplates four objective domains: the body, feelings, states of mind, and phenomena. It is these four objective domains that differentiate mindful observation into four establishments of mindfulness.

The four objective domains divide the expository portion of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta into four major sections. Two of these sections, the first and the fourth, have several subdivisions. When the divisions are added up, we obtain altogether twenty-one meditation subjects. Several of these can be used as means to develop serenity (samatha), but the satipaṭṭhāna system as a whole seems especially designed for the development of insight. The main sections with their divisions are as follows:

Contemplation of the body (kāyānupassanā). This comprises fourteen subjects of meditation: mindfulness of breathing; contemplation of the four postures; clear comprehension of activities; attention to the unattractive nature of the body (viewed by way of its organs and tissues); attention to the elements; and nine charnel ground contemplations, contemplations based on corpses in different stages of decomposition.
Contemplation of feeling (vedanānupassanā). Feeling is differentiated into three primary types—pleasant, painful, and neitherpainful-nor-pleasant—which are each further distinguished into carnal and spiritual feelings. However, because these are all merely different types of feeling, the contemplation of feeling is considered one subject.
Contemplation of mind (cittānupassanā). This is one subject of contemplation—the mind—differentiated into eight pairs of contrasting states of mind.
Contemplation of phenomena (dhammānupassanā). The word dhammā here probably signifies phenomena, which are classified into five categories governed by the Buddha’s teaching, the Dhamma. Thus dhammānupassanā has a dual meaning, “dhammas (phenomena) contemplated by way of the Dhamma (the teaching).” The five categories are: the five hindrances, the five aggregates, the six internal and external sense bases, the seven factors of enlightenment, and the Four Noble Truths.

Although not specified in the sutta, a progressive sequence seems to be implied by the terms describing each contemplation. In mindfulness of breathing one moves to subtler levels of quiescence; in contemplation of feeling, one moves toward noncarnal feelings that are neither painful nor pleasant; in contemplation of mind, one moves toward states of mind that are concentrated and liberated. These all suggest that progressive contemplation brings enhanced concentration. In the contemplation of phenomena, the emphasis shifts toward insight. One begins by observing and overcoming the five hindrances. The overcoming of the hindrances marks success in concentration. With the concentrated mind, one contemplates the five aggregates and the six sense bases. As contemplation gains momentum, the seven factors of enlightenment become manifest, and the development of the seven enlightenment factors culminates in knowledge of the Four Noble Truths. Knowledge of the Four Noble Truths liberates the mind from the defilements and thus leads to the attainment of Nibbāna. Thus this system of meditation fulfills the potential ascribed to it by the Buddha of leading directly to the realization of Nibbāna.

Each major contemplative exercise is supplemented by an auxiliary section, a “refrain” with four subdivisions. The first states that the meditator contemplates the object internally (within his or her own experience), externally (reflectively considering it as occurring within the experience of others), and both; this ensures that one obtains a comprehensive and balanced view of the object. The second portion states that the meditator contemplates the object as subject to origination, as subject to vanishing, and as subject to both origination and vanishing; this brings to light the characteristic of impermanence and thus leads to insight into the three characteristics: impermanence, suffering, and nonself (anicca, dukkha, anattā). The third states that the meditator is simply aware of the bare object to the extent necessary for constant mindfulness and knowledge. And the fourth describes the meditator as dwelling in a state of complete detachment, not clinging to anything in the world.

In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati) is included as merely one meditation subject among others, but the Nikāyas assign it a position of fundamental importance. The Buddha said that he used mindfulness of breathing as his main meditation subject for the attainment of enlightenment (see SN 54:8; V 317). During his teaching career he occasionally went into seclusion to devote himself to “the concentration gained through mindfulness of breathing” and he confers on it a unique honor by calling it “the Tathāgata’s dwelling” (SN 54:11; V 326).

Mindfulness of breathing is the subject of an entire chapter in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 54, Ānāpānasaṃyutta). Whereas the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta explains mindfulness of breathing by a four-step formula, the suttas in this collection expand its practice to sixteen steps. Text VIII,9, from the Ānāpānasaṃyutta, describes the sixteen steps. Since these steps are not necessarily sequential but partly overlap, they might be thought of as facets rather than actual steps. The sixteen facets are grouped into four tetrads each of which corresponds to one of the four establishments of mindfulness. The first tetrad contains the four facets mentioned in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta in its section on contemplation of the body, but the other tetrads extend the practice to the contemplations of feelings, mind, and phenomena. Thus the development of mindfulness of breathing can fulfill not just one but all four establishments of mindfulness. The four establishments of mindfulness, based on mindfulness of breathing, in turn fulfill the seven factors of enlightenment; and these in turn fulfill true knowledge and liberation. This exposition thus shows mindfulness of breathing to be a complete subject of meditation that begins with simple attention to the breath and culminates in the permanent liberation of the mind.

Finally, in Text VIII,10, the Buddha’s chief disciple, the Venerable Sāriputta, testifies to his own achievement of mastery over the mind. In reply to questions from the Venerable Ānanda, he explains how he is able to dwell for a whole day in each of the jhānas and formless attainments, as well as in the special attainment called the cessation of perception and feeling (saññāvedayitanirodha). In each case, because he is an arahant, he can do so without grasping these attainments with thoughts of “I” and “mine.”

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IX. Shining the Light of Wisdom

Introduction

Introduction to Part IX, “Shining the Light of Wisdom”

The texts cited in the last chapter treated meditation as a discipline of mental training aimed at a twofold task: stilling the mind and generating insight. The still mind, calm and collected, is the foundation for insight. The still mind observes phenomena as they arise and pass away, and from sustained observation and probing exploration arises “the higher wisdom of insight into phenomena” (adhipaññādhammavipassanā). As wisdom gathers momentum, it penetrates more and more deeply into the nature of things, culminating in the full and comprehensive understanding called enlightenment (sambodhi).

The Pāli word translated here as “wisdom” is paññā, the Pāli equivalent of Sanskrit prajñā, which gives its name to the voluminous prajñāpāramitā sūtras of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The idea of paññā/prajñā as the principal tool on the path to enlightenment, however, did not originate with the prajñāpāramitā literature but is already deeply embedded in the teachings of Early Buddhism. The Nikāyas take paññā not only as a point of doctrine but as a rich theme for imagery. Thus, Texts IX,1(1)–(2) speak of paññā respectively as a light and a knife. It is the supreme light because it illuminates the true nature of things and dispels the darkness of ignorance. It is a knife—a sharp butcher’s knife—because it cuts through the tangled mass of the defilements and thereby opens the way to liberation.

The Pāli word paññā is derived from the verbal root ñā (Skt: jñā), meaning “to know,” preceded by the prefix pa (Skt: pra), which merely gives the root meaning a more dynamic nuance. So paññā/prajñā means knowing or understanding, not as a possession, but as an action: the act of knowing, the act of understanding, the act of discerning. In Pāli, the verb pajānāti, “one understands,” conveys this sense more effectively than the correlative noun paññā. What is meant by paññā, however, is a type of understanding superior to that which occurs when one understands, for instance, a difficult passage in an economics textbook or the implications of a legal argument. Paññā signifies the understanding that arises through spiritual training, illuminates the real nature of things, and culminates in the mind’s purification and liberation. For this reason, despite its drawbacks, I continue to use the familiar “wisdom.”

Contemporary Buddhist literature commonly conveys two ideas about paññā that have become almost axioms in the popular understanding of Buddhism. The first is that paññā is exclusively nonconceptual and nondiscursive, a type of cognition that defies all the laws of logical thought; the second, that paññā arises spontaneously, through an act of pure intuition as sudden and instantaneous as a brilliant flash of lightning. These two ideas about paññā are closely connected. If paññā defies all the laws of thought, it cannot be approached by any type of conceptual activity but can arise only when the rational, discriminative, conceptual activity of the mind has been stultified. And this stopping of conceptualization, somewhat like the demolition of a building, must be a rapid one, an undermining of thought not previously prepared for by any gradual maturation of understanding. Thus, in the popular understanding of Buddhism, paññā defies rationality and easily slides off into “crazy wisdom,” an incomprehensible, mindboggling way of relating to the world that dances at the thin edge between super-rationality and madness.

Such ideas about paññā receive no support at all from the teachings of the Nikāyas, which are consistently sane, lucid, and sober. To take the two points in reverse order: First, far from arising spontaneously, paññā in the Nikāyas is emphatically conditioned, arisen from an underlying matrix of causes and conditions. And second, paññā is not bare intuition, but a careful, discriminative understanding that at certain stages involves precise conceptual operations. Paññā is directed to specific domains of understanding. These domains, known in the Pāli commentaries as “the soil of wisdom” (paññābhūmi), must be thoroughly investigated and mastered through conceptual understanding before direct, nonconceptual insight can effectively accomplish its work. To master them requires analysis, discrimination, and discernment. One must be able to abstract from the overwhelming mass of facts certain basic patterns fundamental to all experience and use these patterns as templates for close contemplation of one’s own experience. I will have more to say about this as we go along.

The conditional basis for wisdom is laid down in the three-tier structure of the Buddhist training. As we have seen, in the three divisions of the Buddhist path, moral discipline functions as the basis for concentration and concentration as the basis for wisdom. Thus the immediate condition for the arising of wisdom is concentration. As the Buddha often says: “Develop concentration, monks. One who is concentrated sees things as they really are.” To “see things as they really are” is the work of wisdom; the immediate basis for this correct seeing is concentration. Since concentration depends on proper bodily and verbal conduct, moral discipline too is a condition for wisdom.

Text IX,2 gives a fuller list of eight causes and conditions for obtaining “the wisdom fundamental to the spiritual life” and for bringing such wisdom to maturity. Of particular interest is the fifth condition, which not only emphasizes the contribution that study of the Dhamma makes to the development of wisdom but also prescribes a sequential program of education. First one “learns much” of those “teachings that are good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end.” Then one memorizes them; then recites them aloud; then investigates them with the mind; and finally “penetrates them well by view.” The last step can be equated with direct insight, but such insight is prepared for by the preceding steps, which provide the “information” necessary for thorough penetration to occur. From this, we can see that wisdom does not arise automatically on the basis of concentration but depends upon a clear and precise conceptual understanding of the Dhamma induced by study, reflection, and deep contemplation of the teachings.

As a factor of the Noble Eightfold Path, wisdom is known as right view (sammādiṭṭhi). Text IX,3, a slightly abridged version of the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta, the Discourse on Right View (MN 9), gives an excellent overview of the “soil of wisdom.” The Venerable Sāriputta, the Buddha’s disciple who excelled in wisdom, spoke the discourse to a group of his fellow monks. Since ancient times, the text has served as a primer of Buddhist studies in the monasteries of southern Asia. According to the classical commentary on this sutta, right view is twofold: conceptual right view, a clear intellectual grasp of the Dhamma; and experiential right view, the wisdom that directly penetrates the Dhamma. Conceptual right view, called “right view in conformity with the truths” (saccānulomika-sammādiṭṭhi), is a correct understanding of the Dhamma arrived at by studying and examining the Buddha’s teachings in depth. Such understanding, though conceptual rather than experiential, is by no means dry and sterile. When rooted in faith in the Buddha’s enlightenment and driven by a strong determination to realize the truth of the Dhamma, it serves as the germ from which experiential right view evolves and thus becomes a critical step in the growth of wisdom.

Experiential right view is the realization of the truth of the Dhamma—above all, of the Four Noble Truths—in one’s own immediate experience. For this reason it is called “right view that penetrates the truths” (saccapaṭivedha-sammādiṭṭhi). To arrive at direct penetration, one begins with correct conceptual understanding of the teaching and, by practice, transforms this understanding into direct perception. If conceptual right view is compared to a hand—a hand that grasps the truth with the aid of concepts—then experiential right view might be compared to an eye. It is the eye of wisdom, the vision of the Dhamma, that sees directly into the ultimate truth, hidden from us for so long by our greed, hatred, and delusion.

The Discourse on Right View is intended to elucidate the principles that should be comprehended by conceptual right view and penetrated by experiential right view. Sāriputta expounds these principles under sixteen headings: the wholesome and the unwholesome, the four nutriments of life, the Four Noble Truths, the twelve factors of dependent origination, and the taints. It should be noted that from the second section to the end of the sutta, he frames all his expositions in accordance with the same pattern, a pattern that reveals the principle of conditionality to be the scaffolding for the entire teaching. Whatever phenomenon he takes up, he expounds by bringing to light its individual nature, its arising, its cessation, and the way to its cessation. Since this is the pattern that underlies the Four Noble Truths, I shall call it “the fourtruth pattern.” This pattern recurs throughout the Nikāyas as one of the major templates through which phenomena are to be viewed to arrive at true wisdom. Its application makes it clear that no entity is isolated and self-enclosed but is, rather, inherently linked to other things in a complex web of dependently originated processes. The key to liberation lies in understanding the causes that sustain this web and bringing them to an end within oneself. This is done by practicing the Noble Eightfold Path, the way to extinguish those causes.

The world-transcending right view, arrived at by penetrating any of the sixteen subjects expounded in the sutta, occurs in two main stages. The first stage is the right view of the trainee (sekha), the disciple who has entered irreversibly upon the path to liberation but has not yet reached its end. This stage is indicated by the words that open each section, “(one) who has perfect confidence in the Dhamma and has arrived at this true Dhamma.” These words signify right view as a vision of true principles, an insight that has initiated a radical transformation in the disciple but has not yet reached completion. The second stage is the world-transcending right view of the arahant, described by the closing words of each section. These words indicate that the disciple has used right view to eradicate the remaining defilements and has attained complete emancipation.

In section 4 we arrive at what I call “the domain of wisdom,” the areas to be explored and penetrated by insight. Many of the texts in this section come from the Saṃyutta Nikāya, whose major chapters are devoted to the principal doctrines of Early Buddhism. I include selections here on the five aggregates; the six sense bases; the elements (in different numerical sets); dependent origination; and the Four Noble Truths. As we survey these selections we will notice certain recurrent patterns.

IX,4(1) The Five Aggregates. The five aggregates (pañcakkhandha) are the main categories the Nikāyas use to analyze human experience. The five are: (1) form (rūpa), the physical component of experience; (2) feeling (vedanā), the “affective tone” of experience—either pleasant, painful, or neutral; (3) perception (saññā), the identification of things through their distinctive marks and features; (4) volitional formations (saṅkhārā), a term for the multifarious mental factors involving volition, choice, and intention; and (5) consciousness (viññāṇa), cognition arisen through any of the six sense faculties—eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.

Examination of the five aggregates, the topic of the Khandhasaṃyutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya, chapter 22), is critical to the Buddha’s teaching for at least four reasons. First, the five aggregates are the ultimate referent of the first noble truth, the noble truth of suffering (see the exposition of the first truth in Text II,5), and since all four truths revolve around suffering, understanding the aggregates is essential for understanding the Four Noble Truths as a whole. Second, the five aggregates are the objective domain of clinging and as such contribute to the causal origination of future suffering. Third, clinging to the five aggregates must be removed to attain liberation. And fourth, the kind of wisdom needed to remove clinging is precisely clear insight into the true nature of the aggregates. The Buddha himself declares that so long as he did not understand the five aggregates in terms of their individual nature, arising, cessation, and the way to their cessation, he did not claim to have attained perfect enlightenment. The full understanding of the five aggregates is a task he likewise enjoins on his disciples. The five aggregates, he says, are the things that must be fully understood; their full understanding brings the destruction of greed, hatred, and delusion (SN 22:23).

The word khandha (Skt: skandha) means, among other things, a heap or mass (rāsi). The five aggregates are so called because they each unite under one label a multiplicity of phenomena that share the same defining characteristic. Thus whatever form there is, “past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near,” is incorporated into the form aggregate; whatever feeling there is, “past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near,” is incorporated into the feeling aggregate; and so for each of the other aggregates. Text IX,4(1)(a) enumerates in simple terms the constituents of each aggregate and shows that each aggregate arises and ceases in correlation with its own specific condition; the Noble Eightfold Path is the way to bring each aggregate to an end. Here we find the “four-truth pattern” applied to the five aggregates, an application that follows quite logically from the role that the five aggregates play in representing the first noble truth.

This sutta makes a distinction between trainees and arahants similar to that made by the Discourse on Right View. Trainees have directly known the five aggregates by way of the four-truth pattern and are practicing for their fading away and cessation; they have thereby “gained a foothold (gādhanti) in this Dhamma and Discipline.” Arahants too have directly known the five aggregates by way of the fourtruth pattern, but they have gone further than the trainees. They have extirpated all attachment to the aggregates and are liberated by nonclinging; thus they are called “consummate ones” (kevalino) who cannot be described by way of the round of rebirths.

A detailed catechism on the aggregates, treating them from diverse angles, can be found in Text IX,4(1)(b). Because the five aggregates that make up our ordinary experience are the objective domain of clinging (upādāna), they are commonly called the five aggregates subject to clinging (pañc’upādānakkhandhā). Clinging to the five aggregates occurs in two principal modes, which we might call appropriation and identification. One either grasps them and takes possession of them, that is, one appropriates them; or one uses them as the basis for views about one’s self or for conceit (“I am better than, as good as, inferior to others”), that is, one identifies with them. As the Nikāyas put it, we are prone to think of the aggregates thus: “This is mine, this I am, this is my self” (etaṃ mama, eso ’ham asmi, eso me attā). In this phrase, the notion “This is mine” represents the act of appropriation, a function of craving (taṇhā). The notions “This I am” and “This is my self” represent two types of identification, the former expressing conceit (māna), the latter views (diṭṭhi). Giving up craving is so difficult because craving is reinforced by views, which rationalize our identification with the aggregates and thus equip craving with a protective shield. The type of view that lies at the bottom of all affirmation of selfhood is called identity view (sakkāyadiṭṭhi). The suttas often mention twenty types of identity view, obtained by considering one’s self to stand in any of four relations to each of the five aggregates: either as identical with it, as possessing it, as containing it, or as contained within it. The “uninstructed worldling” holds some kind of identity view; “the instructed noble disciple,” having seen with wisdom the selfless nature of the aggregates, no longer regards the aggregates as a self or the belongings of a self. Adopting any of these views is a cause of anxiety and distress. It is also a leash that keeps us bound to the round of rebirths—see above, Text I,2(3) and Text I,4(5).

The Five Aggregates

Aggregate

Content

Condition

Simile

form

four great elements and form derived from them

nutriment

a lump of foam

feeling

six classes of feeling: born of contact through eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind

contact

a water bubble

perception

six classes of perception: of forms, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile objects, and mental phenomena

contact

a mirage

volitional formations

six classes of volition: regarding forms, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile objects, and

mental phenomena

contact

a banana-tree trunk

consciousness

six classes of consciousness: eye-, ear-, nose-, tongue-, body-,

mind-consciousness

name-and-form

a magical illusion

All the defilements ultimately stem from ignorance, which thus lies at the bottom of all suffering and bondage. Ignorance weaves a net of three delusions around the aggregates. These delusions are the notions that the five aggregates are permanent, a source of true happiness, and a self. The wisdom needed to break the spell of these delusions is the insight into the five aggregates as impermanent (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and nonself (anattā). This is called the direct knowledge of the three characteristics of existence (tilakkhaṇa).

Some suttas seem to make insight into one or another of the three characteristics alone sufficient for reaching the goal. However, the three characteristics are closely interwoven, and thus the most common formula found in the Nikāyas builds upon their internal relationship. First enunciated in the Buddha’s second discourse at Bārāṇasī—Text IX,4(1)(c)—the formula uses the characteristic of impermanence to reveal the characteristic of suffering, and both together to reveal the characteristic of nonself. The suttas take this indirect route to the characteristic of nonself because the selfless nature of things is so subtle that often it cannot be seen except when pointed to by the other two characteristics. When we recognize that the things we identify as our self are impermanent and bound up with suffering, we realize that they lack the essential marks of authentic selfhood and we thereby stop identifying with them.

The different expositions of the three characteristics all thus eventually converge on the eradication of clinging. They do so by showing, with regard to each aggregate, “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” This makes the insight into nonself the culmination and consummation of the contemplation of the three characteristics. While the characteristic of nonself is usually approached through the other two characteristics, as in Text IX,4(1)(d), it is sometimes disclosed directly. An example of the direct approach to nonself is Text IX,4(1)(e), the discourse on “the lump of foam,” which uses five memorable similes to reveal the empty nature of the five aggregates. According to the standard formula, insight into the five aggregates as impermanent, suffering, and nonself induces disenchantment (nibbidā), dispassion (virāga), and liberation (vimutti). One who attains liberation subsequently wins “the knowledge and vision of liberation,” the assurance that the round of rebirths has indeed been stopped and nothing more remains to be done.

Another pattern that the suttas often apply to the five aggregates, and to the other groups of phenomena, is the triad of gratification, danger, and escape. Texts VI,2(1)–(3), from the Aṅguttara Nikāya, apply this triad to the world as a whole. The Saṃyutta Nikāya applies the same scheme individually to the aggregates, sense bases, and elements. The pleasure and joy each aggregate, sense base, and element offers is its gratification; its impermanence, pervasion by suffering, and nature to change is its danger; and the abandoning of desire and lust for it is the escape from it.

IX,4(2) The Six Sense Bases. The Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta, the Connected Discourses on the Six Sense Bases (Saṃyutta Nikāya, chapter 35), contains over two hundred short suttas on the sense bases. The six internal and external sense bases provide a perspective on the totality of experience different from, but complementary to, the perspective provided by the aggregates. The six pairs of bases are the sense faculties and their corresponding objects, which support the arising of the respective type of consciousness. Because they mediate between consciousness and its objects, the internal sense bases are spoken of as the “bases for contact” (phassāyatana), “contact” (phassa) being the coming together of sense faculty, object, and consciousness.

The Six Internal and External Sense Bases

Internal sense bases

External sense bases

Types of consciousness arisen from the sense bases

eye

forms

eye-consciousness

ear

sounds

ear-consciousness

nose

smells

nose-consciousness

tongue

tastes

tongue-consciousness

body

tactile objects

body-consciousness

mind

mental phenomena

mind-consciousness

What the first five sense bases and their objects signify is obvious enough, but the sixth pair, mind (mano) and phenomena (dhammā), presents some difficulty. If we treat the two terms as parallel to the other internal and external bases, we would understand the mind base to be the support for the arising of mind-consciousness (manoviññāṇa) and the phenomena base to be the objective sphere of mind-consciousness. On this interpretation, “mind” might be taken as the passive flow of consciousness from which active conceptual consciousness emerges, and “phenomena” as purely mental objects such as those apprehended by introspection, imagination, and reflection. The Abhidhamma and the Pāli commentaries, however, interpret the two terms differently. They hold that the mind base comprises all classes of consciousness, that is, they include within it all six types of consciousness. They also hold that all actual entities not comprised in the other sense bases constitute the phenomena base. The phenomena base, then, includes the other three mental aggregates—feeling, perception, and volitional formations—as well as types of subtle material form not implicated in experience through the physical senses. Whether this interpretation conforms to the meaning intended in the oldest Buddhist texts is an open question.

Text IX,4(2)(a) testifies that for Early Buddhism, liberation requires direct knowledge and full understanding of the internal and external sense bases and all the phenomena that arise from them. This seems to establish an apparent correspondence between Buddhism and empirical science, but the type of knowledge sought by the two disciplines differs. Whereas the scientist seeks impersonal, “objective” information, the Buddhist practitioner seeks direct insight into the nature of these phenomena as components of lived experience.

The Nikāyas suggest an interesting difference between the treatment given to the aggregates and the sense bases. Both serve as the soil where clinging takes root and grows, but while the aggregates are primarily the soil for views about a self, the sense bases are primarily the soil for craving. A necessary step in the conquest of craving is therefore restraint of the senses. Monks and nuns in particular must be vigilant in their encounters with desirable and undesirable sense objects. When one is negligent, experience through the senses invariably becomes a trigger for craving: lust for pleasant objects, aversion toward disagreeable objects (and a craving for pleasant escape routes), and a dull attachment to neutral objects.

In one of his earliest discourses popularly known as “The Fire Sermon”—Text IX,4(2)(b)—the Buddha declared that “all is burning.” The “all” is just the six senses, their objects, the types of consciousness arisen from them, and the related contacts and feelings. The way to liberation is to see that this “all” is burning with the fires of defilements and suffering. The Saḷāyatanasaṃyutta repeatedly states that to dispel ignorance and generate true knowledge, we must contemplate all the sense bases and the feelings that arise through them as impermanent, suffering, and nonself. This, according to Text IX,4(2)(c), is the direct way to the attainment of Nibbāna. An alternative route, commended by Text IX,4(2)(d), is to see that the six senses are empty— empty of a self or of anything belonging to a self. Since consciousness arises via the six sense bases, it too is devoid of self—Text IX, 4(2)(e).

IX,4(3) The Elements. The elements are the subject of the Dhātusaṃyutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya, chapter 14). The word “elements” (dhātu) is applied to several quite disparate groups of phenomena, and thus the suttas in this chapter fall into separate clusters with little in common but their concern with entities called elements. The most important groups consist of eighteen, four, and six elements.

The eighteen elements are an elaboration of the twelve sense bases. They consist of the six sense faculties, the six sense objects, and the six types of sense consciousness. Since six types of consciousness have been extracted from the mind base, the mind element that remains must be a simpler type of cognitive event. The Nikāyas do not specify its precise function. The Abhidhamma identifies it with a type of consciousness that fulfills more rudimentary roles in the process of cognition than the more discriminative mind-consciousness element. IX,4(3)(a) contains a simple enumeration of the eighteen elements. Contemplation of these elements helps to dispel the notion that an abiding subject underlies the changing contents of experience. It shows how experience consists of different types of consciousness, each of which is conditioned, arisen in dependence on its own specific sense faculty and object. Thus to ascertain the composite, diversified, conditioned nature of experience dispels the illusion of unity and solidity that ordinarily obscures correct cognition.

The four elements are earth, water, heat, and air. These represent four “behavioral modes” of matter: solidity, fluidity, energy, and distension. The four are inseparably united in any unit of matter, from the smallest to the largest and most complex. The elements are not merely properties of the external world, however, but also of one’s own body. Thus one must contemplate them in relation to one’s body, as the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta teaches (see Text VIII, 8 §12). The three suttas combined in Text IX,4(3)(b) show that these elements can be viewed: as impermanent and conditioned; from the triple standpoint of gratification, danger, and escape; and by way of the four-truth pattern.

The six elements include the four physical elements, the space element, and the element of consciousness. Text IX,4(3)(c), a long excerpt from MN 140, explains in detail how to contemplate the six elements in relation to the physical body, the external world, and conscious experience.

IX,4(4) Dependent Origination. Dependent origination (paṭiccasamuppāda) is so central to the Buddha’s teaching that the Buddha said: “One who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma, and one who sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination” (MN 28; I 190–91). The ulitmate purpose of the teaching on dependent origination is to reveal the conditions that sustain the round of rebirths and thereby to show what must be done to gain release from the round. To win deliverance is a matter of unraveling the causal pattern that underlies our bondage, and this process begins with understanding the causal pattern itself. It is dependent origination that defines this causal pattern.

An entire chapter of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Nidānasaṃyutta (chapter 12), is devoted to dependent origination. The doctrine is usually expounded as a sequence of twelve factors joined into a chain of eleven propositions; see Text IX,4(4)(a). A Buddha discovers this chain of conditions; after his enlightenment, his mission is to explain it to the world. Text IX,4(4)(b) declares the sequence of conditions to be a fixed principle, a stable law, the nature of things. The series is expounded in two ways: by way of origination (called anuloma or forward order), and by way of cessation (called paṭiloma or reverse order). Sometimes the presentation proceeds from the first factor to the last; sometimes it begins at the end and traces the chain of conditions back to the first. Other suttas pick up the chain somewhere in the middle and work either backward to the end or forward to the front.

The Nikāyas themselves do not give any systematic explanation of dependent origination in the way one might expect a college textbook to do. Thus, for a clear explanation, we must rely on the commentaries and expository treatises that have come down from the Early Buddhist schools. Despite minor differences in details, these concur on the general meaning of this ancient formula, which might be briefly summarized as follows: Because of (1) ignorance (avijjā), lack of direct knowledge of the Four Noble Truths, we engage in wholesome and unwholesome activities of body, speech, and mind; these are (2) volitional formations (saṅkhārā), in other words, kamma. Volitional formations sustain consciousness from one life to the next and determine where it re-arises; in this way volitional formations condition (3) consciousness (viññāṇa). Along with consciousness, beginning from the moment of conception, comes (4) “name-andform” (nāmarūpa), the sentient organism with its physical form (rūpa) and its sensitive and cognitive capacities (nāma). The sentient organism is equipped with (5) six sense bases (saḷāyatana), the five physical sense faculties and the mind as organ of cognition. The sense bases allow (6) contact (phassa) to occur between consciousness and its objects, and contact conditions (7) feeling (vedanā). Called into play by feeling, (8) craving (taṇhā) arises, and when craving intensifies it gives rise to (9) clinging (upādāna), tight attachment to the objects of desire through sensuality and wrong views. Impelled by our attachments, we again engage in volitional actions pregnant with (10) a new existence (bhava). At death this potential for new existence is actualized in a new life beginning with (11) birth (jāti) and ending in (12) aging-and-death (jarāmaraṇa). From the above, we can see that the commentarial interpretation treats the twelve factors as spread out over a span of three lives, with ignorance and volitional formations pertaining to the past, birth and aging-and-death to the future, and the intermediate factors to the present. The segment from consciousness through feeling is the resultant phase of the present, the phase resulting from past ignorance and kamma; the segment from craving through existence is the karmically creative phase of the present, leading to renewed existence in the future. But existence is distinguished into two phases: one, called kamma-existence (kammabhava), constitutes the active side of existence and belongs to the causal phase of the present life; the other, called rebirth-existence (upapattibhava), constitutes the passive side of existence and belongs to the resultant phase of the future life. The twelve factors are also distributed into three “rounds”: the round of defilements (kilesavaṭṭa) includes ignorance, craving, and clinging; the round of action (kammavaṭṭa) includes volitional formations and kamma-existence; and all the other factors belong to the round of results (vipākavaṭṭa). Defilements give rise to defiled actions, actions bring forth results, and results serve as the soil for more defilements. In this way the round of rebirths revolves without discernible beginning.

This method of dividing up the factors should not be misconstrued to mean that the past, present, and future factors are mutually exclusive. The distribution into three lives is only an expository device which, for the sake of concision, has to resort to some degree of abstraction. As many suttas in the Nidānasaṃyutta show, groups of factors separated in the formula are inevitably interwoven in their dynamic operation. Whenever there is ignorance, craving and clinging invariably accompany it; and whenever there is craving and clinging, ignorance stands behind them. The formula demonstrates how rebirth can take place without the presence of a substantial self that maintains its identity as it transmigrates from one life to the next. Without a self to hold the sequence together, what connects one life to the next is nothing other than the principle of conditionality. Conditions in one existence initiate the arising of the conditioned phenomena in the next existence; these serve as conditions for still other phenomena, which condition still other phenomena, and so on indefinitely into the future.

The whole process ends only when its underlying springs—ignorance, craving, and clinging—are extirpated by wisdom.

Dependent origination is not a mere theory but a teaching that should be directly known by personal experience, a point clearly made by Text IX,4(4)(c). This sutta instructs the disciple to understand each factor by way of the four-truth pattern: one should understand the factor itself, its origin, its cessation, and the way to its cessation. First one understands this pattern in relation to one’s personal experience. Then, on this basis, one infers that all those who correctly understood these things in the past understood them in exactly the same way; then that all those who will correctly understand these things in the future will understand them in exactly the same way. In this way, dependent origination acquires a timeless and universal significance.

Several suttas hold up dependent origination as a “teaching by the middle” (majjhena tathāgato dhammaṃ deseti). It is a “teaching by the middle” because it transcends two extreme views that polarize philosophical reflection on the human condition. One extreme, the metaphysical thesis of eternalism (sassatavāda), asserts that the core of human identity is an indestructible and eternal self, whether individual or universal. It also asserts that the world is created and maintained by a permanent entity, a God or some other metaphysical reality. The other extreme, annihilationism (ucchedavāda), holds that at death the person is utterly annihilated. There is no spiritual dimension to human existence and thus no personal survival of any sort. For the Buddha, both extremes pose insuperable problems. Eternalism encourages an obstinate clinging to the five aggregates, which are really impermanent and devoid of a substantial self; annihilationism threatens to undermine ethics and to make suffering the product of chance.

Dependent origination offers a radically different perspective that transcends the two extremes. It shows that individual existence is constituted by a current of conditioned phenomena devoid of a metaphysical self yet continuing on from birth to birth as long as the causes that sustain it remain effective. Dependent origination thereby offers a cogent explanation of the problem of suffering that on the one hand avoids the philosophical dilemmas posed by the hypothesis of a permanent self, and on the other avoids the dangers of ethical anarchy to which annihilationism eventually leads. As long as ignorance and craving remain, the process of rebirth continues; kamma yields its pleasant and painful fruit, and the great mass of suffering accumulates. When ignorance and craving are destroyed, the inner mechanism of karmic causation is deactivated, and one reaches the end of suffering in saṃsāra. Perhaps the most elegant exposition of dependent origination as the “middle teaching” is the famous Kaccānagotta Sutta, included here as Text IX,4(4)(d).

Though the twelve-factor formula is the most familiar version of the doctrine of dependent origination, the Nidānasaṃyutta introduces a number of little-known variants that help to illuminate the standard version. One such variant, Text IX,4(4)(e), speaks about the conditions for “the continuance of consciousness” (viññāṇassa ṭhitiyā), in other words, how consciousness passes on to a new existence. The causes are said to be the underlying tendencies, namely, ignorance and craving, and “what one intends and plans,” namely, the volitional formations. Once consciousness becomes established, the production of a new existence begins; thus we here proceed directly from consciousness (the usual third factor) to existence (the usual tenth factor). Text IX,4(4)(f) says that from the six internal and external sense bases (the former being the usual fifth factor), consciousness (the third factor) arises, followed by contact, feeling, craving, and all the rest. These variants make it plain that the sequence of factors should not be regarded as a linear causal process in which each preceding factor gives rise to its successor through the simple exercise of efficient causality. Far from being linear, the relationship among the factors is always complex, involving several interwoven strands of conditionality.

IX,4(5) The Four Noble Truths. As we have seen in both the “gradual path to liberation” and in the “contemplation of phenomena” section of the Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness, the path to liberation culminates in the realization of the Four Noble Truths: see Text VII,4 §25 and Text VIII,8 §44. These were the truths that the Buddha discovered on the night of his enlightenment and enunciated in his first discourse: see Text II,3(2) §42 and Text II,5. The First Discourse is tucked away almost inconspicuously in the Saccasaṃyutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya, chapter 56), the Connected Discourses on the Truths, a chapter replete with many other pithy and thought-provoking suttas.

To highlight the wide-ranging significance of the Four Noble Truths, the Saccasaṃyutta casts them against a universal background. According to Text IX,4(5)(a), not only the Buddha Gotama, but all the Buddhas past, present, and future awaken to these same four truths. These four truths, says Text IX,4(5)(b), are truths because they are “actual, unerring, not otherwise.” According to Text IX,4(5)(c), the things the Buddha teaches are as few as a handful of leaves in the forest, and what he teaches are just these Four Noble Truths, taught precisely because they lead to enlightenment and Nibbāna.

Sentient beings roam and wander in saṃsāra because they have not understood and penetrated the Four Noble Truths—Text IX,4(5)(d). As the chain of dependent origination shows, what lies at the base of the causal genesis of suffering is ignorance (avijjā), and ignorance is unawareness of the Four Noble Truths. Thus those who fail to understand the four truths generate volitional formations and fall down the precipice of birth, aging, and death—Text IX,4(5)(e).

The antidote to ignorance is knowledge (vijjā), which accordingly is defined as knowledge of the Four Noble Truths. The first penetration of the Four Noble Truths occurs with the attainment of stream-entry, called the breakthrough to the Dhamma (dhammābhisamaya). To make this breakthrough is by no means easy, but without doing so it is impossible to put an end to suffering—Text IX,4(5)(f). Hence the Buddha again and again urges his disciples to “make an extraordinary effort” to achieve the breakthrough to the truths.

Once the disciple makes the breakthrough and sees the Four Noble Truths, more work still lies ahead, for each truth imposes a task that must be fulfilled in order to win the final fruit. The truth of suffering, which ultimately consists of the five aggregates, must be fully understood (pariññeyya). The truth of its origin, craving, must be abandoned (pahātabba). The truth of cessation, Nibbāna, must be realized (sacchikātabba). And the truth of the way, the Noble Eightfold Path, must be developed (bhāvetabba). Developing the path brings to completion all four tasks, at which point one reaches the destruction of the taints. This process begins with penetration of the same Four Noble Truths, and thus Text IX,4(5)(g) says that the destruction of the taints is for those who know and see the Four Noble Truths.

IX,5 The Goal of Wisdom. The Four Noble Truths not only serve as the objective domain of wisdom but also define its purpose, which is enshrined in the third noble truth, the cessation of suffering. The cessation of suffering is Nibbāna, and thus the goal of wisdom, the end toward which the cultivation of wisdom moves, is the attainment of Nibbāna. But what exactly is meant by Nibbāna? The suttas explain Nibbāna in a number of ways. Some, such as Text IX,5(1), define Nibbāna simply as the destruction of lust, hatred, and delusion. Others, such as the series comprised in Text IX,5(2), employ metaphors and images to convey a more concrete idea of the ultimate goal. Nibbāna is still the destruction of lust, hatred, and delusion, but as such it is, among other things, peaceful, deathless, sublime, wonderful, and amazing. Such descriptions indicate that Nibbāna is a state of supreme happiness, peace, and freedom to be experienced in this present life.

A few suttas, most notably a pair in the Udāna—included here as Texts IX,5(3) and IX,5(4)—suggest that Nibbāna is not simply the destruction of defilements and an exalted feeling of psychological wellbeing. They speak of Nibbāna almost as if it were a transcendent state or dimension of being. Text IX,5(3) refers to Nibbāna as a “base” (āyatana) beyond the world of common experience where none of the physical elements or even the subtle formless dimensions of experience are present; it is a state completely quiescent, without arising, perishing, or change. Text IX,5(4) calls it the state that is “unborn, unmade, unbecome, [and] unconditioned” (ajātaṃ, akataṃ, abhūtaṃ, asaṅkhataṃ), the existence of which makes possible deliverance from all that is born, made, come-to-be, and conditioned.

How are we to correlate these two perspectives on Nibbāna found in the Nikāyas, one treating it as an experiential state of inward purity and sublime bliss, the other as an unconditioned state transcending the empirical world? Commentators, both Buddhists and outsiders, have tried to connect these two aspects of Nibbāna in different ways. Their interpretations generally reflect the proclivity of the interpreter as much as they do the texts themselves. The way that seems most faithful to both aspects of Nibbāna delineated in the texts is to regard the attainment of Nibbāna as a state of freedom and happiness attained by realizing, with profound wisdom, the unconditioned and transcendent element, the state that is intrinsically tranquil and forever beyond suffering. The penetration of this element brings the destruction of defilements, culminating in complete purification of mind. Such purification is accompanied by the experience of perfect peace and happiness in this present life. With the breakup of the body at physical death, it brings irreversible release from the beginningless round of rebirths.

The suttas speak of two “elements of Nibbāna,” the Nibbāna element with residue remaining (sa-upādisesa-nibbānadhātu) and the Nibbāna element without residue remaining (anupādisesa-nibbānadhātu). Text IX,5(5) explains the Nibbāna element with residue remaining to be the destruction of lust, hatred, and delusion attained by an arahant while still alive. The “residue” that remains is the composite of the five aggregates that was brought into being by the ignorance and craving of the past life and that must continue on until the end of the lifespan. As to the Nibbāna element without residue remaining, the same text says only that when the arahant passes away, all that is felt, not being delighted in, will become cool right here. Since there is no more clinging to the five aggregates, and no more craving for fresh experience through a new set of aggregates, the occurrence of the aggregates comes to an end and cannot continue. The process of the five aggregates is “extinguished” (the literal meaning of Nibbāna). The Buddha says nothing at all, however, in terms either of existence or nonexistence, about the condition of the arahant after death. It might seem logical to suppose that since the five aggregates that constitute experience completely cease with the attainment of the Nibbāna element without residue, this element must itself be a state of complete nonexistence, a state of nothingness. Yet no text in the Nikāyas ever states this. To the contrary, the Nikāyas consistently refer to Nibbāna by terms that refer to actualities. It is an element (dhātu), a base (āyatana), a reality (dhamma), a state (pada), and so on. However, though so designated, it is qualified in ways that indicate this state ultimately lies beyond all familiar categories and concepts.

In Text IX,5(6), the wanderer Vacchagotta asks the Buddha whether the Tathāgata—here signifying one who has attained the supreme goal—is reborn (upapajjati) or not after death. The Buddha refuses to concede any of the four alternatives. To say that the Tathāgata is reborn, is not reborn, both is and is not reborn, neither is nor is not reborn— none of these is acceptable, for all accept the term Tathāgata as indicative of a real being, while from an internal point of view a Tathāgata has given up all clinging to notions of a real being. The Buddha illustrates this point with the simile of an extinguished fire. Just as a fire that has been extinguished cannot be said to have gone anywhere but must simply be said to have “gone out,” so with the breakup of the body the Tathāgata does not go anywhere but has simply “gone out.” The past participle nibbuta, used to describe a fire that has been extinguished, is related to the noun nibbāna, which literally means “extinguishing.” Yet, if this simile suggests a Buddhist version of the “annihilationist” view of the arahant’s fate after his demise, this impression would rest on a misunderstanding, on a wrong perception of the arahant as a “self” or “person” that is annihilated. Our problem in understanding the state of the Tathāgata after death is compounded by our difficulty in understanding the state of the Tathāgata even while alive. The simile of the great ocean underscores this difficulty. Since the Tathāgata no longer identifies with the five aggregates that constitute individual identity, he cannot be reckoned in terms of them, whether individually or collectively. Freed from reckoning in terms of the five aggregates, the Tathāgata transcends our understanding. Like the great ocean, he is “deep, immeasurable, [and] hard to fathom.”

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X. The Planes of Realization

Introduction

Introduction to Part X, “The Planes of Realization”

The cultivation of wisdom, as we have seen, aims at the realization of Nibbāna. The Nikāyas stipulate a fixed series of stages through which a person passes on the way toward the attainment of Nibbāna. In passing through these stages one evolves from an “uninstructed worldling,” blind to the truths of the Dhamma, into an arahant, a liberated one, who has attained full comprehension of the Four Noble Truths and realized Nibbāna in this present life. I have already referred to several of these stages in the earlier chapters of this book. In the present chapter we will explore them in a more systematic manner.

On entering the irreversible path to the attainment of Nibbāna, one becomes a noble person (ariyapuggala), the word “noble” (ariya) here denoting spiritual nobility. There are four major types of noble persons. Each stage is divided into two phases: the path (magga) and its fruition (phala). In the path phase, one is said to be practicing for the attainment of a particular fruition, which one is bound to realize within that same life; in the resultant phase, one is said to be established in that fruition. Thus the four major types of noble persons actually comprise four pairs or eight types of noble individuals. As enumerated in Text X,1(1), these are: (1) one practicing for the realization of the fruit of stream-entry, (2) the stream-enterer, (3) one practicing for the realization of the fruit of once-returning, (4) the once-returner, (5) one practicing for the realization of the fruit of nonreturning, (6) the nonreturner, (7) one practicing for arahantship, (8) the arahant. Text X,1(2) grades these eight according to the relative strength of their spiritual faculties, so that those at each subsequent stage possess stronger faculties than those at the preceding stage. The first seven persons are collectively known as sekhas, trainees or disciples in the higher training; the arahant is called the asekha, the one beyond training.

The four main stages themselves are defined in two ways: (1) by way of the defilements eradicated by the path leading to the corresponding fruit; and (2) by way of the destiny after death that awaits one who has realized that particular fruit. Text X,1(3) gives standard definitions of the four types that mention both the defilements abandoned and their future destiny.

The Nikāyas group the defilements abandoned into a set of ten fetters (saṃyojana). The stream-enterer abandons the first three fetters: identity view (sakkāyadiṭṭhi), that is, the view of a truly existent self either as identical with the five aggregates or as existing in some relation to them; doubt (vicikicchā) about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Saṅgha, and the training; and the wrong grasp of rules and observances (sīlabbataparāmāsa), the belief that mere external observances, particularly religious rituals and ascetic practices, can lead to liberation. The stream-enterer is assured of attaining full enlightenment in at most seven more existences, which will all take place either in the human realm or the heavenly worlds. The stream-enterer will never undergo an eighth existence and is forever freed from rebirth in the three lower realms—the hells, the realm of afflicted spirits, and the animal realm.

The once-returner (sakadāgāmī) does not eradicate any new fetters. He or she has eliminated the three fetters that the stream-enterer has destroyed and additionally attenuates the three unwholesome roots— lust, hatred, and delusion—so that they do not arise often and, when they do arise, do not become obsessive. As the name implies, the oncereturner will come back to this world only one more time and then make an end to suffering.

The nonreturner (anāgāmī) eradicates the five “lower fetters.” That is, in addition to the three fetters eliminated by the stream-enterer, the nonreturner eradicates two additional fetters, sensual lust and ill will. Because nonreturners have eradicated sensual lust, they have no ties binding them to the sensual realm of existence. They thus take birth in the form realm (rūpadhātu), generally in one of five planes called the “pure abodes” (suddhāvāsa) reserved exclusively for the rebirth of nonreturners. They attain final Nibbāna there, without ever returning to the sensual realm.

The nonreturner, however, is still bound by the five “higher fetters”: desire for existence in the form realm, desire for existence in the formless realm, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. Those who cut off the five higher fetters have no more ties binding them to conditioned existence. These are the arahants, who have destroyed all defilements and are “completely liberated through final knowledge.”

The Four Classes of Noble Disciples

Class of disciple

Fetters newly eliminated

Remaining types of rebirth

stream-enterer

identity view, doubt, wrong grasp of rules and observances

at most seven more births among humans and devas

once-returner

none, but weakens lust, hatred, and delusion

one more birth in the sensesphere realm

nonreturner

sensual lust and ill will

spontaneous birth in the form realm

arahant

desire for existence in form realm, desire for formless existence, conceit, restlessness, ignorance

none

Besides the four main classes of noble persons, the Nikāyas sometimes mention a pair ranked just below the stream-enterer—see Text X,1(3). These two—called the Dhamma-follower (dhammānusārī) and the faith-follower (saddhānusārī)—are actually two types belonging to the eighth category of noble disciples, the person practicing for the realization of the fruit of stream-entry. The Nikāyas include this pair to show that those on the way to stream-entry can be distinguished into two classes by way of their dominant faculty. The Dhamma-follower is one for whom wisdom is dominant, the faith-follower one for whom faith is dominant. It may be significant that at this stage prior to the first fruition, it is only faith and wisdom and not the other three faculties—energy, mindfulness, and concentration—that serve to distinguish disciples into different types. The explanation of the classes of noble disciples found in the above text, an extract from the Alagaddūpama Sutta (MN 22), may convey the impression that all those who attain these stages are monks. This, however, is by no means the case. The Alagaddūpama extract is worded in this way only because it is addressed to monks. Text X,1(4) corrects this impression and provides a clearer picture of how the classes of noble disciples are distributed among the groups of the Buddha’s followers. As an abiding state, arahantship is reserved for monks and nuns. This does not mean that only monks and nuns can attain arahantship; the suttas and commentaries do record a few cases of lay disciples attaining the final goal. However, such disciples either attain arahantship on the brink of death or enter the monastic order very soon after their attainment. They do not continue to dwell at home as arahant householders, for dwelling at home is incompatible with the state of one who has severed all craving.

In contrast, nonreturners can continue to dwell as householders. While they continue to live as lay disciples, they have eradicated sensual desire and thus necessarily observe celibacy. They are described as “lay followers … clothed in white, leading lives of celibacy, who, with the destruction of the five lower fetters, will be reborn spontaneously [in the pure abodes] and there attain final Nibbāna without ever returning from that world.” Though the suttas do not explicitly say this, it is reasonable to suppose that those disciples practicing to attain the fruit of nonreturning also observe full-time celibacy. Lay streamenterers and once-returners, however, are not necessarily celibate. In the sutta the Buddha describes them as “lay followers … clothed in white, enjoying sensual pleasures, who carry out my instruction, respond to my advice, have gone beyond doubt, become free from perplexity, gained intrepidity, and become independent of others in the Teacher’s dispensation.” Thus, while some stream-enterers and once-returners may observe celibacy, this is by no means typical of these two classes.

The Nikāyas occasionally employ another scheme for classifying noble disciples, one that makes the dominant faculty rather than the level of attainment alone the basis for differentiation. The main source for this scheme is a passage in the Kīṭāgiri Sutta included here as Text X,1(5). This method of classification divides arahants into two categories: those liberated in both ways (ubhatobhāgavimutta) and those liberated by wisdom (paññāvimutta). The former are called “liberated in both ways” because they are liberated from form by their mastery over the formless meditations and liberated from all defilements by their attainment of arahantship. Those arahants “liberated by wisdom” have not mastered the formless attainments but have gained the final fruit by the power of their wisdom combined with degrees of concentration lower than the formless states.

Those who have attained any of the lower stages, from stream-entry up to and including the path to arahantship, are divided into three categories. The “body-witness” (kāyasakkhī) is one at any of these stages who has mastered the formless attainments; the “one attained-toview” (diṭṭhippatta), one at any of these stages who lacks the formless attainments and gives prominence to wisdom; and the “one liberated by faith” (saddhāvimutta), one at any of these stages who lacks the formless attainments and gives prominence to faith. The last two persons in this typology are the Dhamma-follower and the faith-follower explained above.

It should be noted that this scheme does not mention a person at the path of stream-entry who possesses the formless attainments. This should not be taken to mean that such a type is in principle excluded but only that such a type was considered irrelevant for purposes of classification. It seems that at this preparatory stage, the allotment of a separate category to one with outstanding skills in concentration was deemed unnecessary.

In the selection of texts, I next take up the main types for individual consideration. I begin with the stream-enterer, but first some preliminary comments are necessary. In the Nikāyas, the great majority of human beings are called “uninstructed worldlings” (assutavā puthujjana). Uninstructed worldlings have no regard for the Buddha and his teaching, no understanding of the Dhamma or dedication to the practice. The purpose of the Buddha’s path is to lead uninstructed worldlings to the attainment of the Deathless, and the stages of realization are the steps toward the completion of this process. The process of transformation generally begins when one encounters the Buddha’s teaching and gains confidence in the Buddha as the Enlightened One. One must then acquire a clear understanding of the Dhamma, undertake the precepts, and enter upon the systematic practice of the path. In the suttas such a person is called a noble disciple (ariyasāvaka) in a broad sense of the term, not necessarily in the narrow, technical sense of one who has already reached the paths and fruits.

Later tradition calls a person who has faith in the Dhamma and aspires to reach the state of stream-entry a virtuous worldling (kalyāṇaputhujjana). To reach the attainment of stream-entry, the aspiring disciple should cultivate the “four factors leading to stream-entry.” As Text X,2(1) explains, these are: associating with wise and virtuous spiritual guides; listening to the true Dhamma; attending carefully to things (for example, by way of gratification, danger, and escape); and practicing in accordance with the Dhamma (by undertaking the threefold training in moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom). The peak of the training undertaken by the aspiring disciple is the development of insight: the thorough contemplation of the aggregates, sense bases, and elements as impermanent, bound up with suffering, and devoid of a substantial self. At a certain point, when insight reaches its peak, the disciple’s understanding will undergo a major transition, which marks the entry upon “the fixed course of rightness,” the true Noble Eightfold Path that leads irreversibly to Nibbāna. As Text X,2(2) puts it, such a disciple has risen up from the plane of worldlings and reached the plane of the noble ones. Though not yet a stream-enterer, a person at this stage cannot pass away without having realized the fruit of stream-entry.

As we have already seen, among disciples who attain the path there is a distinction between those who arrive through faith, called faithfollowers, and those who arrive through wisdom, called Dhammafollowers. But while faith-followers and Dhamma-followers differ by way of their dominant faculty, they are alike in that both must further cultivate the path they have entered. Once they know and see the essence of the Dhamma—when they “obtain the vision of the Dhamma” and “make the breakthrough to the Dhamma”—they become stream-enterers, bound to reach full enlightenment and attain final Nibbāna in a maximum of seven more lives; see Text X,2(3). Stream-enterers eradicate the first three fetters and acquire the eight factors of the Noble Eightfold Path. They also have “four factors of stream-entry”: confirmed confidence in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and Saṅgha, and “the moral virtues dear to the noble ones,” that is, firm adherence to the five precepts; see Texts X,2(4)–(5).

Having seen the truth of the Dhamma, the stream-enterer faces the challenge of cultivating this vision in order to eliminate the remaining defilements. The next major milestone, the attainment of the plane of the once-returner, does not eliminate any defilements completely. However, it does attenuate the three root defilements—lust, hatred, and delusion—to a degree sufficient to ensure that the disciple will return to “this world,” the sense-sphere realm of existence, only one more time and then make an end to suffering.

A disciple who attains either of the first two stages, stream-enterer or once-returner, need not remain fixed there but can advance to the two higher stages. Descriptions of attainment in the Nikāyas suggest that it is also possible for a virtuous worldling with extremely sharp faculties to advance directly to the stage of nonreturner. The state of nonreturner is always said to be attained simply through the destruction of the five lower fetters, the three fetters eradicated by the streamenterer along with sensual lust and ill will. From the Nikāyas, it appears that one with extremely sharp wisdom can achieve this stage at a single stroke. The commentaries, however, explain that in such a case the person actually passes through the first two paths and fruits in very quick succession before reaching the third path and fruit.

According to Text X,3(1), to abandon the five lower fetters, a monk first attains one of the four jhānas or one of the three lower formless attainments; the constituent factors of the fourth formless attainment are too subtle to serve as objects of insight. Directing his attention to the factors constituting the jhāna or formless attainment, he subsumes them under the five aggregates: as included in form (omitted in relation to the formless attainments), feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness. Having done so, he contemplates these factors, now classified into the five aggregates, as marked by the three characteristics: impermanence, suffering, and nonself (expanded into eleven headings). As contemplation advances, at a certain point his mind turns away from all conditioned things and focuses upon the deathless element, Nibbāna. If he has sharp faculties and can relinquish all attachments on the spot, he attains arahantship, the destruction of the taints; but if he cannot yet give up all attachments, he attains the state of nonreturning.

The Buddha recognized differences in the approaches individuals take to achieving the final goal, and in Text X,3(2) he divides persons into four categories with respect to its attainment. The four are obtained through the permutations of two pairs. He first distinguishes disciples on the basis of the strength of their spiritual faculties. Those with strong faculties reach final Nibbāna in this very life. Those with relatively weak faculties attain final Nibbāna in the next life, and thus presumably expire as nonreturners. The other pair distinguishes disciples by their mode of development. One class takes the “difficult” approach, which uses meditation subjects that generate sharp wisdom and lead directly to disenchantment and dispassion. The other class takes the smoother and more pleasant route leading through the four jhānas. These two types correspond roughly to those who give emphasis to insight and those who give emphasis to serenity.

A short sutta in the Sotāpattisaṃyutta, Text X,3(3), relates the story of Dīghāvu, a youth who took the difficult route emphasizing insight to the stage of nonreturner. Dīghāvu was lying on his deathbed when the Buddha came to him and asked him to train in the four factors of stream-entry. Dīghāvu said that he was already endowed with these factors, indicating thereby that he was a stream-enterer. The Buddha then instructed him to develop “six things that partake of true knowledge.” He evidently heeded the Buddha’s advice, for shortly after he died the Buddha declared him to have expired as a nonreturner. Though it is possible that Dīghāvu had already gained the jhānas and thus did not need to be instructed in their practice, it is also possible that he attained the stage of nonreturner entirely through the power of the deep insight arisen from these six contemplations.

Text X,3(4) makes further distinctions among those who attain arahantship and the stage of nonreturner. Such suttas point to the great variety that can exist even among those at the same spiritual level. It is because he was able to make such distinctions that the Buddha was said to possess perfect understanding of the diversity in the faculties of sentient beings.

Since nonreturners have eradicated the five lower fetters, they are no longer bound to the sensual realm of existence. However, they are still not entirely liberated from the cycle of rebirths but are still bound by the five higher fetters: desire for existence in the form realm, desire for existence in the formless realm, the conceit “I am,” subtle restlessness, and ignorance. The conceit “I am” (asmimāna) differs from identity view, the view of self (sakkāyadiṭṭhi), to which it is partly akin. The view of self affirms an enduring self existing in relation to the five aggregates, either as identical with them, or as their inner core, or as their owner and master. But the conceit “I am” lacks a clear conceptual content. It lurks at the base of the mind as a vague, shapeless, but imperious sense of the “I” as a concrete reality. Though the view of self is already eliminated at the stage of stream-entry, the conceit “I am” persists in noble disciples even up to the stage of nonreturner. This is the point of the incisive Khemaka Sutta—Text X,4(1)—with its two beautiful similes of the flower’s scent and the laundered cloth. The noble disciples differ from ordinary people in that they do not buy into the conceit “I am.” They recognize the conceit “I am” as a mere figment of the imagination, a false notion that does not point to a self, to a truly existent “I.” But they have not completely overcome it.

The subtle attachment and the residual sense of “I am” that persist in the nonreturner both stem from ignorance. To reach the end of the path, the nonreturner must obliterate the remaining segment of ignorance and dispel all traces of craving and conceit. The critical point when ignorance, craving, and conceit are eradicated marks the transition from the stage of nonreturner to arahantship. The difference between the two can be a subtle one, and therefore standards for distinguishing them are necessary. In Text X,4(2) the Buddha proposes several criteria by which a trainee and an arahant can determine their respective standings. One of particular interest concerns their relationship to the five spiritual faculties: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. The trainee sees with wisdom the goal in which the faculties culminate—namely, Nibbāna—but cannot dwell in it. The arahant sees with wisdom the supreme goal and can also dwell in that goal.

The texts that follow offer different perspectives on the arahant. Text X,4(3) characterizes the arahant with a series of metaphors, elucidated in the same passage. Text X,4(4) enumerates nine things that an arahant cannot do. In Text X,4(5), the Venerable Sāriputta describes the arahant’s imperturbability in the face of powerful sense objects, and in Text X,4(6) he enumerates the ten powers of an arahant. Text X,4(7), an excerpt from the Dhātuvibhaṅga Sutta, begins as an account of the attainment of arahantship through the contemplation of the elements; the relevant passage was included in the previous chapter as Text IX,4(3)(c). The exposition then turns to the “four foundations” (cattāro adhiṭṭhāna) of the arahant, here spoken of as “the sage at peace” (muni santo). Text X,4(8), the last in this section, is a poem extolling the arahant’s distinguished qualities.

The first and foremost of the arahants is the Buddha himself, to whom the last section of this chapter is devoted. The section is titled “The Tathāgata,” the word the Buddha used when referring to himself in his archetypal role as the discoverer and bringer of liberating truth. The word can be resolved in two ways: taken as tathā āgata, “Thus Come,” it implies that the Buddha has come in accordance with an established pattern (which the commentaries interpret to mean the fulfillment of the ten spiritual perfections—the pāramīs—and the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment); taken as tathā gata, “Thus Gone,” it implies that he has gone in accordance with an established pattern (which the commentaries interpret to mean that he has gone to Nibbāna by the complete practice of serenity, insight, the paths, and the fruits).

Later forms of Buddhism draw extreme distinctions between Buddhas and arahants, but in the Nikāyas this distinction is not as sharp as one might expect if one takes later texts as the benchmark of interpretation. On the one hand, the Buddha is an arahant, as is evident from the standard verse of homage to the Blessed One (iti pi so bhagavā arahaṃ sammā sambuddho …); on the other, arahants are buddha, in the sense that they have attained full enlightenment, sambodhi, by awakening to the same truths that the Buddha himself realized. The proper distinction, then, is that between a sammā sambuddha or Perfectly Enlightened Buddha, and an arahant who has attained enlightenment and liberation as a disciple (sāvaka) of a Perfectly Enlightened Buddha. However, to avoid such complex locutions, we will resort to the common practice of phrasing the distinction as that between a Buddha and an arahant.

What then is the relationship between the two? Is the difference between them primarily one of temporal sequence, with perhaps a few additional capacities specific to a Perfectly Enlightened Buddha? Or is the difference between them so vast that they should be considered distinct types? The Nikāyas display an interesting, even tantalizing, ambivalence on this question, as the texts included here illustrate. Text X,5(1) raises the question about the difference between “the Tathāgata, the Arahant, the Perfectly Enlightened One” and “a monk liberated by wisdom”; apparently the expression bhikkhu paññāvimutta is used here in a sense applicable to any arahant disciple rather than solely to one who lacks the formless attainments (that is, in an inclusive sense, not as a wisdom-liberated arahant contrasted with a both-ways liberated arahant). The answer the text gives expresses the difference in terms of role and temporal priority. A Buddha has the function of discovering and expounding the path, and he also possesses a unique familiarity with the intricacies of the path not shared by his disciples. His disciples follow the path he reveals and attain enlightenment afterward, under his guidance.

The polemical literature of later Buddhism sometimes depicts the Buddha as motivated by great compassion and his arahant disciples as cool and aloof, indifferent to the plight of their fellow beings. As if to forestall this criticism, Text X,5(2) states that not only the Buddha but arahants as well as learned and virtuous disciples still in training arise for the welfare of many people, live their lives out of compassion for the world, and teach the Dhamma for the good, well-being, and happiness of their fellow beings, devas as well as humans. Thus, if this text is taken as authoritative, it cannot be claimed that compassion and altruistic concern are qualities that distinguish Buddhas from arahants.

Yet Text X,5(3) gives us another perspective on this question. Here, the Buddha challenges the Venerable Sāriputta’s “bellowing utterance” by asking him whether he fully knows the moral discipline, qualities (perhaps concentration), wisdom, meditative dwellings, and liberation of the Buddhas of the past, present, and future. To this the great disciple can only answer in the negative. But Sāriputta declares that he knows that all the Buddhas of the three periods of time attain perfect enlightenment by abandoning the five hindrances, by establishing their minds in the four establishments of mindfulness, and by developing correctly the seven factors of enlightenment.

These, however, are aspects of the path that Buddhas have fulfilled in common with arahant disciples. Beyond this, the Buddhas possess certain qualities that elevate them above even the foremost of the arahants. From the Nikāyas, their superiority seems to rest on two main pillars: first, their being is essentially “for others” in a way that the most altruistic of the arahant disciples can only emulate but never equal; and second, their knowledges and spiritual powers are much greater than those of the arahant disciples.

The Buddha states that even monks fully liberated in mind, who possess “unsurpassable vision, practice, and liberation,” venerate the Tathāgata, because his attainment of enlightenment helps others to attain enlightenment, his deliverance helps others gain deliverance, his realization of Nibbāna enables others to realize Nibbāna (MN 35.26; I 235). In Text X,5(4), we encounter two sets of qualities considered special endowments of a Buddha, enabling him to “roar his lion’s roar in the assemblies” and set rolling the wheel of Dhamma. These are the ten Tathāgata’s powers and the four grounds of selfconfidence. Though several of these powers are shared by disciples, in their totality these two sets are distinctive of a Buddha and equip him to guide and instruct beings in accordance with their individual aptitudes and dispositions. The four grounds of self-confidence confer upon the Buddha a boldness of authority, a magnitude of mission, that only the founder of a religion can exercise. Text X,5(5) compares the Tathāgata to the sun and moon, for his appearance in the world is the manifestation of great light and dispels the darkness of ignorance. Text X,5(6) compares him to a man who rescues a herd of deer from calamity, thus portraying him as the great benefactor of humanity.

With Text X,5(7) we return to the metaphor of the lion’s roar, introduced earlier, with a lengthy simile that compares the Buddha’s proclamation of universal impermanence to the roar of a lion when he emerges from his den. Like the closing passage of the First Sermon (see Text II,5), this text draws our attention to the cosmic scope of the Buddha’s mission. His message extends not only to human beings, but reaches up to the high heavenly realms, shaking the delusions of the deities.

Finally, Text X,5(8) offers us a series of brief explanations why the Buddha is called the Tathāgata. He is called the Tathāgata because he has fully awakened to the nature of the world, its origin, its cessation, and the way to its cessation; because he has fully comprehended all phenomena within the world, whether seen, heard, sensed, or cognized; because his speech is invariably true; because he acts in conformity with his words; and because he wields supreme mastery within the world. The text ends with an inspired poem, probably attached by the compilers of the canon, which celebrates the Buddha as the supreme refuge for the world.

The personal devotion toward the Tathāgata expressed by both the prose text and the poem introduces us to the warm current of religious feeling that runs through Early Buddhism, always present just beneath its cool and composed exterior. This religious dimension makes the Dhamma more than just a philosophy or an ethical system or a body of meditative techniques. Animating it from within, drawing its followers upward and onward, it makes the Dhamma a complete spiritual path—a path rooted in faith in a particular person who is at once the supreme teacher of liberating truth and the foremost example of the truth he teaches.

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4👑☸ Cattāri Ariya-saccaṃ 四聖諦

In the Buddha's Words

In the Buddha's Words

General Introduction

I. The Human Condition

1. Old Age, Illness, and Death

2. The Tribulations of Unreflective Living

3. A World in Turmoil

4. Without Discoverable Beginning

II. The Bringer of Light

1. One Person AN 1. xiii, 1, 5, 6) [AN 1.170-186]

2. The Buddha’s Conception and Birth (MN 123, abridged)

3. The Quest for Enlightenment

4. The Decision to Teach (from MN 26}

5. The First Discourse (SN 56.11)

III. Approaching the Dhamma

1. Not a Secret Doctrine (AN 3.129}

2. No Dogmas or Blind Belief (AN 3.65}

3. The Visible Origin and Passing Away of Suffering (SN 42.11}

4. Investigate the Teacher Himself (MN 47}

5. Steps toward the Realization of Truth (from MN 95}

IV. The Happiness Visible in This Present Life

1. Upholding the Dhamma in Society

2. The Family

3. Present Welfare, Future Welfare (AN 8.54}

4. Right Livelihood

5. The Woman of the Home (AN 8.49)

6. The Community

V. The Way to a Fortunate Rebirth

1. The Law of Kamma

2. Merit. The Key to Good Fortune

3. Giving

4.Moral Discipline

5. Meditation

VI. Deepening One’s Perspective on the World

1. Four Wonderful Things (AN 4.128}

2. Gratification, Danger, and Escape

3. Properly Appraising Objects of Attachment (MN 13}

4. The Pitfalls in Sensual Pleasures

5. Life Is Short and Fleeting (AN 7.70} [AN 7.74}

6. Four Summaries of the Dhamma (from MN 82)

7.The Danger in Views

8. From the Divine Realms to the Infernal (AN 4.125}

9. The Perils of Saṃsāra

VII. The Path to Liberation

1. Why Does One Enter the Path?

2. Analysis of the Eightfold Path (SN 45.8}

3. Good Friendship (SN 45.2}

4. The Graduated Training (MN 27}

5. The Higher Stages of Training with Similes (from MN 39}

VIII. Mastering the Mind

1. The Mind Is the Key (AN 1. iii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10) [AN 1.21-30]

2. Developing a Pair of Skills

3. The Hindrances to Mental Development (SN 46.55, abridged)

4. The Refinement of the Mind (AN 3.100 §§1–10) [AN 3.101]

5. The Removal of Distracting Thoughts (MN 20}

6. The Mind of Loving-Kindness (from MN 21)

7. The Six Recollections (AN 6.10} [Related: AN11.12 ]

8. The Four Establishments of Mindfulness (MN 10}

9. Mindfulness of Breathing (SN 54.13}

10. The Achievement of Mastery (SN 28.1–9,combined)

IX. Shining the Light of Wisdom

1.Images of Wisdom

2. The Conditions for Wisdom (AN 8.2, abridged)

3. A Discourse on Right View (MN 9}

4. The Domain of Wisdom

5. The Goal of Wisdom

X. The Planes of Realization

1. The Field of Merit for the World

2. Stream-Entry

3. Nonreturning

4. The Arahant

5. The Tathāgata

Miscellaneous

article was derived from two sources:

mikenz66 from dhammawheel forum

readingfaithfully.org

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