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

I will talk more about this model as we go, and have already talked about it often in a less direct way. I present it first to serve as a foil or counterpoint to all of the other models, and it is the only model that can withstand reality testing without qualification or difficulty. All of the other models may contain some degree of truth somewhere in them, either literally or poetically, but this one you can hang your hat on all the way through. This awareness develops gradually with some sharp jumps along the way, leading to the endless debates about sudden and gradual schools of awakening, a subject that will hopefully become more clear as we go, but probably deserves some mention here.

THE SUDDEN SCHOOLS OF AWAKENING

There are schools of awakening, particularly some Zen (Chan) traditions from China and Korea, and some interpretations of Hinduism, though this is not a complete list, that say that awakening happens in one big shift and that’s basically it, regardless of exactly how you define “it”. They deny the claims of the progressive schools (Theravada, Tibetans, some other strains of Zen, most schools of Sufism, Qabala, other Western Traditions, etc.) that there is mappable territory before awakening and that there might be lots to do after stream entry or whatever you want to call it. Possible explanations for these schools include:

1. There may be a few rare individuals that somehow manage to go straight to full awakening due to whatever interesting way they are wired or practiced, though I have never met anyone who did this.

2. There may be schools founded or influenced by people who got to the first stage of awakening and somehow never realized there could be anything more than that or got trapped in a lie about being fully awakened when they hadn’t yet realized there was more to go and never retracted their initial, erroneous claim.

3. There are people who just thought that was the dogma somehow and stuck with it regardless of any issues of actually having insight.

4. Other explanations I haven’t thought of or run across.

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Models of the Stages of Enlightenment

Being as every single person I have ever known has followed a progressive path, including myself, it is very hard for me to believe the sudden claims except for keeping open the possibility that there may be the exceedingly rare practitioner who occasionally manages to pull this off and thus imagines based on their limited experience that this is how it happens in general. In short, if you manage to do this, more power to you, and please let me know. Otherwise, I would bet on the gradual, progressive schools, and if you attain something that you are pretty impressed by, give it time to see how it holds up when the troubles of the world come knocking at your door over the months and years after that shift of perspective.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PERCEPTION MODELS

Related to the Non-Duality Model, and also useful for practice, are the Fundamental Perception Models. I say models here because various traditions emphasize different qualities of reality as being essential. For instance, the Theravada uses the Three Characteristics of

Impermanence, Suffering and No-Self, as you already know well by this point. The Mahayana traditions (Tibetans in particular), may emphasize Shunyata or emptiness, and the Vajrayana traditions may emphasize luminosity or the space-like meditative equipoise of Dzogchen. They may also talk about Maha Ati, or express fundamental truths in some other way.

These models may directly state or imply that enlightenment

involves continuously perceiving these aspects of things in all sensations at a conscious level, so that every waking instant we were flooded with the sense of impermanence or luminosity or whatever as our dominant experience. While attempting to perceive this at all times is excellent practice advice, particularly when on retreat, were these models true then realization would seem to involve flooding the consciousness of the individual with a ton of information at all times. While there may be moments or bursts of this sort of perception in enlightened individuals, this is not what finally happens. Instead, with strong awareness of how things are, a process of identification stops, the switch is thrown, as noted above in the Non-Duality Models. By following the practice advice of the Fundamental Perception Models we may come to stop this process.

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Models of the Stages of Enlightenment However, as the Buddha said, do not imagine that you must