Progress along the supramundane path is marked by four major breakthroughs, each of which ushers the disciple through two subordinate phases called the path (magga) and its fruit (phala). The phase of path has the special function of eliminating a determinate number of defilements to which it is directly opposed, the mental impediments that hold us in bondage to the round of rebirths. When the work of the path has been completed, the disciple realises its corresponding fruit, the degree of liberation made accessible by that particular path. The canonical formula of homage to the Sangha refers obliquely to these four planes of liberation—each with its phase of path and fruit—when it extols the Blessed One’s community of noble disciples as comprising “the four pairs of persons, the eight types of individuals” (MN 7.7). These four pairs are obtained by taking, for each stage, the one who has entered upon the way to realisation of the fruit and the one who has attained the fruit.
In the suttas the Buddha highlights the specific characteristics of each supramundane stage in two ways: by mentioning the defilements that are abandoned on each plane and the consequences its attainment bears on the process of rebirth (see, e.g., MN 6.11–13, 19; MN 22.42–45, etc.). He handles the elimination of the defilements by classifying these into a tenfold group called the ten fetters (saṁyojana). The disciple enters upon the first supramundane path either as a Dhamma-follower (dhammānusārin) or as a faith-follower (saddhānusārin); the former is one in whom wisdom is the dominant faculty, the latter one who progresses by the impetus of faith. This path, the path of stream-entry, has the task of eradicating the grossest three fetters: identity view, i.e., the view of a self among the five aggregates; doubt in the Buddha and his teaching; and adherence to external rules and observances, either ritualistic or ascetic, in the belief that they can bring purification. When the disciple realises the fruit of this path he becomes a stream-enterer (sotāpanna), who has entered the “stream” of the Noble Eightfold Path that will carry him irreversibly to Nibbāna. The stream-enterer is bound to reach final liberation in a maximum of seven more births, which all occur either in the human world or in the heavenly realms.
The second supramundane path attenuates to a still greater degree the root defilements of lust, hatred, and delusion, though without yet eradicating them. On realising the fruit of this path the disciple becomes a once-returner (sakadāgāmin), who is due to return to this world (i.e., the sense-sphere realm) only one more time and then make an end of suffering. The third path eradicates the next two fetters, sensual desire and ill will; it issues in the fruit of the non-returner (anāgāmin), who is due to reappear by spontaneous birth in one of the special celestial realms called the Pure Abodes, and there attain final Nibbāna without ever returning from that world.
The fourth and last supramundane path is the path of arahantship. This path eradicates the five higher fetters: desire for rebirth in the fine-material realm and in the immaterial realm, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. By realisation of the fruit of this path the practitioner becomes an arahant, a fully liberated one, who “here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.” The arahant will be discussed further in the next section.
The commentaries (often referred to in the notes to this translation) develop an interpretation of the paths and fruits based upon the systemisation of the Buddha’s teachings known as the Abhidhamma. Drawing upon the Abhidhamma depiction of the mind as a sequence of discrete momentary acts of consciousness, called cittas, the commentaries understand each supramundane path to be a single occasion of consciousness arising at the climax of a series of insights into the Dhamma. Each of the four momentary path cittas eliminates its own fixed set of defilements, to be followed immediately by its fruition, which consists of a string of momentary cittas that enjoy the bliss of Nibbāna made accessible by the breakthrough of the path. Though this conception of the paths and fruits is regularly employed by the commentators as an hermeneutical tool for interpreting the suttas, it is not explicitly formulated as such in the old Nikāyas and at times there even appears to be a tension between the two (for example, in the passage at MN 142.5 describing the four persons on the path as distinct recipients of offerings).
THE ARAHANT
The ideal figure of the Majjhima Nikāya, as of the Pali Canon as a whole, is the arahant. The word “arahant” itself derives from a root meaning “to be worthy.” Ven. Ñāṇamoli renders it “accomplished” and “Accomplished One” when it is used as an epithet of the Buddha, probably to be consistent with his practice of translating all the Buddha’s epithets. In its other occurrences he leaves it untranslated. The word seems to have been of pre-Buddhist coinage but was taken over by the Buddha to designate the individual who has reached the final fruit of the path.
The suttas employ a stock description of the arahant that summarises his accomplishments: he is “one with taints destroyed, who has lived the holy life, done what had to be done, laid down the burden, reached his own goal, destroyed the fetters of being, and is completely liberated through final knowledge” (MN 1.51, etc.). Variant descriptions emphasise different aspects of the arahant’s attainment. Thus one sutta offers a series of metaphorical epithets that the Buddha himself interprets as representing the arahant’s abandoning of ignorance, craving, and conceit, his eradication of fetters, and his freedom from the round of births (MN 22.30–35). Elsewhere the Buddha ascribes a different set of epithets to the arahant—several of brahmanical currency—deriving these terms by imaginative etymology from the arahant’s elimination of all evil unwholesome states (MN 39.22–29).
The Majjhima records differences of type among the arahants, which are ascribed to the diversity in their faculties. In MN 70 the Buddha introduces a basic distinction between those arahants who are “liberated-in-both-ways” and those who are “liberated-by-wisdom”: whereas the former are capable of abiding in the immaterial attainments, the latter lack that capacity. Arahants are further distinguished as those who possess, besides the knowledge of the destruction of the taints necessary to all arahants, all three of the true knowledges and all six of the direct knowledges. In MN 108 the venerable Ānanda indicates that those arahants who possessed the six direct knowledges were accorded special veneration and authority in the Sangha following the Buddha’s passing away.
Beneath these incidental differences, however, all arahants alike share the same essential accomplishments—the destruction of all defilements and the freedom from future rebirths. They possess three unsurpassable qualities—unsurpassable vision, unsurpassable practice of the way, and unsurpassable deliverance (MN 35.26). They are endowed with the ten factors of one beyond training—the eight factors of the Noble Eightfold Path augmented by right knowledge and right deliverance (MN 65.34, MN 78.14). They possess the four foundations—the foundations of wisdom, of truth, of relinquishment, and of peace (MN 140.11). And by the eradication of lust, hate, and delusion all arahants have access to a unique meditative attainment called the fruition attainment of arahantship, described as the unshakeable deliverance of mind, the immeasurable deliverance of mind, the void deliverance of mind, the deliverance of mind through nothingness, and the signless deliverance of mind (MN 43.35–37).
KAMMA AND REBIRTH
According to the Buddha’s teaching, all beings except the arahants are subject to “renewal of being in the future” (punabbhava), that is, to rebirth. Rebirth, in the Buddhist conception, is not the transmigration of a self or soul but the continuation of a process, a flux of becoming in which successive lives are linked together by causal transmission of influence rather than by substantial identity. The basic causal pattern underlying the process is that defined by the teaching of dependent origination (see above, pp. 30–31), which also demonstrates how rebirth is possible without a reincarnating self.
The process of rebirth, the Buddha teaches, exhibits a definite lawfulness essentially ethical in character. This ethical character
is established by the fundamental dynamism that determines the states into which beings are reborn and the circumstances they encounter in the course of their lives. That dynamism is kamma, volitional action of body, speech, and mind. Those beings who engage in bad actions—actions motivated by the three unwholesome roots of greed, hate, and delusion—generate unwholesome kamma that leads them to rebirth into lower states of existence and, if it ripens in the human world, brings them pain and misfortune. Those beings who engage in good actions—actions motivated by the three wholesome roots of non-greed, non-hate, and non-delusion—generate wholesome kamma that leads them to higher states of existence and ripens in the human world as happiness and good fortune. Because the deeds a person performs in the course of a single life can be extremely varied, the type of rebirth that lies ahead of him can be very unpredictable, as the Buddha shows in MN 136. But despite this empirical variability, an invariable law governs the direct relationship between types of actions and the types of results they yield, the basic correlations being sketched by the Buddha in MN 57 and laid out in greater detail in MN 135.
In several suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya the Buddha refers to various planes of existence into which rebirth can occur and he also gives some indication of the types of kamma that lead to those planes. This cosmological typography is not, from the Buddhist standpoint, the product of conjecture or fantasy but a matter directly known to the Buddha through his “Tathāgata’s powers of knowledge” (MN 12.36); to some extent the process is also verifiable by those who gain the divine eye (e.g., MN 39.20). A brief overview may be given here of the planes of rebirth recognised in Buddhist cosmology and of their kammic antecedents, as systematised in the developed Theravāda tradition.
The Buddhist cosmos is divided into three broad realms—the sense-sphere realm, the fine-material realm, and the immaterial realm. Each of these comprises a range of subsidiary planes, amounting to a total of thirty-one planes of existence.
The sense-sphere realm, so called because sensual desire predominates there, consists of eleven planes divided into two groups, the bad destinations and the good destinations. The bad destinations or “states of deprivation” (apāya) are four in number: the hells, which are states of intense torment as described in MN 129 and MN 130; the animal kingdom; the sphere of ghosts (peta), beings afflicted with incessant hunger and thirst; and the sphere of titans (asura), beings involved in constant combat (not mentioned as a separate plane in the Majjhima). The courses of kamma leading to rebirth into these planes are classified into a set of ten—three of body, four of speech, and three of mind. These are enumerated briefly at MN 9.4 and explicated in MN 41. Gradations in the gravity of the evil intentions responsible for these deeds account for specific differences in the mode of rebirth resulting from such actions.
The good destinations in the sense-sphere realm are the human world and the heavenly planes. The latter are sixfold: the gods under the Four Great Kings; the gods of the Thirty-three (tāvatiṁsa), who are presided over by Sakka, a Buddhist metamorphosis of Indra, depicted as a devotee of the Buddha, faithful, but prone to negligence (MN 37); the Yāma gods; the gods of the Tusita heaven, the abode of the Bodhisatta before his final birth (MN 123); the gods who delight in creating; and the gods who wield power over others’ creations. The last is said to be the abode of Māra, the Tempter in Buddhism, who besides being a symbol for Desire and Death, is also regarded as a powerful deity with evil designs, keen to prevent beings from escaping the net of saṁsāra. The kammic cause for rebirth into the good destinations of the sense-sphere realm is the practice of the ten courses of wholesome action, defined at MN 9.8 and in MN 41.
In the fine-material realm the grosser types of matter are absent and the bliss, power, luminosity, and vitality of its denizens are far superior to those in the sense-sphere realm. The fine-material realm consists of sixteen planes, which are the objective counterparts of the four jhānas. Attainment of the first jhāna leads to rebirth among Brahmā’s Assembly, the Ministers of Brahmā and the Mahā Brahmās, according to whether it is developed to an inferior, middling, or superior degree. Baka the Brahmā (MN 49) and Brahmā Sahampati (MN 26, MN 67) seem to be residents of the last-named plane. The suttas mention especially the divine abodes as the path to the company of Brahmā (MN 99.24–27). Attainment of the second jhāna in the same three degrees leads respectively to rebirth among the gods of Limited Radiance, of Immeasurable Radiance, and of Streaming Radiance; the third jhāna to rebirth among the gods of Limited Glory, of Immeasurable Glory, and of Refulgent Glory. The fourth jhāna ordinarily leads to rebirth among the gods of Great Fruit, but if it is developed with a desire to attain an insentient mode of existence, it will conduce to rebirth among the non-percipient beings, for whom consciousness is temporarily suspended. The fine-material realm also contains five special planes that are exclusively for the rebirth of non-returners. These are the Pure Abodes—the Aviha, the Atappa, the Sudassa, the Sudassī, and the Akaniṭṭha. In each of these planes in the fine-material realm the lifespan is said to be of enormous duration and to increase significantly in each higher plane.
The third realm of being is the immaterial realm, where matter has become non-existent and only mental processes exist. This realm consists of four planes, which are the objective counterparts of the four immaterial meditative attainments, from which they result and whose names they share: the bases of infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither-perception-nor-non-perception. The lifespans ascribed to them are respectively 20,000; 40,000; 60,000; and 84,000 great aeons.
In Buddhist cosmology existence in every realm, being the product of a kamma with a finite potency, is necessarily impermanent. Beings take rebirth in accordance with their deeds, experience the good or bad results, and then, when the generative kamma has spent its force, they pass away to take rebirth elsewhere as determined by still another kamma that has found the opportunity to ripen. Hence the torments of hell as well as the bliss of heaven, no matter how long they may last, are bound to pass. For this reason the Buddha does not locate the final goal of his teaching anywhere within the conditioned world. He guides those whose spiritual faculties are still tender to aspire for a heavenly rebirth and teaches them the lines of conduct that conduce to the fulfilment of their aspirations (MN 41, MN 120). But for those whose faculties are mature and who can grasp the unsatisfactory nature of everything conditioned, he urges determined effort to put an end to wandering in saṁsāra and to reach Nibbāna, which transcends all planes of being.
THE BUDDHA AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
The Middle Country of India in which the Buddha lived and taught in the fifth century B.C. teemed with a luxuriant variety of religious and philosophical beliefs propagated by teachers equally varied in their ways of life. The main division was into the brahmins and the non-brahmanic ascetics, the samaṇas or “strivers.” The brahmins were the hereditary priesthood of India, the custodians of the ancient orthodoxy. They accepted the authority of the Vedas, which they studied, chanted at countless rituals, sacrifices, and ceremonies, and turned to as the source of their philosophical speculations. Thus they are characterised in the suttas as traditionalists (anussavika), who teach their doctrines on the basis of oral tradition (MN 100.7). The Pali Canon generally depicts them as living a comfortably settled life, as marrying and begetting progeny, and in some cases as enjoying royal patronage. The more learned among them gathered a company of students—all necessarily of brahmin birth—to whom they taught the Vedic hymns.
The samaṇas, on the other hand, did not accept the authority of the Vedas, for which reason from the perspective of the brahmins they stood in the ranks of heterodoxy. They were usually celibate, lived a life of mendicancy, and acquired their status by voluntary renunciation rather than by birth. The samaṇas roamed the Indian countryside sometimes in company, sometimes as solitaries, preaching their doctrines to the populace, debating with other ascetics, engaging in their spiritual practices, which often invo
lved severe austerities (see MN 51.8). Some teachers in the samaṇa camp taught entirely on the basis of reasoning and speculation, while others taught on the basis of their experiences in meditation. The Buddha placed himself among the latter, as one who teaches a Dhamma that he has directly known for himself (MN 100.7).
The Buddha’s encounters with brahmins were usually friendly, their conversations marked by courtesy and mutual regard. Several suttas in the Majjhima Nikāya concern the brahmins’ claim to superiority over those in other social classes. In the Buddha’s age the caste system was only beginning to take shape in northeast India and had not yet spawned the countless subdivisions and rigid regulations that were to manacle Indian society through the centuries. Society was divided into four broad social classes: the brahmins, who performed the priestly functions; the khattiyas, the nobles, warriors, and administrators; the vessas, the merchants and agriculturalists; and the suddas, the menials and serfs. From the Pali suttas it appears that the brahmins, while vested with authority in religious matters, had not yet risen to the position of unchallengeable hegemony they were to gain after the promulgation of the Laws of Manu. They had, however, already embarked on their drive for domination and did so by propagating the thesis that brahmins are the highest caste, the fairest caste, the divinely blessed offspring of Brahmā who are alone capable of purification. Anxiety that this claim of the brahmins might actually be true seems to have spread among the royalty, who must have been fearful of the threat it posed to their own power (see MN 84.4, MN 90.9–10).
The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha Page 5