Conclusions

In the Introduction, we noted the patterns that the Buddha established in his earliest discourses for bringing his listeners immediately to awakening. He started first with the four noble truths and their duties, prefacing this topic with the graduated discourse for lay people who needed to have their minds weaned from sensuality and into a state of concentration before they could fully benefit from learning the four truths.

Once listeners were familiar with these truths—either through direct experience of all four, or through conviction in them—the Buddha would then introduce them to the questionnaire applying the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to the five aggregates or six sense media. For those familiar with the four truths, these perceptions were effective in getting them to abandon any clinging for the aggregates and thus fulfill the duties of the truths.

How far the Buddha’s listeners advanced along the noble attainments while listening to these topics, though, depended on what they brought to the act of listening. According to him, as we have noted, they had to bring three faculties—conviction based on an acute awareness of suffering, concentration, and discernment—in order to awaken then and there. Because right concentration also entails persistence and mindfulness—equivalent to right effort and right mindfulness—this means that the listener had to engage in all five of the faculties while listening in order to gain a noble attainment at the same time.

Their conviction also had to be accompanied by joy—a sense of relief over having found a teaching that could release them from the sufferings of which they were intensely aware.

Although this pattern remained standard throughout the Buddha’s teaching career, we’ve also noted ways in which he and his disciples worked variations on it, sometimes seeming to diverge from it quite widely. Among the most striking examples are the discourses in which the Buddha doesn’t mention the four truths or the three perceptions at all, and which gain their force from striking similes. Also striking are the short riddles that challenged their listeners to figure out how those riddles applied to their own minds.

In all cases where the talks depart from the standard pattern, though, we’ve found that the departures can be explained by the nature of dependent co-arising, the Buddha’s most complex explanation of the sequence of causes of suffering. The sequence’s non-linear structure, with many interdependent feedback loops, means that a person can focus on developing dispassion for any cause-and-effect pair of factors in the sequence and, as a result, bring the whole sequence down.

The important point to keep in mind with regard to all the talks that bring their listeners to awakening is that the words are meant to be performative. They don’t just describe the truth, they’re also aimed at inducing a change in the listener’s heart. The clinging that constitutes suffering is based on a value judgment: that whatever stress is involved in the clinging is adequately repaid by the pleasure it affords. The purpose of the Dhamma is to get the listener to reverse that value judgment, seeing that whatever pleasure is entailed in clinging is not worth the pain. The Buddha and his disciples used whatever means they could—long analyses, short verses, riddles, similes, questions—to induce this change of heart.

It’s informative, though, to consider three things that they didn’t do in these talks.

• First, even though the talks are aimed at inducing an experience that will cut through the ten fetters that bind the mind to the processes of birth and death, the talks following the standard pattern mention issues that touch on only four of the fetters: sensual desire and ignorance of the four noble truths in the graduated discourse, and issues of self—related to the fetters of self-identity view and conceit—in the questionnaire. None of the other fetters are addressed. Among the outliers from the standard pattern, only two—MN 140 and Sn 3:12—touch on the drawbacks of concentration, which would be related to the fetters of passion for form and passion for the formless. But those are rare exceptions. Some of the talks don’t mention anything connected to the fetters at all.

• Second, it’s also the case that none of the talks seem specifically aimed at inducing this or that noble attainment. The graduated discourse discusses the four noble truths in detail, but in only one case—Yasa’s—does it lead the listener to abandon the corresponding fetter of ignorance. The questionnaire on the three perceptions would sometimes lead its listeners to arahantship, yet sometimes—as in the case of Ven. Ānanda [§40]—only to stream-entry.

So there’s no telling from a talk what attainment the listener will attain. This is in line with the fact that the listener doesn’t need to know anything of the fetters beforehand. What cuts the fetters is the experience of the deathless. And how many fetters are cut will depend on the acts of discernment that follow on that experience.

• This connects with the third point: The Buddha’s discussions of what goes on in the experience of awakening show that there are two critical junctures where the individual’s ability to commit and reflect play a crucial role.

a) To begin with, he or she has to see that the value judgments fostered by the Buddha’s five-step program, to lead to a noble attainment, must be applied not only to the objects of clinging and craving in the first and second noble truths, but also to the path factors that constitute the fourth: seeing the origination, passing away, allure, drawbacks, and escape from the five faculties. Anyone who is not quick to reflect in this way and find the escape even from the path that he or she has been following will not be able to reach any of the levels of awakening. At all.

b) Further, when a meditator attains any of the levels of right concentration, reflects on the drawbacks of concentration, and inclines the mind to the deathless, he or she has to be quick to reflect to see if any clinging remains around the experience of the deathless itself. Those who reflect successfully in this way, abandoning even the subtlest forms of clinging even for what is not fabricated, will achieve full awakening; those who don’t, will reach a lower level, non-return.

Yet even though both these moments of reflection are crucial, none of the talks that induce an immediate experience of the deathless mention them. The two outlying passages that we just noted—MN 140 and Sn 3:12—come close when they describe the drawbacks of and escape from concentration. But even they don’t hint at the drawbacks of and escape from discernment. So, aside from these partial exceptions, it’s totally up to the listeners to intuit, on their own, the need to reflect in these ways on the practices to which they have committed themselves.

Why they’re left to intuit this on their own, the texts don’t say. Perhaps the speaker saw there would be no need to mention these reflections, in that the listeners already had developed the habit of being thoroughly meticulous in reflecting on their own actions. Or perhaps their attainments required moments of totally independent insight, when they had to exercise their own discernment in an unexpected and unscripted way so as to abandon all acts of discernment and be truly free from fabrications and anticipations of all kinds.

Either way, the need for this type of commitment and reflection shows that the Buddha was wise in training his disciples who didn’t gain immediate awakening to develop their ability to reflect on their own commitment to their actions all along the path. That way, they could develop this habit and have it on hand when they really needed it as the path reached its end.

We can see the Buddha teaching this ability from the very beginning, in his instructions to his son, Rāhula, on how to reflect on his intentions, his actions, and their results with regard to all his thoughts, words, and deeds (MN 61). These instructions are among the most elementary in the Dhamma, and yet they’re among the most consistently relevant. They keep getting repeated on higher and higher levels of the practice, as in the Buddha’s instructions to Ven. Ānanda on the topic of emptiness, when he explains how a monk should reflect on the disturbances that his own perceptions are causing in one level of concentration so that he can drop those perceptions and bring the mind to levels of concentration that are progressively deeper and more devoid of disturbance, all the way to awakening (MN 121).

People often complain, when reading the words of a talk that led a listener to experience the deathless: “Why don’t I experience the deathless when listening to the same words?” The answer: “You need greater powers of commitment and reflection.”

The good news is that those powers can be trained, and that the Dhamma offers thorough instructions in how to train them.