Introduction

The Pāli Canon contains records of some of the most remarkable communications ever:

  • The Buddha or one of his noble disciples is giving a Dhamma talk or conducting a conversation.

  • Listeners take his words, use them to examine their own minds,

  • and gain a noble attainment, or level of awakening, on the spot.

This means that they experience a deathless dimension, outside of space and time, and cut through some or all of the ten fetters that bind the mind to the process of repeated becoming and birth.

We read these records and sometimes forget how extraordinary they are. They show the power of words in space and time to bring about an experience beyond space and time. They’re evidence that the Buddha not only attained the deathless in line with his aspirations, but was also able to use words strategically to bring others to experience that dimension as well.

These records are important not only in reference to the past, but also for us in the present. They highlight the Buddha’s purpose in teaching the Dhamma and the means by which he achieved that purpose. From them, we can gain lessons in how to master those means so as to achieve that purpose within ourselves.

This book is an attempt to draw out those lessons by gathering all the Canonical records of these communications in one place, analyzing them in line with the Buddha’s own observations about what’s needed for this sort of communication to yield an experience of awakening then and there.

In some cases, the records convey only the outline of what was said on those occasions. In others, they seem to be more complete. Some give a bare minimum of a background on the listeners; others provide more. Using the Buddha’s own analysis of what’s going on in the mind of a person who gains a noble attainment, plus other information from the Canon or our knowledge of Indian thought in the Buddha’s time, we can fill in some of the blanks in the individual accounts.

But we have to be clear from the start that many blanks simply cannot be filled in. When people gain awakening while listening to the Dhamma, they’re not coming with empty slates, and they’re not just listening. They’re bringing their own assumptions and questions to the Dhamma, along with their own ability to engage in what the Buddha identified as the two qualities needed to nourish the Dhamma within them: commitment and reflection (AN 10:73). They commit to bringing their minds to concentration while listening, and then use their discernment to reflect on where they can detect any suffering or stress, along with its causes, there in that steady state of mind. On top of that, the Buddha tells us that their karmic background—which can extend to past lives—also plays a role in determining how capable they will be in putting the Dhamma to the best use.

Those are some of the unknowns on the side of the listeners. Then there are the unknowns on the side of the speakers. Only rarely do the accounts give us a glimpse of what’s going on, say, in the Buddha’s mind as he prepares to speak on occasions of this sort. The glimpses they do afford us are these: On some occasions, he sees that a particular person has faculties ripe for understanding the Dhamma (Ud 5:3) or for gaining full release (MN 147 [§47]). On another, he questions himself as to the best way to bring a group of listeners to full awakening (SN 15:13 [§52]). There’s even a case where we’re told that he suffused a particularly difficult person with goodwill before leading that person to a first glimpse of awakening (Mv 6:36.1–5). However, it’s hard to imagine that the Buddha didn’t reflect in these ways in other cases, or that he didn’t extend strong goodwill to everyone he taught. There’s also the question of exactly how much he could read in the minds of his listeners and how much he adjusted his message to fit with what he read. On top of that, there’s the question of what karmic relationships the Buddha and the listener had with each other in the past.

So it’s not the case that the Buddha was simply speaking, and a listener simply listening, when their communication resulted in the listener’s awakening while the Buddha spoke. The written records don’t tell us everything that was going on. Much of the communication must have been non-verbal, taking place in the context of multi-life stories that we can only guess at.

Still, there’s a lot that can be learned from the fragmentary records we do have, both in terms of common patterns they show of the process of awakening, and in terms of the variations that different teaching strategies can work on those patterns.

The common patterns indicate the dynamic of awakening in any mind. Prominent examples include the graduated discourses, or step-by-step talks, with which the Buddha introduced lay listeners to the four noble truths. We have no full account of any of these discourses. We don’t even have an outline. All we have is a list of the topics: giving, virtue, heaven; the drawbacks of, degradation in, and defilement in sensuality; and the rewards of renunciation. The Canon records 30 instances in which the Buddha gave a discourse based on this list, leading his listeners to their first glimpse of the deathless. Because he gave these discourses to a wide variety of people—everywhere from kings to lepers and would-be assassins—it’s safe to assume that the details differed, sometimes radically, from case to case. But what’s important is the sequence of the underlying list: It shows the dynamic by which a mind normally immersed in sensuality can be brought, step by step, to a state where it can benefit fully from the Buddha’s core teaching.

Similarly, there’s the Buddha’s questionnaire applying the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to the five aggregates, past, present, and future. We’ll discuss this questionnaire in more detail in Chapter 4. Here we can simply note that its purpose is to highlight the drawbacks of the aggregates so that the listeners will comprehend the suffering involved in clinging to them. Reflecting on these drawbacks, they’ll be inclined to abandon any craving for the aggregates, thus fulfilling the duties with regard to the noble truths. We’ll see that this questionnaire, or variations on it, is employed again and again in the passages collected here.

We should also note, though, that when the Buddha or one of his disciples is bringing a listener to awakening, he uses this questionnaire only when the listener is already familiar with the noble truths and the duties appropriate to them. Seeing this pattern helps us to understand the role of the three perceptions: as strategies for carrying out the duties of the noble truths, inducing dispassion in those who are already aware of the positive role of dispassion in bringing suffering to an end. In other words, the four noble truths provide the context for the three perceptions, and not the other way around. This is a point we will encounter repeatedly in this book. For the purposes of understanding and attaining awakening, it’s important to keep in mind.

As for the variations on the patterns: There’s sometimes a tendency to define the Dhamma in terms of lists of qualities said to be the Buddha’s basic teachings, the belief being that if you want to know the Dhamma, you have to know all the names on the lists. And it is true that the Buddha did tend to explain things in terms of lists, with each name on each list precisely defined. A prime example is the group of seven lists of dhammas in the Wings to Awakening that the Buddha encouraged all his monks to know in order to keep the Dhamma alive (DN 16).

However, the suttas (discourses) and Vinaya (collections of monastic rules) contain many stories of how people gained awakening when learning only a few concepts or fragments of a framework—such as the causal framework of the four noble truths. In some cases, awakening was induced even just through the use of vivid similes—showing that the similes in these texts are not purely decorative, but play a crucial role in transmitting the Dhamma. In other cases, a listener was presented with a riddle and gained awakening by exercising his ingenuity and intuition in figuring out how the riddle applied to his own mind.

What mattered in every case was that the teaching strategy employed was successful in getting the listener to thoroughly eradicate clinging of every sort.

This observation is what justifies many practice traditions in devising their own techniques for putting an end to clinging. Not all the Dhamma is in the Canon. Whatever other teachings get the same effect count as Dhamma as well.

As we’ll see, one of the Buddha’s master lists—dependent co-arising, his explanation of the causes leading to suffering—explains why a variety of approaches can work in freeing the mind (SN 12:20 [§13]). The list contains many feedback loops, making all the factors mutually dependent. This means that developing dispassion for any pair of factors in the list can unravel the whole sequence and bring it down.

There’s some irony in the fact that the structure of this master list—the most complicated and extensive of the Buddha’s teachings—shows why there were cases where the Buddha’s listeners could gain awakening without knowing any of the names of the factors in any list at all. But the Buddha didn’t let that irony get in his way. He used the complexity of dependent co-arising in such a direct manner that he could get even some of his most uneducated listeners to abandon their clingings and achieve awakening.

So the passages here show both the common dynamic of the process of awakening and the wide variety of strategies by which that process can be induced. In doing so, they show the Dhamma, not as a body of words to define, but as a collaborative communication between real human beings so as to free hearts and minds. To understand the Dhamma, you always have to remember this living human context. It’s within that context, heart to heart, that the Dhamma stays alive.

This book is divided into two parts.

The first part—Chapters 1 through 3—deals with theory. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a general background on the noble attainments, covering what can be gleaned from the suttas about the insights required for the various levels and about the fetters abandoned with each. Chapter 3 examines the Buddha’s own analysis of what a listener has to bring to the Dhamma in order to awaken while listening to it. Readings from the suttas supplement the discussions in these chapters.

The second part—Chapters 4 through 8—contains readings from the suttas and Vinaya, gathering the accounts we have of people gaining a noble attainment while listening to the Dhamma and dividing them by categories. I haven’t included all the instances where the Buddha taught the graduated discourse, as those accounts are all identical. Otherwise, all the relevant accounts are here.

In this part of the book, the readings form the core of each chapter. In every chapter, they are prefaced by a commentary aimed at highlighting what seem to be the most important features of the readings, adding background information wherever that helps to make the readings clearer. Central to this background information are the lessons derived from Chapter 3, analyzing what happens in these passages in the Buddha’s own terms.

Chapter 4 treats the earliest instances in which the Buddha brought his listeners to awakening, establishing many teaching strategies that he and his disciples continued to use in the following years. Chapters 5 through 8 contain passages reporting the remaining instances where listeners gained awakening while listening to the Dhamma, divided according to the level(s) of awakening gained.

I’ve included only the passages where the Canon itself clearly says that the listeners achieved particular noble attainments. There are passages where the Canon is more vague about the listeners’ attainments—such as Sn 5—and those for which the Commentary makes specific claims, but I haven’t included those passages, so as to keep the discussion clearly focused.

I hope that the material gathered here helps to open the doors to the deathless for you.