Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

Before I discuss the various models, I should begin by saying that this is almost certainly the most easily misconstrued chapter in this book. Further, if you are a big fan of standard Buddhist dogma, I strongly recommend that you stop reading this chapter now and skip to the conclusion of this book. Seriously, I’m about to get quite irreverent again, but in that irreverence are bits of wisdom that are hard to find so explicitly stated elsewhere, so dismiss this chapter at your peril.

The temptation when thinking about enlightenment is to come up with something defined that you can imagine, such as a state or quality of being, and then fixate on that ideal rather than doing the practices that lead to freedom. It is absolutely guaranteed that anything you can imagine or define as being enlightenment is a limited and incorrect view, but these views are extremely tempting just the same and generally continue to be very seductive even through the middle stages of enlightenment. Every possible description of the potential effects of realization is likely to feed into this unfortunate tendency.

Thus, my distinct preference when practicing is to assume that enlightenment is completely impractical, produces no definable changes, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the scopes of the other trainings. This means that I take it as a working hypothesis that it will not make me a better person in any way, create any beneficial mental qualities, produce any states of happiness or peace, and provide no additional clarity into any of the issues surrounding how to live my ordinary life. I have experimented with adopting other views and found that they nearly always get in the way of my insight practices.

A view so easily becomes sacred, and thus the temptation is to not investigate the sensations that make up thoughts about that view, but rather to imitate the ideal expressed in the content of that view. This can seem like practice in fundamental insight, but it is not. I realize that I am not doing a good job of advertising enlightenment here, particularly following my descriptions of the Dark Night. Good point. My thesis is that those who must find it will, regardless of how it is advertised. As to the rest, well, what can be said? Am I doing a disservice by not selling it like nearly everyone else does? I don’t think so. If you want grand

Models of the Stages of Enlightenment

advertisements for enlightenment, there is a great stinking mountain of it there for you partake of, so I hardly think that my bringing it down to earth is going to cause some harmful deficiency of glitz in the great spiritual marketplace.

Bill Hamilton had a lot of great one-liners, but my favorite concerned insight practices and their fruits, of which he said, “Highly recommended, can’t tell you why.” That is probably the safest and most accurate advertisement for enlightenment that I have ever heard. There was a famous old dead enlightened guy (whose name ironically eludes me at the moment), who was known to have said, “I have gained absolutely nothing through complete and unexcelled enlightenment.” A friend of mine thinks it was the Buddha, and it may have been.

Regardless, it is traditional to advertise enlightenment in the negative in the Buddhist tradition and many others, either stating what it is not or stating what is lost at each stage, but it is so very tempting to imagine that

“freedom from suffering” will naturally translate in to a permanent state of mental happiness or peace, and this can tempt one to try to mimic that idealized state. That would be a concentration practice.

Having said all of that, the fact is that the models of the stages of enlightenment are out there and available. Even when they are not explicitly mentioned, they have an obvious influence on how people describe realization. Thus, I have decided to try to work with them so that they might be used in ways that are helpful rather than harmful.

This is more difficult than it may initially sound.

There are days I wish the words for awakening didn’t exist, the models had never exited, and that the whole process was largely unknown to the ordinary person so that it would be less mythologized and aggrandized, thus making conversations about it much more normal and less reaction-producing. I wish we could start over, strip away all the strange cultural and mythical trappings, create simple, clear terms, and move on with things.

There are other days when I think that at least people know it might be possible, even if most of what has been said about it is pretty fantasy-based. My greatest dream is that the current generation of enlightened teachers will go far out of their way to correct the descriptive errors and false promises of the past and lay the groundwork for perpetuation of 262