Acknowledgements & Notes

• As the Buddha once said, all things are rooted in desire (AN 10:58). This book is no exception. It was born of a desire to see what could be learned by collecting all the cases in the Pāli Canon—the oldest extant complete canon of the Buddha’s Dhamma, or teachings—where people gained awakening while listening to the Dhamma. What was distinctive about those Dhamma talks? What qualities of attention and intention did the listeners have to bring to the act of listening in order to get such results?

  After organizing the relevant passages, I tried to draw some conclusions, which I have gathered here. But I have also included full texts of the passages so that other readers could draw additional conclusions of their own.

• I could not have completed this book without the help of many individuals. In addition to the monks here at the monastery, these include: Andrea Kessler, Virginia Lawrence, Georgi Lyapkin, Xeying Ng, Addie Onsanit, Julia Uddèn, and Xiaoxi Wang. Any mistakes that remain in the book are, of course, my own responsibility.

• The text of the book contains many references to the Pāli Canon. References to where these passages can be found in the Canon are placed in parentheses ( ). If the passages can also be found in the readings included in this book, they have the passage number placed in brackets [ ]. So, for instance, (MN 2 [§32]) indicates a passage from Majjhima Nikāya 2 that is also passage §32 in this book.

• Finally, when the Buddha first decided to teach, he said that the doors to the deathless were open. This means that the attainment of the deathless is the central focus of his teachings. It’s what constitutes awakening, and so is the central focus of this book as well. However, the Buddha’s approach to reaching the deathless was based on one of his most original insights: It could be found by recognizing and solving the problem of dukkha. In fact, the act of solving this problem was so central to his message that he once said that all he taught was dukkha and the ending of dukkha (MN 22; SN 22:86). This means that dukkha is a good word to know if you want to understand his teachings and use them for their intended purpose.

  Its primary meaning is simple enough—pain—but it covers all levels of pain and discomfort, from acute physical suffering and mental anguish to subtle levels of stress in very refined, even blissful, states of mind. Unfortunately, there’s no single English word that can encompass all these levels of intensity. For this reason, in the course of this book, I will usually translate dukkha as suffering, but there are also times when I use pain or stress where appropriate, to make the point that the Buddha is referring to pain on every level. Keep in mind that these words denote different levels of the same thing.