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

4. The Arising and Passing Away

2nd jhana

5. Dissolution

6. Fear

7. Misery

The Dark Night

3rd jhana

8. Disgust

(dukkha ñanas)

9. Desire for Deliverance

10. Re-observation

11. Equanimity

4th jhana

12. Conformity

13. Change of Lineage

14. Path

15. Fruition

Nirvana (one of two meanings)

16. Review

I will give detailed descriptions of them shortly.

I will refer to these stages by their shortened titles, their numbers and occasionally short-hand slang. These are formally known as

“Knowledge of” and then the stage, e.g. “Knowledge of Mind and Body,” but I will just use the part after the “of.” They are also called

“ñanas,” which means “knowledges”, usually with a number, as in “the First Ñana.” Notice that I use the word stage rather than state. These are stages of heightened perception into the truth of things, opportunities to see directly how things actually are, but they are not seemingly stable states as with concentration practice. The jhanaic groupings refer to vipassana jhanas, which will be covered in more depth later, but they borrow their perspectives and certain fundamental aspects from their

The Progress of Insight

samatha jhana equivalents. In other ways they may diverge widely from the experience of pure samatha jhanas.

One of the most profound things about these stages is that they are strangely predictable regardless of the practitioner or the insight tradition. Texts two thousand years old describe the stages just the way people go through them today, though there will be some individual variation on some of the particulars today as then. The Christian maps, the Sufi maps, the Buddhist maps of the Tibetans and the Theravada, and the maps of the Khabbalists and Hindus are all remarkably consistent in their fundamentals. I chanced into these classic experiences before I had any training in meditation, and I have met a large number of people who have done likewise. These maps, Buddhist or otherwise, are talking about something inherent in how our minds progress in fundamental wisdom that has little to do with any tradition and lots to do with the mysteries of the human mind and body. These stages are not Buddhist but universal, and Buddhism is merely one of the traditions that describes them, albeit unusually well.

The progress of insight is discussed in a number of good books, such as Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart in the section called Dissolving the Self, which I highly recomment. A very extensive, thorough, accessible and highly recommended treatment of it is given in Mahasi Sayadaw’s works The Progress of Insight and Practical Insight Meditation (on BPS out of Sri Lanka), a partially castrated version of which appears in Jack Kornfield’s Living Dharma. It should be noted here that Practical Insight Meditation is my favorite dharma book of all time with no close competitors. If you can ever lay your hands on a copy, do so! Even the section of it that appears in Living Dharma is much better than having access to none of it at all.

Sayadaw U Pandita’s In This Very Life also covers this territory, and is a bit of a must have for those who like lists and straight-up Theravada, but he leaves out a lot of juicy details. The Vis

uddhimagga , a 5th

Century text by Buddhaghosa, also does a nice treatment of these stages, and contains some interesting and hard to find information. It focuses largely on the emotional side-effects and thus misses many useful points.

Another good but brief map appears in Ven. Khenpo Karthar

Rinpoche’s Dharma Paths. You could also check out Bhante

167

The Progress of Insight

Gunaratana’s The Path of Serenity and Insight if you would like to know the dogma well. It is a thorough and scholarly work.

Matthew Flickstein’s Swallowing the River Ganges is a light

treatment of basic Buddhist concepts and contains a very superficial treatment of the stages of insight. It is kind of like what would happen if you condensed a medical school textbook down to a 5th grade science text. It focuses almost entirely on the emotional side effects and thus misses a huge amount that is worthy of discussion, but it comes from a good place and is harmless enough. It doesn’t add anything to the above sources but is easy to read.

There are many less accessible maps of insight as well. The Tibetan Book of the Dead

, Li

beration Through Hearing in the Bardo requires

some prior familiarity with this territory to sort out the wild symbolic imagery. A 12th Century Sufi map is given in Journey to the Lord of Power by Ibn 'Arabi, but again the medieval symbolism is somewhat hard to untangle unless you are already personally familiar with these stages. It also provides a very interesting if quite cryptic description of the higher stages of realization. St. John of the Cross’ The Dark Night of The

Soul does a good job of dealing with the most difficult of the insight stages. His map is called The Ladder of Love. Unfortunately, the translation of the medieval Spanish and thickness of complex Catholic dogma make it a fairly inaccessible.