This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Dhamma in Brief: The Graduated Discourse (Class 2 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.
Okay, so last time we considered the 44 suttas where the Buddha gives the Dhamma in brief as a teaching to someone who’s going on retreat. We saw that the two main topics for meditation were the five aggregates and the six sense spheres, and then the wisdom aspect was most often some version of the three characteristics. That’s a bunch of technical terminology, but we went over that last time. And even though that’s all technical sounding, I gave some fairly mundane examples of how we could touch into these practices in our daily life, such as looking at the impermanence of taste or looking at the uncontrollability, which is part of not-self, of sound.
I’m curious if anyone has any comments about trying any of those or anything that you may have noticed in daily life that somehow relates to the main topics of what the Buddha was teaching in the Dhamma in brief. I just wanted to make space for winding things up from last week.
(Audience member): My emotional states change, thank God, and then they change back. And I keep thinking, “This is going to change,” and it does.
Is that helpful to bear in mind?
(Audience member): It definitely is, yes. It keeps me from getting excessively depressed and also not overly excited.
And not overly excited either. Yeah, that’s great. That is a perfect everyday example. And as you know, emotional states are part of saṅkhāra1, the fourth of the five aggregates. So you’re right in there with one of the teachings that the Buddha was offering. And yeah, I do want to highlight that seeing that things change helps us, kind of mitigates the highs and the lows, right? And we’ll actually see a reference today also to someone understanding the nature of change. It was a deep teaching given by the Buddha, even though it’s also fairly everyday. So thanks, Wayne.
In the suttas that we looked at, the Dhamma in brief is a form of teaching that’s given to a monastic, and probably related to the fact that it’s about going off on retreat. That wasn’t something that laypeople really did at the time of the Buddha; they didn’t have the space in their life. So we live in a very special and interesting time where laypeople can actually do that. There’s an interesting history to laypeople learning how to go on retreat, but that’s not the subject of this class, so don’t get me on it. But it’s fairly recent, actually, and we are the beneficiaries of that.
So we also saw that from the Dhamma in brief, this person going on retreat may or may not attain full awakening from it. It seems to depend mostly on the person, but the Dhamma in brief is a deep Dhamma teaching that’s aimed at being able to awaken the mind completely. It kind of encapsulates the full depth of the Buddhist teaching into this one summary, if you will, that he gives to these people. And as far as we can tell, in the cases where we actually know who the person was that he gave it to, these people were pretty far along in their practice. He gave it to people who were dedicated practitioners, even among monastics; they had a lot of experience.
So what about us? For laypeople, there’s a form of teaching that’s called the graduated discourse. I mentioned this at the end of the last class. It’s also called the progressive discourse or the step-by-step discourse. It all depends on how you translate the word anupubba2, which means something like “following in turn,” “successive,” or “gradual.” And just as I mentioned this before, this is not the same as the gradual training, which is in itself a kind of encapsulated teaching that’s talked about in many suttas. It goes through what happens to a person from when they embark on the path through all the different things they would have to train in in order to awaken.
This is a different idea. This is one single discourse, a single Dhamma talk that’s delivered to a layperson that takes them through a standard set of topics that we’re going to look at today, and which leads to stream-entry in the Pali suttas. Stream-entry is the first of the stages of awakening, so it’s not full awakening—that’s the fourth. So it seems, though, that the Buddha gave this special talk to someone whom he knew was ready to have some kind of a deep Dhamma insight. He saw that their mind was kind of ready for it. So it’s not that the discourse itself is guaranteed to have some kind of powerful effect by its own nature, but instead, it’s the intuition of the Buddha that the person was ready. So I just want to make that clear. Although we will go through the topics today, and if you listen carefully, you never know, right?
The implication then is that the graduated discourse could have been different each time in length or style. All we know is the list of topics, and we don’t know how the Buddha went through them or how long it took. The implication, I think, from reading the texts that I’ve read that included it, is that it wasn’t super long either. I mean, he usually gives it to a layperson who’s kind of standing there or sitting there with him, sometimes even with other people present. And so the implication is probably not like a three or four-hour-long lecture with diagrams and charts and sorts of things. It’s kind of something that he goes through and highlights various topics in the person’s mind and leads them along a path.
So it’s an interesting concept, right? As we’re talking about this sudden versus gradual, and here we have a case where a person has a significant change from hearing one discourse. We’ll talk about context a little bit more as it goes along.
There are three general parts to these graduated discourse teachings: the preliminary conditions, the topics of the talk, and the result in the layperson. As far as I know, this talk was given in nine suttas, and we’ll talk later about who the recipients were.
The preliminary conditions always include some kind of expression or indication of deep confidence in the Buddha from the layperson. This is always described in some way in the text that precedes when the Buddha starts giving this discourse, and it varies a bit from sutta to sutta. It’s not like there’s a formula for this part, but I can name a few of the various ways.
A common one is that the person declares that they are going for refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. You may have said the refuges if you’ve been on retreat. In our tradition, we often say the three refuges at the beginning of the retreat as part of setting the container. It’s where you say, “I go for refuge in the Buddha, in the Dhamma, and the Sangha,” for a second time, for a third time. You may have done that in Pali or heard it. So people actually do that in the teaching. They don’t use exactly that formulaic language that we use at the beginning of retreats, but they use a stock phrase that’s very similar to that, just a little bit more elaborate.
Then there are some cases where the person—it’s hard to describe this to a modern audience—but a couple of the people were brahmins who were looking for what are called the 32 marks of a great man, which are the marks that are supposed to show that somebody is enlightened according to their tradition. The Buddha apparently had these marks, and so they would come looking for them. There comes a point when they’re interacting with the Buddha that they realize he has all 32 marks, and so then they have confidence in him because that’s what their tradition says is useful.
Then there are several cases of what we could call instant devotion, where somebody says, “Upon seeing the Buddha, my heart acquired confidence.” There’s the idea that the Buddha had a very special kind of bearing, somebody who was enlightened, and people who were attuned to that could see that.
And then there was also an exceptional case where a person who was very marginal in society, he was a leper, saw a big gathering of people and thought maybe there was going to be food given out. So he went, and it turned out not to be food but to be a Dhamma talk. His reason for being there ended, but he got intrigued. He saw that people were listening and he said, “I think I can listen to the Dhamma also.” So he sits down, and you can see that he’s drawn to what’s going on, and he ends up being a recipient of this discourse.
We’ll talk more about this quality of confidence or faith later because it’s actually very rich and not very well understood necessarily. We tend to have a different idea about it in our own culture, but it’s very important. It’s clear when you read these suttas, it’s common to all of them, that the person slowly or quickly develops some kind of confidence such that their mind is open and receptive.
Seeing this, and realizing that not only did they have faith—because a lot of people came with faith—but they had the conditions in their mind for being able to receive the Dhamma at that moment, the Buddha realizes this. The text says:
Then the Blessed One gave the householder Upāli progressive instruction, that is: talk on giving, talk on virtue, talk on the heavens. He explained the danger, degradation, and defilement in sensual pleasures, and the blessing of renunciation. When he knew that the householder Upāli’s mind was ready, receptive, free from hindrances, elated, and confident, he expounded to him the teaching special to the Buddhas: dukkha3, its origin, its cessation, and the path.
There you go, that’s the discourse. It starts with dāna4 and it ends with the Four Noble Truths. That’s fairly indicative of other patterns you may have seen in the suttas, where dāna is almost always the foundational quality that we need to have, and then the Four Noble Truths somehow encapsulate and point toward awakening in a way that was considered unique to the Buddha. Some of you know that the Turning of the Wheel discourse is about the Four Noble Truths, where the Buddha first expounds those. That was considered his first discourse, and this was when he established his brand, that’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? [Laughter] But that was his thing, and so here it’s labeled as “the teaching special to the Buddhas.”
I want to go through these topics and kind of frame them in a progressive way. Why do these form a progression? This is now my interpretation, because we’re never told—I just read the text of what it says. It doesn’t say how the Buddha talked about each of these things, how he strung them together. Maybe that would have been clearer to somebody in that culture, maybe there’s some obvious link between all of these, but I don’t think so. I think it was a unique talk that he gave, and we can interpret it based on knowing his teachings in general.
He starts with giving, dāna, and that is really considered the foundational quality for a follower of the Buddha. It’s a literal giving in the sense of supporting teachers, sanghas, monasteries. This is built right into the structure of the teachings, where the monastics are dependent upon the laypeople for their livelihood. Monastics in the Theravada Buddhist tradition can’t cook, store food, or grow it, so you don’t eat unless somebody gives you food, and it has to be every day because you can’t store it. It was built in that the monastics were dependent on laypeople. This was wise; then they couldn’t be kind of elite and off by themselves. They had to be in association with people who were living in the world. That’s the foundational understanding.
But a little bit more subtly, we have giving or letting go as an ongoing thing that we do all along the path. Maybe there’s literal giving, but there’s also giving up of the hindrances, sitting in meditation, being willing to train the mind. What do we have to give up in order to practice the path? And eventually, letting go of deep views that we carry about how things work, understandings about ourselves. Those are all letting go of various kinds. So I think it’s not just accidental that giving is first, and it’s not just literal, like the Buddha is trying to get more donations or something. It’s a quality of mind and heart that’s going to serve all along the path.
Then he talks about virtue, sīla5, also very commonly near the beginning of lists. In this case, he means that the mind has to be well-directed. At the most basic form for laypeople, virtue is the keeping of the five foundational precepts, which are common to many spiritual traditions and religions the world over: not killing, not stealing, not sexual misconduct, and not lying. Those are quite basic. And then the fifth for laypeople in this tradition is non-intoxication of mind and body. This is also foundational. People tend to frame it as, “I’m supposed to be a good person.” Sometimes in the West, we get confused with other religious ideas that talk about what will happen to you after you die based on your behavior here. That’s true in the realm of rebirth also, but in a more immediately practical sense, virtue is the basis for sound meditation. You can’t really easily get the mind settled and concentrated and directed toward insight if there’s a lot of churning around in the system because we haven’t been behaving in line with wholesome qualities. Virtue feels good. When we actually touch into the experience of wholesomeness, it feels so good to know that we’ve acted in line with these virtuous qualities.
Then we have talk on the heavens. Where did that come from? This is about the deva6 realms. In this case, I think what’s being pointed to is not so much a belief or an idea about what’s going to happen to this person after they die. In the Buddhist cosmology, the deva realms are occupied by beings who have cultivated a lot of good qualities in their life. You can be reborn in heaven by being a good person and also by cultivating concentration and other meditative qualities. The heavens are a lot better than the human realm in terms of how they feel. You don’t have as much bodily pain, you exist for a very long time, and things are generally tranquil and easier to be with. It’s something that would have been appealing. He’s painting a bigger picture of there being a whole cosmos and a lot of potential through goodness and virtue to experience much better living conditions.
Then we get to the fourth topic: he explained the danger, degradation, and defilement in sensual pleasures. Yeah, right, this is classic Buddhism. [Laughter] Then we get to the downer part about the sense pleasures. Essentially, if we’re wrapped up in sensual pleasures of various kinds, we’re not really able to access these higher states of mind. We know that the first of the five hindrances that prevent wisdom and concentration on the cushion is sensual desire, which means sitting there on the cushion and fantasizing about what you’re going to have for lunch or imagining your trip to Hawaii. The Buddha reminds the person that this is a limited way of living compared to dāna, sīla, and the potential for these higher mind states.
Then he goes on to the blessing of renunciation. The word renunciation is always problematic, but I think we should revive this word a little bit and have a different understanding of it. Renunciation is offered as the escape from being enslaved to our senses, to our smaller internal drives for food and sex and things like that. Renunciation is the wisdom to choose how to do those things wisely. Obviously, we’re still going to eat, and as laypeople, we’re going to reproduce, and it’s fine to have a vacation. But renunciation includes the wisdom of being able to say when it’s the right time for each of those things. Sometimes renunciation is associated with leaving the household life and ordaining as a monastic, but I don’t think that’s what’s meant in this graduated discourse because it’s given to a layperson, and in general, they don’t ordain afterward. It just means that this is an alternative, having enough wisdom to be able to say no to the more animal side. The blessing of renunciation is meant to have two sides: one is that you get the blessing of not being enslaved to sensual pleasures, and the other is that you gain a bunch of space in your life to have more good things come in.
The person is poised, and the text says, “When he knew that this householder’s mind was ready, receptive, free from hindrances, elated, and confident,” then he teaches them the Four Noble Truths: dukkha, its origin, cessation, and the path. Here, I think he points quite deeply. He’s not just talking anymore about ordinary sense pleasures; he’s talking about all kinds of stress and suffering and difficulty and unsatisfactoriness that there is in life. It’s hard to be a human. The Buddha points out that there is an underlying drive in us that’s kind of fueling all this activity, and unless we see that that drive can be released, there will be no end to the ongoing struggle. But there is a way to end that push underneath, which is the craving—the craving to get more, do more, be more, be different. When we see the root underneath all of that frenetic activity, he says it’s possible to release that. The person gets a glimpse of, “Ah, that would be great.” And then he tells them there’s a path to do that.
During this, the person gets it. We now move on to the result of this teaching. I’ll read again the text, and it’s always the same:
Just as a clean cloth with all marks removed would take dye evenly, so too, while the householder Upāli sat there, the spotless, immaculate vision of the Dhamma arose in him: “All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation.”
That’s interesting in and of itself.
Then the householder Upāli saw the Dhamma, attained the Dhamma, understood the Dhamma, fathomed the Dhamma. He crossed beyond doubt, did away with perplexity, gained intrepidity, and became independent of others in the Teacher’s dispensation.
Wow. So that’s the stock phrase around this attainment of stream-entry in the case of the graduated discourse. The spotless, immaculate vision of the Dhamma—it could also be said “dustless” or “stainless.” This vision of the Dhamma, or sometimes “eye of the Dhamma,” arises. The insight is: “All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation.” Or, we could also say, based on the Pali, “Anything that is of the nature to arise is of the nature to cease.”
The realization is impermanence. We may not immediately perceive this conclusion as following logically from what came before. I’m going to say that’s explained because it’s an insight, it’s not a logical deduction. It’s not something that was all explained in a certain way and the person says, “Oh, I get it.” It’s more like an insight. The person listens to this whole thing, and their mind shifts in a certain way such that they have this understanding of impermanence. But I would say it is in line with the flow of the graduated discourse, which points the person toward higher potentials: first, the ordinary higher potentials that come from giving, from virtue, from letting go of sense pleasures, and then the potential for really letting go of a whole concept of what it is that we’re doing in life. That is the little turn, or the big turn, that comes in the mind with stream-entry: to understand it’s not actually about me. There isn’t an eternal soul. There’s a process going on that isn’t about that.
Typically, after the person has this realization, they do something reverential, like offer a meal to the Buddha or say some inspired verses. Sometimes people take refuge after the graduated discourse.
So there it is. That’s the graduated discourse and how it unfolds. The person wakes up, essentially. They’re not fully awakened, but their life has been irrevocably changed by understanding what the Buddha was explaining about the Four Noble Truths.
(Audience member): Is it that compacted? Because it seems like, for example, the Buddha could say quite a bit about the danger, degradation, and defilement of sense pleasures to kind of really help the person get it.
That’s a good point. There are whole suttas where he lists long lists of disadvantages of engaging in the pursuit of sense pleasures. Like I said, I don’t really know how long this discourse was. The implication doesn’t seem to be that it was hours and hours long. So my guess is, maybe he chose—this is now my interpretation—maybe he knew the person enough or could look into their mind and chose particular examples that would be meaningful for them. And he pointed them through a couple of examples toward understanding that. Remember that their mind was very faithful and very poised toward wanting to hear this teaching. So yeah, I would guess that he summarized it in some compact way.
(Audience member): Would you mind naming another one of those suttas where it’s unpacked? I’d love to go read the expanded version.
I think Majjhima Nikāya7 13 has quite a bit, and then there’s also one, I don’t remember the exact number, somewhere in the 60s that has quite a lot also. Both of them are referenced in my book, Unentangled, there’s a section on the dangers of sense pleasure, and both of those are talked about there.
(Audience member): You mentioned the preliminary conditions being first, and then when it comes to the topics, did it seem like it was a preliminary condition for a person to understand one topic before the Buddha would continue on to the other topic? Was it sort of step-by-step in that way too?
It doesn’t say that. It just says, “talk on giving, talk on virtue,” etc. So maybe he was—this is again speculation—maybe he was watching the person to see that they were understanding, and then he would move on. You know, the way if you were explaining to somebody how to do a long process, you might not necessarily ask, “Did you get that? Okay, let’s go on to step two,” but you would explain step one, and if they nod and look like they get it, you go on to the next one. That would be my guess.
I thought I would say a little bit now about focusing on one of these stories. Last time we had the story of Moggallāna, who was one of the people receiving the Dhamma in brief, and so I thought we’d look at Upāli8 in this case, just to add a human face onto this.
There were at least two Upālis in the suttas, by the way. This one was a Brahmin layperson who was wealthy and well-known in the community. He was a prominent follower of a person named Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta9, whose name was also Mahavira, and that’s the leader of the Jains10.
Another follower of Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta had a debate with the Buddha about whether bodily, verbal, or mental action is the most powerful, especially in the case of unwholesome action. The Jain person says it is bodily action that’s the worst. We might agree with that on the surface; it’s probably worse to actually kill somebody than to imagine doing it. But interestingly, in this particular debate, the Buddha asserts that mental action is actually the most consequential.
The follower of Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta goes back to him and reports all of this to an assembly where Upāli is also there. They all say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous.” And so Upāli says, “I’m going to go debate the Buddha on this.” The first guy who went said, “I don’t think you should go because the Buddha’s really good in debate and he tends to have some kind of magical power to convert people.” But Upāli decides to go.
He goes and makes the same assertion: “The Jain leader says that bodily action is the most defiled, not mental action.” Then the Buddha gives Upāli a series of similes through which he makes the case that mental action actually is more powerful, either because it has to be there to precede bodily action and hence is the real force behind it, or he also gives the example of how supernormal mental powers can do much more than limited bodily action can.
At the end of several such similes—Upāli keeps saying, “I don’t believe it”—the Buddha gives him another one, and then another one. At the end of several of these, Upāli backs off and says that actually, he was convinced after the very first simile that the Buddha was right, but he kept it up because he wanted to hear more.
Then he takes refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. The Buddha says to him, “Be careful. You should investigate more carefully before you change your alliance. You’ve just declared that you’re taking refuge in me, and you’re a follower of the Jains. You should be careful because you’re a prominent person and it will have public ramifications if you change this allegiance.”
Upāli is delighted and says, “Wow, other teachers would have been eager for the fame, and you instead ask me to be careful about changing my allegiance. I feel even more devoted to you.” He takes refuge a second time. The Buddha says, “Well, okay, but just so you know, you should probably still give alms to the Jains if they come to your house. You’ve been supporting them before; you should not cut off that support even if you change your allegiance.”
This even further delights Upāli, who says, “Other spiritual teachers would say to only support them, and here you say I’m supposed to still support the Jains even though I’ve become your follower.” So he feels even more devoted and he takes refuge a third time. That’s a very strong expression in Buddhist understanding. Whenever you say something three times, that means you really mean it.
With all of that as the setup, the Buddha gives the graduated discourse, and Upāli awakens, has the first stage of awakening. I said earlier that this is followed then by some kind of an expression of gratitude, like offering a meal. That does happen, but rather hilariously, the first thing Upāli says after waking up is, “I’m very busy, I have to leave. I have a lot of things to attend to.” And the Buddha says, “Okay, go at your convenience.” So Upāli rushes off to do his important things as an important person, but then later he invites the Buddha to come for a meal and gives a kind of a long eulogy about his conversion.
We can see now that this form of teaching is quite different from the one that we looked at last week. Although this is a literal brief teaching on the Dhamma, it’s not at all a condensed form of practice instructions as the other ones were. It’s a very different idea. It’s intended more as something that takes a person out of their usual way of seeing things. They’re buoyed up by confidence when they arrive, and then the person kind of follows the Buddha along a mental trajectory toward getting a whole different understanding of what they’re doing in their life.
This shift at stream-entry is when a person acquires what is called Right View or Right Understanding. I don’t know that those words are very sufficient, though, because it’s not something logical. It’s not just a better view that could be explained. It’s a shift such that we don’t see suffering in the same way as we did before. We have a much clearer understanding of how it can cease.
The teaching on the Four Noble Truths, when it penetrates, gives a person that glimpse. Then you have a different reference point of actually having seen it end, and the mind goes on in a different way. It’s not the same as full awakening. To get that, you have to do those specialized practices with subjects like the aggregates or the sense spheres. It’s a yet deeper penetration of how all of this is working.
So there’s the gradual versus sudden that I touched on last time. I think one of the best resolutions of that I’ve heard is that it’s gradual until it’s sudden. There’s preparation and the arising of certain wholesome qualities in someone’s mind, and then there’s the leading of the mind from something familiar into new territory like the Four Noble Truths, and then there can be some kind of a shift.
Next time, we should talk a little bit more about this quality of faith or confidence because it might not be exactly what we think. And then we’ll talk about an example of a path that starts with faith and ends with transformation that was given to both monastics and laypeople.
Saṅkhāra: A Pali term for “formations,” “volitional activities,” or “mental fabrications.” It is the fourth of the five aggregates (khandhas) and refers to the conditioned responses and mental imprints that shape our experience. ↩
Anupubba-kathā: The Pali term for the “graduated discourse” or “progressive instruction” that the Buddha often gave to laypeople who were ready for a deeper teaching. ↩
Dukkha: A core concept in Buddhism, often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “unease,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the inherent stress and discontent in conditioned existence. ↩
Dāna: The Pali word for “giving,” “generosity,” or “liberality.” It is considered a foundational virtue in Buddhism, essential for developing wholesome qualities of mind. ↩
Sīla: The Pali term for “virtue,” “morality,” or “ethical conduct.” It forms the foundation of the Buddhist path and typically includes the five precepts for lay followers. ↩
Deva: A Pali term for a “heavenly being” or “deity.” In Buddhist cosmology, devas inhabit realms of great pleasure and long life as a result of their past good karma, but they are still subject to rebirth. ↩
Majjhima Nikāya: The “Middle-length Discourses,” which is the second of the five major collections (nikāyas) in the Sutta Piṭaka of the Pali Canon. ↩
Upāli: A prominent and wealthy householder who was initially a devoted follower of the Jain leader, Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta. After a debate with the Buddha, he converted and became an important lay disciple, eventually attaining stream-entry. ↩
Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta: The name used in Buddhist scriptures to refer to Mahavira, the 24th and final Tirthankara (spiritual teacher) of Jainism and a contemporary of the Buddha. ↩
Jains: Followers of Jainism, an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings. ↩