This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Dhamma in Brief: The Path in Brief (Class 3 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.
So this is the third class on the Dhamma1 in brief. I’ve been reflecting on that title. I’ve been told by some Dhamma students that Dhamma teachings can be a little bit daunting at first because there are so many lists. It’s like, “Do I have to memorize all of these things? How does it all fit together?” Trying to understand the structure of the Dhamma is not automatic, not really easy right away. So maybe it’s appealing to hear that the Dhamma can be encapsulated into pithy little teachings that contain the essence of the fullness of the Dhamma. In this class, we’re looking at some of those encapsulations which, as we’ve seen, come in different forms.
As an adjunct to that, we’re looking at the conditions that have to be in place for a person to receive a brief Dhamma teaching and really take it in or really benefit from it. So there are both sides of it, right? It isn’t just the teacher or even just the Dhamma that’s automatically magical in some way. It depends on us too, having the right conditions that we’ve created or cultivated, or somehow been graced by in some way.
We started with the suttas2 where the Buddha is literally asked to teach the Dhamma in brief, and that phrase is used. That was my inspiration for finding these encapsulations. This was so that someone can go on retreat. They asked the Buddha for this brief teaching, which is something that monastics ask him since they’re considered to be the ones who would be going on retreat. We saw that the main topics that he chooses in these 44 suttas are usually things that center around some kind of subtle aspect of experience—aggregates or the sense bases usually—and then something that we need to look at with wisdom in a particular way. So we’re generally looking for the three characteristics of inconstancy, uncontrollability, and unsatisfactoriness in these things.
Then that led to looking at a special discourse that encapsulates the change in view that a person undergoes to get a glimpse of the Four Noble Truths. That was the graduated discourse that we talked about in the second class, and that’s given to a layperson whose mind is kind of poised for understanding. The words that were used around that were that the person is ready, receptive, free from hindrances, elated, and confident. I love that set; it’s very inspiring somehow. I offered some reflections last time about if and how we recognize these qualities in our own mind. Is it something that we can be aware of?
So let’s pause after that kind of recap and ask if there are any questions on any of this or anything that came up in the last week if you did those reflections. I just want to make some space.
Alright, so we’ll move on. In both of the cases that we’ve looked at so far, we have a notion that the person is ready in some way. They’re at a key moment for their mind. So either they’re planning to go off on retreat and they’re inspired and they’re ready to go—some of you know the feeling of the night before going on retreat and that it has a certain anticipation to it—or that the person is very inspired by the Buddha or the Dhamma at that moment, and so they’re receptive.
I think we can return at this point then to the idea from the first class where we talked about the gradual or sudden methods of the path. There’s a distinction between different Buddhist schools that have different ideas about whether our heart or our mind will open in a gradual, step-by-step way, or whether there will be a sudden, powerful moment that changes everything. One of the best resolutions I have heard of this gradual versus sudden debate is that Awakening is gradual until it’s sudden. I think it’s pretty good. There’s a Zen saying where somebody asks, “How long will it take?” and the teacher says, “It will take 30 years or a microsecond.” So there’s again this notion that you do something for years or a long time, and that sets you up for something that can be a brief insight. I mean, we do call this the Insight tradition, right? So there’s a notion that we’re going to have sudden glimpses of things, but there’s a lot of prep to get to that point.
The early Buddhist teachings, as I said, generally favor the gradual idea. In the suttas, the Buddha lays out a broad series of stages through which a practitioner would pass as they first encounter the Dhamma, then practice it, and then finally have some kind of realization. He actually does that in more than one way in different places. So what we’ll do tonight is talk about one of these ways where he actually lays out the entire path. I picked it because it begins with faith or confidence, that quality that was so important last session in the graduated discourse, and then it proceeds through a series of steps to finally arrive at the end at a sudden realization. I also like that it was taught to both laypeople and monastics, so we can maybe get rid of this artificial distinction we’ve been making over the last couple of sessions, where it sounds like some teachings are just for monastics and some just for laypeople. It’s not the case in his descriptions of the path; we’re all walking the same path, just in different forms.
For those who like to look up suttas, I’m going to use the one that was in Majjhima Nikāya 953 tonight, but you don’t have to know that to listen. What I’m going to do is first read this sequence that starts with the faith part and goes up to the Awakening part. Then I’ll show them on a slide and we can talk through them in a little bit more detail. There are actually 12 steps, so I’ll just read them first of all so you can kind of feel how it is to go through those.
We have:
How about that? It’s not a highly taught sequence, but it does appear in at least two places. The context in this teaching is that a Brahman4 is questioning the Buddha about how a person can discover the truth. There are some details about what is meant by truth and how one would know and things like that. This sequence of 12 steps appears about three-quarters of the way through the sutta, and the Buddha encapsulates it as saying, “In this way…” So after he gets through number 12, he says, “In this way, there is the discovery of Truth.” So we discover it through this realizing with the body and penetrating with wisdom.
I think it’s interesting also because as a teacher, I like to teach about experience in the body. I’m not keen on only focusing on the mind, even though it’s the mind that becomes liberated. So I like that it includes that as an equal part.
Let me show this sequence and give a summary. We start by investigating the teacher with some discernment, checking if they’re displaying any unwholesome qualities. I’ll say a little bit more about that in a moment. Then this helps us to gain trust in the teacher, which is enacted through visiting and paying respect. That puts the mind into a state where it can receive the Dhamma in some way. We talked about that before, that having this faith or confidence or trust is useful. But even then, we have to examine what has been taught by taking it in deeply. Here that includes memorizing it but also reflecting on it so that we make sure that it makes sense to us. I like to think that this reflective confirmation is both rational and emotional. It’s not that we’re just figuring it out with our rational mind, but also just checking if it feels right, if it has some inspiration to it.
Then we go on from there to decide that we accept it, and then zeal springs up and there’s a practicing of it. I’ll say more about these later steps in a moment when I unfold them, but eventually, there’s some kind of practice and then this realization.
A couple of things to note about it is that it’s a sketch, it’s not a formula. We don’t have to start with number one and then do each one in exact sequence and finish with one before we do the next. I think it’s very possible that one disciple could linger on one of the early steps for a while. Some people spend a lot of time in this area, and eventually, it takes a long time to gain the reflective acceptance, this first half of it, and then they go on. Somebody else might zip through all the first stages but then linger later, something like that. I also don’t think it’s just linear from 1 to 12. Probably we go through 1 through 12 and then back somewhere and then up again and up again. I think we go through several rounds of this; it’s not really meant to be just only linear.
Another thing to note in general is that the general movement is from something that’s a little bit abstract, like learning and listening and reflection—something that’s a little bit cognitive—up toward something that is much more about direct experience. So scrutinizing means looking really in the moment at what’s happening. To give an example of that, we could consider something like the First Noble Truth, which many people have heard in Buddhism, that it’s about dukkha.5 It’s about there being some kind of suffering or unsatisfactoriness or stress in life. We could say that kind of abstractly, “There is dukkha.” That’s one of the expressions of the First Noble Truth—not “life is dukkha,” by the way, that’s not a helpful encapsulation—but it is fair enough to say “there is dukkha” as an idea. But more directly, we could know, “This is dukkha.” The Pali is the same; there’s no difference between “there is” and “this is.” One is a concept and one is an experience, like, “Oh, this, actually this that I’m experiencing is stressful or has grasping in it or something.”
So there’s a general movement toward getting more and more direct, and that’s important to realize as we’re practicing. All of these teachings are pointing so that we can see the Dhamma happening right now in our own mind and body. The understanding in Buddhist teachings is that it’s going to take meditation to really do that deeply.
This is quite lovely. I really like this sequence, and maybe you can see it in yourself in various ways. I want to talk in more detail about some of the steps, starting with this investigation.
Majjhima Nikāya 95, the one I mentioned, includes instructions on how to decide if a teacher is worthy of one’s trust. How about that? I thought I’d read it because it’s kind of nice. It says a householder goes to a teacher and investigates in regard to three kinds of states: in regard to states based on greed, based on hate, and based on delusion. The person asks in their mind, “Are there in this venerable one any states based on greed such that with his mind obsessed by those states, while not knowing he might say ‘I know,’ or while not seeing he might say ‘I see,’ or he might urge others to act in a way that would lead to their harm and suffering for a long time?”
That’s the question to ask: are there any states based on greed that would lead a person to do these things? Then it says, “Through investigation, he comes to know: no, there are no such states in this person. The bodily behavior and the verbal behavior are not those of one affected by greed. And the Dhamma that this venerable one teaches is profound, hard to see, and hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise. This Dhamma cannot easily be taught by one affected by greed.”
How about that? It’s pretty interesting criteria, right? And then it says the same thing for hatred and for delusion. So you check if the person seems to act in ways—and you can’t check what’s going on in their mind, right?—but you check their bodily behavior and their verbal behavior. Are they going to lie about what they know or understand? Are they going to urge people to do things that are harmful? Eventually, you realize no. And then also, is the Dhamma that they’re teaching profound in some way? You get the sense that there’s real depth and meaning in what they’re offering.
There’s also, not in this text but another text, that says that if we want to check if somebody is reliable, we need to do so over a long time, not a short time. And we need to do it with a discerning mind and not a distracted mind. So we’re supposed to watch them carefully for a while in regard to all these qualities.
We might say, “Okay, that seems reasonable enough about deciding whether or not we trust people.” But I would just like to step back and say, that’s not bad. How many religions say something like that in their text? “Here’s how you check out whether or not your religious leaders are worth trusting.” So my trust increased when I read that sutta. I said, “Yeah, okay, if they’re willing to hold that up for scrutiny.”
So then after you’ve done that investigation, there’s this matter of trusting or placing faith or confidence. You can choose whichever word works for you. The Pali word is saddhā,6 and it’s a little bit complex. It includes different dimensions, and that’s why it’s hard to translate it as one word. I mentioned this last time we were talking about the graduated discourse and how important this was. I said I don’t think we talk enough about all the different dimensions of this. Maybe we’ll do this next week. So here we are.
Let’s talk a little bit about this quality of saddhā and what it means, because sometimes we can have a funny relationship to a word that means something like “faith.” We might have associations from some earlier religious experience we had, or it may have associations like we don’t want that; we prefer something that’s more philosophical or more rational or something. Either way, the word might have some negative connotations.
I want to point out that in Buddhist understanding, this word has three different dimensions to it: cognitive, devotional, and motivational. So it’s not blind faith at all.
In the cognitive dimension, it comes down to, “This makes sense.” It’s something that we can place our confidence in. I see this all the time in modern people who read neuroscientific research as a way to convince them of the value of meditation. That is developing confidence, is developing saddhā. “Why should I meditate?” “Well, this study says that people who do that have an elevation of certain kinds of hormones or neurotransmitters that are associated with good feeling,” something like that. Or they’ve been shown to say after six months that they have less stress in their job. The only thing that they changed was sitting for 30 minutes in the morning. And so then people become convinced. There you go, that’s placing faith.
In the suttas, there wasn’t neuroscientific research, of course, but often there are examples where something about the Buddha’s intelligence convinces people that they will decide to listen to his teachings—the ability to explain things well or to do well in debates. We saw that last time in the graduated discourse. A number of the Brahmans saw the 32 marks on him, which they considered to be important, or they listened to him debating somebody and realized, “Oh yeah, that guy’s got something.” It’s kind of similar in the modern world of taking the word of people you respect.
This cognitive dimension can also include being willing to give credence to things that we don’t experientially know yet, based on having some prior experience. You know, we meditate for a while and we decide, “Yes, meditation does make me calmer, more peaceful, and more able to not be as reactive emotionally,” for example. We see that in ourselves. And then we read the suttas and they say, “Oh, there are states of absorption,” you know, where the mind can become so absorbed in an object that it loses all sense of its surroundings and it gains a state called jhāna7 that’s very, very pleasant. And you think, “Well, I haven’t experienced that, but I think I’ll believe that that’s possible because the suttas also say that meditation leads to tranquility and calmness and non-reactivity, and I’ve experienced that. So maybe I’ll extend a little bit farther out.” So that too is a form of cognitive faith.
Then there’s also a devotional or emotional side. This has to do with how something makes us feel. We can have devotional faith in a person or in the way a certain person or text opens us up to experience. I had an interesting experience one time being on retreat at the Forest Refuge, which is a place where you can be on retreat for a long time and the teachers change every month. I was there, and partway through, Joseph Goldstein8 was on the new teaching team for that month. He’s somebody that I respect quite a lot. I was sitting there calmly meditating, and he came into the hall for the first time that he was going to sit with us. I was already sitting, and I sort of peeked my eyes open because I heard somebody come in, and I saw him. It was so interesting. Totally unexpectedly, I straightened up in my seat, and something in my mind kind of opened, and I felt this delight from seeing him. I was partly excited that he was going to be there for the next month, but I recognized it right away. I was like, “Oh, this is the feeling of saddhā.” There is a literal uprightness to the body when we have an experience of faith. It wasn’t literally about him—I don’t know him that well as a person—but it was about the fact that he represents really good Dhamma teachings to me. So I had this kind of inner response to seeing him, an interesting bodily and emotional feeling. We experience it as some kind of reverence or maybe a heartfelt connection to something bigger than ourselves.
And then the third dimension is the motivational aspect. One is moved to act in some way. We already saw in the teachings last week that people decide to take refuge. In the modern world, when people become inspired by the Dhamma, they decide to go on a retreat. How do you decide to go on your first meditation retreat? There’s got to be some kind of inspiration there, some kind of confidence or sense that that will be important. Or simpler things, like deciding to meditate every day. That takes some time and some effort, so that comes from the motivational form of confidence.
You can see that each of these aspects covers a range, and I think it also increases in depth over the course of practice. I don’t know that these three dimensions can be so clearly separated, but they’re just different aspects of how this mental factor of saddhā can operate in the mind. I hope that fills out some more dimensions of this important quality that can be misunderstood.
After we have the faith, we go and hear the Dhamma. The next steps after that are to memorize and examine the meaning of the teachings that we’ve received. I don’t know how many of you here have actually memorized teachings. It’s interesting because we don’t do that so much today; we don’t really have a tradition of that. But there was a big tradition of that in ancient India, and I’ve actually found that it really helps in the cases where I’ve done some memorization.
In fact, I have a story about that. I was taking some sutta classes early on in my practice, and the teacher would require that we memorize something from that week’s readings. She would sometimes call on people at the beginning of class and say, “What did you memorize?” It was the easiest assignment because we could memorize just one phrase if we wanted. One time, we were reading a sermon called the Fire Sermon, which is the Buddha’s third discourse, and it’s very formulaic. I liked it, so I memorized the first part of it. I recited that part, and the teacher said, “Oh, that’s lovely. Why don’t you keep going?” And I said, “Well, I can’t.” And she said, “Well, just keep going.” And I realized, “Oh, I do actually remember the next phrase.” And so I said that one, and then I realized it’s a cut and paste after that, so I should be able to fill in the rest. In the end, I spit out the entire Fire Sermon with a little bit of prompting. That’s when I really understood that this cut-and-paste way, that there are stock phrases in the suttas, was for memorization. In my mind, I could just memorize maybe four or five different stock phrases, and then I could plug them in, substituting the different things that go through the six sense bases. I could substitute eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, and it was always the same. It was really great, actually. It gave kind of a nice feeling in the body and the mind to go through an entire sutta that way. So if you’re inclined, you might try memorizing. It’s very interesting.
That leads to really learning the structure of the teachings. At some point in their practice, people often get to a sense like, “Oh, I want to go back and discover the source of all those quotes I keep hearing in Dhamma talks.” And then the whole world opens through starting to learn the structure of the teachings. It does something to our mind to have this repetition and this sense of structure.
After that, in this sequence of 12, we get to this section about the zeal and the will and the striving. I found it interesting that this particular version includes a strong role given to willful effort, which we tend to de-emphasize for Westerners who get a little over-striving sometimes. But I take it to mean that we’re motivated to really give ourselves over to the practice. Scrutinizing is to really look carefully at experience. Striving doesn’t necessarily mean anymore than the will, but kind of really giving ourselves over, maybe going on a long retreat, maybe daring to go deeper than we have before. There’s a way the practice can become habitual. We just do the same thing every day. We sit down, we know what the mind feels like, we go through this and that, and then eventually the bell rings. But there can be little openings that appear sometimes, and it could be interesting to be like, “Oh, I’m going to take that one. I wonder where that goes.” The mind starts feeling different. Instead of saying, “Oh, well, I don’t know what that is,” say, “Oh, go ahead, let it feel different. Wow, what would happen if I did that?” So really starting to allow the mind to move into different territory is what I see as represented in these last steps about the scrutinizing and the striving.
Then there’s this penetration of the truth. It’s understood that wisdom is generally the quality that will help the mind to go over the edge, if you will. It’s not us per se; it’s wisdom that comes in and does that. That’s what it’s pointing to here: a penetration of what we couldn’t see through before, a revealing of what was behind a wall before. And then somehow the mind pushes through that and can see something very different.
Question: I just got super curious by that phrase, “the Supreme Truth.” Can you tell us what that is? What’s meant by that?
Kim Allen: The grandiose language is a little bit unusual in this sutta. The general topic of the sutta is what religious truth is and how we can know it, and maybe how it differs for Brahmans in the Buddhist time compared to people who were meditators, because most of the Brahmans didn’t meditate at that time. The Supreme Truth, I’m guessing, is pointing to a glimpse of Nibbāna,9 what the mind is when it doesn’t have any greed, hate, or delusion clouding it over. It’s interesting that it says that can be a bodily experience and also something that wisdom is needed to really see clearly. That gives us some clues about it. But I don’t think it means—in fact, in the sutta, it makes it clear that it doesn’t mean that the person has awakened completely. They don’t just go through 1 through 12 and that’s it. That would be becoming an Arahant. It says this is a discovery of truth. And then the Brahman who was questioning the Buddha says, “Well, is that it? Are you done at that point?” And the Buddha says, “No, actually, I do not say that this is the final attainment. That comes through more practice.” But we can have this penetration and quick glimpse of it, and that gives us the first round of it. But then I think we have to go back and do more scrutinizing and understanding and hearing of the Dhamma and all that.
Question: This part where there’s a scrutinizing and then the striving… I kind of get an impression that through the scrutinizing, there is some sort of a beginning of seeing a direction to go. Because just striving is like putting my car in gear and really pushing on the gas and just spinning the wheels. There’s got to be a direction.
Kim Allen: I think that’s perceptive. I think there’s a reason why “scrutinize” comes first. Scrutinize would be the application of some kind of intelligence or wisdom in order to understand which direction to strive in. So yeah, I think that’s right. And remember, before that, there was all this stuff about learning the Dhamma, hearing it, becoming convinced of it, and then this zeal springs up. That’s very emotional; we want to go and practice it. But the scrutinizing then comes next, right? To make sure that we’re doing it in a wise way.
Follow-up: I often have some sort of an insight, and sometimes it may even be a year later and I am still uncovering layers of it, one insight leading to the next. At each point, there’s some little thing that I’m seeing that is sort of pointing me to the next thing, and that becomes something that drives me because I’m quite curious about it. So maybe it’s that kind of a striving.
Kim Allen: I think so. From what you said, it sounds reasonable. There’s a sense of “onward leading” is what I heard in what you said. It’s fine to use the language of “I follow this, I find it interesting,” etc. But eventually, there’s kind of a sense of unfolding and not so much that “I” need to really do the next thing.
Question: I’m wondering if you could say a little bit more about what you think is meant by “realizes with the body.”
Kim Allen: Interesting, isn’t it? “Realize” is an interesting, and I think a good, translation in that in English, the word “realize” has different facets to it. We understand that “realize” can be something in our understanding, like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that such and such is true,” and now we understand it. But “realize” can also mean to make real, you know, to make manifest in some way. So I think there’s an implication that something in the body shifts in some way, and we actually can then embody what is seen or embody this truth in some way. That can take a little longer to unfold, but when the mind has a different understanding, it actually changes the way we manifest that in the world. Does that make sense? It may also imply that there’s an actual bodily sensation of some kind in some of these cases. Not every teacher will say that; some teachers will say that the body is gone or is not involved. So it’s interesting just to see what different suttas say.
I want to show how we look at the development of wisdom because in the last step, we have “penetrating it with wisdom.” It happens that there are three kinds of wisdom defined in the Buddhist teachings, and I noticed that the three kinds of wisdom map onto these 12 steps.
Sutamaya Paññā:10 This is the wisdom of learning or hearing or listening. That comes, I think, from this first sequence where the person decides that they trust somebody, they visit them, they listen, and they hear the Dhamma. That’s all wisdom that we get through learning or hearing. Like what we’re doing here, if you’re receiving new information through this talk, then that’s the wisdom of learning. It is a kind of wisdom; you’re rearranging how you understand things, but it is at a conceptual level.
Cintāmaya Paññā: This is the wisdom of reflecting, which I think is encapsulated in numbers six and seven: memorizing it, examining the meaning, and gaining reflective acceptance. That has to do with not only have we heard something, but then we really think about, “Oh, how does that apply in my experience? Have I placed faith in a teacher? Have I heard the Dhamma carefully? In what ways have I practiced?” We sort of map ourselves onto it or map it onto our lives, and we take it in a little bit more deeply and understand how it applies to us.
Bhāvanāmaya Paññā: This is the wisdom that comes from meditation, and this is actual experiential wisdom. This is wisdom that is only gained through practice. It’s not something that you could just know through thinking about it or reflecting on it in some way. I want to hark back to when I was reading that passage about investigating the teacher. The part at the end about the person’s Dhamma being profound, one of the phrases that was said about it, besides “hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful and sublime,” was “unattainable by mere reasoning.” So there’s an understanding that there’s a kind of wisdom that can come only through practice. This is this last section that leads us toward realizing and penetrating in some way.
I thought this was a nice overlap, that this sequence of 12 lines up nicely with the three kinds of wisdom that are defined.
(After breakout groups)
I’m curious if anybody would like to share any of your reflections or any of the wisdom that might have come up in the group. I’m curious where people have been placing their emphasis and what feels alive.
Participant 1: When I came into practice from mindfulness, it was the Dhamma. It was listening to the Dhamma talks. So I think that’s primarily where I focused for a long time. But as my practice has progressed and there’s been some insights, I see that aspect of the prescriptive and the descriptive in the suttas, and it takes me back because I know that the answer is there. So I rely on that a lot for guidance, and I’m starting to put much more focus on the meditation side. But I’m drawn to sutta study, to something far more structured rather than my haphazard approach. So that’s a new wholesome desire.
Kim Allen: That’s nice. I hear a lot of balance and integration in your approach over this time. It’s a good demonstration of how each of these things kind of reinforces the other. It can sound like there’s a progression, like you start with the not-very-useful stuff of listening and then it goes deeper and deeper. There are always the folks who say, “Well, I’m just going to skip all the early stuff and get to the deep end.” But actually, I find that they’re very reinforcing, the way you said. If we do some practice, we want to go back and hear more and then reflect more, and there’s a way in which they mutually deepen each other.
Participant 1: I did find, it took me a while, but I found how easy it is to get caught in that loop of the learning. Quickly it switches over in my mind to the very subtle sense desire for playing with ideas. And you know, story time, who doesn’t love a good story?
Kim Allen: Yeah, sixth sense door pleasure, as we call it.
Participant 2: When I went to my first retreat, I blurted out at the teacher when I had a one-to-one, “I’m afraid to be in my body.” And so learning became my endeavor, which was really exciting for me and brought me a lot of comfort and confidence to pursue. I feel like I’m in a reflective stage now. Like what I’m learning, I’m processing more personally now. In my group of four, we all had different approaches. Some people started with practice; I started with learning. It was a very interesting discussion.
Kim Allen: Yeah, we can realize that there isn’t just one way. Wonderful.
Participant 3: For myself, I know I started just with practice because I just needed peace of mind. I just needed a moment of peace, and that’s all that mattered. But as the peace began to settle me a little bit, then I had room for the learning. And it’s interesting because now I’m pretty well in balance and use all of them, and I see the sequence in them. But there are layers to how they’re used because, you know, the learning, I need the big picture, but then there are so many layers in all of that big picture. And as I practice, at least I know where to go back and dig for more learning if I need it, and bring that out and then reflect on it, and it comes into the practice. So they just really work together.
Returning then to this sequence, I think we can place the Dhamma in brief on this sequence also. We have some preparation through monastic training. Remember the Dhamma in brief, the first thing we talked about, is asked by a monastic. You can imagine that a person has done a lot of practice and listening, and they definitely have faith. And then at some point, zeal springs up and they say, “I’m going to go on retreat.” And so they request the Dhamma in brief, which is practice instructions. And then they do these practice steps, these last ones. And if you remember, many of the Dhamma in brief, not all of them, but many of them led to some kind of insight for the person. So, just tying back to the beginning and the theme of this class.
The class was called “The Dhamma in Brief,” but it was also called “Preparing the Mind for Transformation,” which I felt might have been a little grandiose at the time that I wrote it. But essentially, what we saw, I hope, through this series of different encapsulations of the Dhamma or the path into these sequences, is that there is something that we bring to the Dhamma. We do some preparation. We do some kind of preparing of our mind in some way. And it’s neither that we are in control, just adding up the hours. Ajahn Chah11 once said, “If sitting were all that it took, chickens would be enlightened.” So you know those apps that add up how many hours you’ve done? I know people who are just clocking in the hours because they’ve heard that 10,000 is some kind of a relevant point. And I have to say, maybe, but on the other hand, maybe what we’ve learned in this class is that there’s something that we bring also, besides the desire that goes with getting to 10,000 hours, that might be a hindrance along the way.
So we’re not really in complete control, but neither is it just some kind of outside magic that we have to kind of wait for and maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t. We have a role, but not control. And our role includes discernment in finding a good teacher. It includes learning the teachings and reflecting carefully on them to make sure that they make sense to us. And then practicing somehow in line with those teachings to the point that wisdom develops. And who knows how long all of that will take? Who knows whether or not we’re going to get stuck on one of those for a long time and then zip through all the others, or whether they’re all going to be kind of equal effort for us? That I don’t think we know completely, but that’s part of the fun and part of the adventure and part of the reflection. You know, how is this going?
I find these kinds of things inspiring and useful, and I hope you have also, in the course of learning about these different views of the Dhamma and how they’re described and how people met them such that there could be some change in their mind.
Are there any last thoughts or questions?
We’ve had the Dhamma in brief over three sessions. I hope it’s been useful. I would like to just take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the goodness of sharing the Dhamma in a group, learning together, reflecting together, meditating even if somewhat briefly together. May the study that we’ve done and the reflection and the practice take root more deeply in our heart and our mind for the benefit of us and all beings. And may there be some way that this practice goes forth and manifests, is made real through the body, in the way we are in the world, such that others too can benefit from our work here.
So may all beings be happy, may all beings be peaceful, and may all beings everywhere be free.
Thank you, everyone.
Dhamma (Pali); Dharma (Sanskrit): The teachings of the Buddha; the universal truth or law. ↩
Sutta (Pali); Sutra (Sanskrit): A discourse or scripture attributed to the Buddha or his disciples. ↩
Majjhima Nikāya 95: The 95th discourse in the “Middle-length Discourses,” a major collection of Buddhist scriptures in the Pali Canon. This sutta is known as the Cankī Sutta. ↩
Brahman: A member of the priestly or scholarly class in the ancient Indian caste system. ↩
Dukkha: A core concept in Buddhism, often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” “dissatisfaction,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unease inherent in conditioned existence. ↩
Saddhā: A Pali term for faith, confidence, or trust. In Buddhism, it is not blind faith but a conviction that arises from understanding and experience. ↩
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption or concentration, characterized by profound calm, stability, and bliss. ↩
Joseph Goldstein: A prominent American teacher of Insight (Vipassanā) meditation, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts. ↩
Nibbāna (Pali); Nirvana (Sanskrit): The ultimate goal of the Buddhist path, described as the cessation of suffering, the extinguishing of the “fires” of greed, hatred, and delusion. ↩
Paññā: The Pali word for wisdom, insight, or understanding. The three types—Sutamaya, Cintāmaya, and Bhāvanāmaya—represent wisdom gained from hearing, from reflection, and from direct meditative experience, respectively. ↩
Ajahn Chah: A highly influential Thai Buddhist monk and meditation master of the Thai Forest Tradition. He was known for his simple, direct, and profound teaching style. ↩