This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Dhamma in Brief: Preparing the Mind for Transformation (1 of 3). It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Kim Allen at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome. If you’d like, you can write your location in the chat and also maybe your interest in signing up for this class. While we’re getting started and waiting for others to join, I’ll give just a brief road map so you know what you signed up for. This is three sessions: tonight, and also March 11th and 18th, so three Tuesdays.
We’re going to explore the suttas1 that pertain to the Dhamma2 in brief, as was stated in the title. But we’re also going to look more generally at this process of transforming through hearing the teachings. It’s an interesting and pervasive process, and that will take us out into other suttas. We’re going to start with the ones that are focused on the Dhamma in brief, as advertised, but I have the feeling we’re going to expand from there.
The Pali Canon3, which is what we often study here at the Sati Center, is a very rich resource for taking different angles or perspectives on specific aspects of the Buddhist teaching. This class is a foray into what is called the Dhamma in brief. That refers to times where the Buddha was asked by a disciple to give a brief nugget of his teachings, typically before they were going off on a retreat. They would come to him and ask for a teaching, saying, “I’m going to go off and practice, what should I keep in mind?”
I want to just jump right in with the language that’s used in the suttas. It’s one of those things called a pericope; it’s a stock phrase that you could cut and paste from one sutta to another. The language is the same every time. For this kind of teaching, it goes like this: “Venerable sir, it would be good if the Blessed One would teach me the Dhamma in brief, so that having heard the Dhamma from the Blessed One, I might dwell alone, withdrawn, diligent, ardent, and resolute.” That’s their way of saying, “I’m going off on retreat, and please give me some gem of wisdom to take with me so I can practice.”
This phrase “Dhamma in brief” is a translation of Saṅkhittena Dhammaṁ,4 where saṅkhittena literally means concise or brief. But I was speculating—this is now my interpretation—maybe we could use the word “condensed,” implying that this is a shortened teaching that contains everything that’s essential for the wholeness of the Dharma. It’s not really just that the Buddha is giving them a particular piece of the whole, even though it sounds like that, but he’s giving them something that could be a representation of the whole. It’s good enough to stand for all of it.
It’s an interesting question, right? The Buddha gave a lot of different teachings throughout the Pali Canon in many different situations to different people, and here he is being asked to bring it all into a specific set of instructions for someone to work with. So what is the heart of these teachings, or the essence?
Note that the person says right there in the question that they’re going to go and practice with this teaching, to go off and dwell “diligent, ardent, and resolute,” which are again, stock phrases for “I’m going on retreat.” They’re not asking for a philosophical point; they’re not asking for something theoretical. They want to know what to do while they’re sitting there on retreat.
If you look at the Buddha’s responses to this request, he was almost always very happy to reply with a definite answer. He gives them a straightforward answer to that. Sometimes it’s a little more extended than others; sometimes it is not exactly brief, but often it’s pretty brief. My sense is that he liked that people were going off to apply his instructions. There were a couple of cases where he gently chides the person before he gives an answer to the question—we’ll see one of those today—but mostly he just happily responded and gave them what they wanted: some kind of a condensed teaching.
I like to think that maybe this Dhamma in brief idea is that whatever we get as a little essential piece of Dharma is only meaningful when it’s unpacked through meditation. It might be that what we’re reading and hearing about today will seem a little bit brief, but if one were to go and practice with it, there would be ways that it would unfold. I’ll try to bring it to life a bit as we discuss this.
Today, we’re going to focus on the instances in the Pali Canon where the Buddha was asked to teach the Dhamma in brief. There are 44 of them, so don’t worry, we won’t go over all 44 in detail. As far as I know, there are 44 of them, and taken together, we could say that they give a picture of what the Buddha considered to be the essential areas of focus for a person who was going to do a dedicated period of practice. That might be interesting for us if we ever do a retreat or if we are feeling like we would like to hone in on something that we know is going to be valuable.
In the majority of the cases, the person came to awakening during their retreat, but not all of them. Nonetheless, even if they didn’t come to awakening, my guess is that it was presumably a meaningful teaching for them in some way, and that’s why it was preserved in the suttas. 44 is not an insignificant number, so it’s valuable to look at these as a whole. But I’d like us also to remember that each person received one of them, and the idea was that they could practice starting from this short cue, if you will, and therefore unfold the whole fullness of the Dharma.
One possibility is that the Buddha tailored his suggestion a little bit to the person who was asking, knowing something about their mind so that he could give them the right cue for what would work for them. Again, that’s a little bit of a speculation, but there’s some evidence for that as we go through.
Another topic that we’ll discuss in this class is the overall idea of getting a pith teaching or a nugget at just the right moment and using it to go far in our practice, maybe even using it to awaken, or at least to transform in some way. I think intuitively, we could say that this is appealing. We like the idea that the mind can be ripe in a certain way, maybe like a supersaturated solution, such that a short teaching could bring about a real shift. A supersaturated solution is one where any disturbance to it will easily be the seed for a crystal to form—only a slight disturbance. Wouldn’t that be cool if our mind were poised there and we got just the right teaching and, boom, we could transform in some way?
I have to say immediately, though, while we do have these suttas, in a broad sense, the early Buddhist teachings are not big on this idea of a sudden, amazing shift. There’s a little too much potential for magical thinking or the idea that a powerful guru could somehow make somebody awaken by zapping you in just the right way. In the early Buddhist teachings that we look at, we have to do our own work. Here’s a translation of a verse from the Dhammapada:5 “It is up to you to make strong effort; Tathāgatas6 only tell you how.” Tathāgatas are Buddhas. So it’s up to you to make strong effort; the Buddha’s just going to tell you how.
I think this is in keeping with the idea that people come and ask the Buddha. They’re not actually asking him, “Please tell me something that will zap my mind into awakening.” They come and they say, “I’m going to go off on retreat, please give me instructions.” You can hear the difference between those two requests: “Please do something to me” and “Please give me something that I can use to practice for myself.” They have a very different flavor.
I want to back up to an even bigger picture for context. In Buddhist history, there is a difference between schools or traditions of Buddhism around the idea of sudden versus gradual awakening. Is this something where it’s a big bang moment, or is it something where there’s a long path that you tread over time? It’s a particularly prominent difference among the northern schools that evolved in China, Japan, and Korea. Some of those were, and still are, actually called “sudden schools” because they advocate this idea of a sudden transformation, and then there are some that are “gradual schools.”
In Theravāda,7 which is Southern Buddhism and what we focus on here at the Sati Center, we are definitely on the side of gradual. The Buddha of the early texts frames many of his teachings in the form of what’s called the “gradual training.” We have this idea of an extended path of development. I’ll quote from the Majjhima Nikāya,8 where the Buddha says, “I do not say that final knowledge is achieved all at once. On the contrary, final knowledge is achieved by gradual training, gradual practice, gradual progress.” In another sutta, he gives the image of the ocean gradually sloping down as an analogy for gradually deepening in our practice.
So it’s clear that these Dhamma in brief teachings are not about getting some kind of a special transmission or something that will zap the mind into awakening. And yet, this is a particular form of sutta. There’s this repeated phrase that appears in all of them, and there’s 44 of them, which is enough to be noticeable. My interpretation is that the Buddha is saying that having a simple, clear, and wisdom-oriented focus for a period of intensive practice actually does have the potential to be very fruitful for a person.
Maybe what we can understand is that there is some kind of preparation of the mind that has to go on in order to be ready to receive a pithy teaching and to use it well on retreat. The gradual training says we can prepare ourselves by cultivating certain qualities or organizing our life in certain ways. If we do all of that, then we have conditions in place that if we hear one of these brief teachings and go and practice with it, then the mind would be ready to shift.
Another thing that we’ll talk about in this class is to consider what conditions might have had to be in place for that person to receive the Dhamma. This too is valuable for us as practitioners. We don’t have the benefit of going to the literal Buddha and saying, “Please give me the Dhamma in brief,” but we can prepare our mind well with all of these conditions that the Buddha suggests would be good preparations. So that when we read a text, hear a Dharma talk, go on a retreat, and receive the specific teachings, who knows, one of them may land and really support us.
Now we’re ready to start looking at the suttas that are about the Dhamma in brief. At a top level, as I said, there are 44 of them. In these cases, it’s always a monastic who asks for instructions in order to go off and practice alone. The first question we might want to ask is: what topics are most frequently offered? What does the Buddha most often say in answer to that question?
[The speaker asks the audience to guess.]
Okay, some guesses are: Dukkha, impermanence, anattā, death and aging, not me/not mine, sīla (ethics), abandoning the hindrances, emptiness, the Brahma Viharas, mindfulness, and how to use the mind. These are all great candidates.
[The speaker shares a chart summarizing the 44 suttas.]
The most common subjects are the Five Aggregates9 and the Six Sense Bases.10 The most common wisdom focus is on the Three Characteristics11 (impermanence, suffering, not-self), non-delighting, and non-clinging. Congratulations, you guys got the wisdom part!
So, 23 of the 44 teachings are on the Five Aggregates as the subject for meditation. That’s a little more than half. 11 of them are on the Six Sense Bases. Together, those two make up more than 75%. The main thing the Buddha wants us to look at is the Aggregates and the sense bases. Five of them are on ethics, or sīla,12 and those go on to have the person practice the four foundations of mindfulness. Then there are a few on focusing on what the true teachings of the Buddha are, and a couple of other things.
The wisdom focus is generally either on the Three Characteristics or some form of non-delight or non-clinging. This makes sense because the claim in the Four Noble Truths is that grasping or craving is the reason that we suffer. So, focusing on not holding on to these things would be an obvious practice.
You might not hear about the Aggregates for a while in your practice; it’s not a very common topic in Western teaching. So I thought it was worth saying a little bit about that. The Aggregates are the domains of experience around which we tend to organize our sense of self. The Buddha wanted people to practice directly with aspects of experience that we tend to identify with.
The teaching is that all of these are also not really “me or mine.” This is perhaps easier to see with the mental aggregates because they come and go so readily, whereas the body has a feeling of continuity. We’re not aiming to just think about this, though. These people going off on retreat were wanting to practice in meditation with the Aggregates.
The way to do that most frequently is to notice the Three Characteristics:
Looking at these characteristics, each one has a different way of loosening the mind a little bit. The same practice applies to the Six Sense Bases: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and the mind. In general, the Buddha is asking practitioners to release the way that we hold on to the Aggregates and the sense bases.
Some of the people the Buddha gave his nuggets to were people he had known for a long time. One of these folks is an interesting monk named Māluṅkyāputta.16 He was known for his interest in philosophical questions. In an earlier exchange, Māluṅkyāputta was sitting in meditation and became vexed by questions about the nature of the universe: Is it infinite or finite? Is the soul the same as the body? What happens to Buddhas after they die?
He resolves to go to the Buddha and get answers, or else he will leave the order. He marches off to the Buddha and asks his questions, but the Buddha refuses to answer. He points out, “Māluṅkyāputta, when you ordained, did I tell you that I would answer these questions for you?” Māluṅkyāputta has to admit that wasn’t part of the bargain.
Then the Buddha gives the famous simile of a person shot by a poisoned arrow. His friends are trying to help him, but he says, “Wait, before you pull out the arrow, I need to know what kind of wood the shaft is made of, what kind of feathers are on it, who shot it, what class they were from,” and so on. The Buddha says that while demanding answers to all those questions, the person would die. It’s a powerful image for Māluṅkyāputta, who has been shot with the arrow of suffering but is demanding to know all these irrelevant things. The Buddha tells him that the fundamentals of the spiritual life are suffering, its cause, its end, and the path to its end—the Four Noble Truths.
Fortunately, Māluṅkyāputta stays ordained. Later, in one of the Dhamma in brief suttas, he comes to the Buddha as an old man and makes the classic request. The Buddha teases him, saying, “Here now, Māluṅkyāputta, what should I say to young bhikkhus when a bhikkhu like you—old, aged, burdened with years—asks me for an exhortation in brief?”
But Māluṅkyāputta gives a sincere response: “Perhaps I may understand the meaning of the Blessed One’s statement. Perhaps I may become an heir to the Blessed One’s statement.” The Buddha is compassionate and gives him the same teaching he gave to Bāhiya:17
“Here, Māluṅkyāputta, regarding things seen, heard, sensed, and cognized by you: in the seen, there will be merely the seen; in the heard, there will be merely the heard; in the sensed, there will be merely the sensed; and in the cognized, there will be merely the cognized.”
This is a very brief teaching, and not so easy to execute in practice. How often do we sit in meditation, intending for there to be “just the breath,” but then the mind wanders off? The Buddha is pointing to that tendency. It’s the perfect teaching for somebody whose mind goes off into speculation very easily, which was Māluṅkyāputta’s habit.
Māluṅkyāputta understands immediately. He explains to the Buddha how he had previously been dwelling with a “muddled mindfulness,” where he would grasp onto things and ruminate on them. He realizes that if he could just be with things as they are, there would be no chance of a self forming—it would just be the experience, empty of an experiencer, a commentary, or a judgment.
The Buddha says, “Very good, now go on retreat.” And there’s a happy ending. Māluṅkyāputta goes off and becomes one of the Arahants.18 It tugs at my heart that this monk who almost gave up, who practiced for decades without a particular result, finally as an old man got the teaching that was just the right thing. He was sincere and ready, he understood the teaching, and he became free.
This story is one piece of evidence that the Dhamma in brief teachings might have been tailored to the person. The Buddha could know the minds of people and give them something that would be the best chance for them.
The Dhamma in brief teachings we’ve discussed were only ever requested by monastics, likely because only they would be going off on long retreats. But what about a layperson’s version? There is another standard form, not the Dhamma in brief, but what’s called the “graduated discourse.” This is a single Dharma talk that covers a standard sequence of teachings, which the Buddha gave exclusively to lay people. At the end of this discourse, the lay person achieves the first stage of awakening in 100% of the cases recorded in the suttas.
Next time, we’ll look at that as a parallel example. We’ll talk through what the graduated discourse is, and again, with the caveat, what were the conditions that must have been present for the Buddha to give it?
Meanwhile, have a wonderful week. You might consider practicing with one of these Dhamma in brief teachings.
Sutta: A discourse or sermon of the Buddha. ↩
Dhamma (Sanskrit: Dharma): The teachings of the Buddha; the universal truth or law. ↩
Pali Canon: The standard collection of scriptures in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition, as preserved in the Pāli language. ↩
Saṅkhittena Dhammaṁ: The Pāli phrase for “the Dhamma in brief.” ↩
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form, one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. ↩
Tathāgata: A Pāli and Sanskrit word; the Buddha uses it when referring to himself. The term is often thought to mean either “one who has thus gone” or “one who has thus come.” ↩
Theravāda: The “School of the Elders,” the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. ↩
Majjhima Nikāya: The “Middle-length Discourses,” a collection of suttas in the Sutta Piṭaka of the Pāli Canon. ↩
Five Aggregates (Khandhas): The five aspects that constitute a sentient being’s experience: form (or matter), feeling (or sensation), perception, mental formations (or impulses), and consciousness. ↩
Six Sense Bases (Saḷāyatana): The six internal sense organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind) and their corresponding external objects (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thoughts). ↩
Three Characteristics (Tilakkhaṇa): The three fundamental truths of all existence: impermanence (Anicca), unsatisfactoriness or suffering (Dukkha), and not-self (Anattā). ↩
Sīla: Virtue, morality, or ethical conduct. It is one of the three sections of the Noble Eightfold Path. ↩
Anicca: The doctrine of impermanence; the understanding that all conditioned things are in a constant state of flux. ↩
Dukkha: A Pāli word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is the first of the Four Noble Truths. ↩
Anattā: The doctrine of “not-self,” that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul, or essence in living beings. ↩
Māluṅkyāputta: A monk who appears in the suttas, most famously for questioning the Buddha on a set of ten speculative, metaphysical questions. ↩
Bāhiya: A wandering ascetic who, upon meeting the Buddha, asked for a teaching in brief and became enlightened on the spot. His story is a famous example of sudden awakening. ↩
Arahant: An enlightened person, one who has attained Nibbāna (Sanskrit: Nirvāṇa) and is free from the cycle of rebirth. ↩