Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - Revised and Expanded Edition

by Daniel M. Ingram

The gold standard for training in morality is how kind and compassionate our intentions are and how well we lead a useful and moral life. The gold standard for training in concentration practices is how quickly we can enter into highly altered states of consciousness, how long we can stay in them, and how refined, complete and stable we can make those states. The gold standard for insight practices is that we can quickly and consistently see the true nature of the numerous quick sensations that make up our whole reality, regardless of what those sensations are, allowing us to cut to a level of understanding that goes utterly beyond specific conditions.

Be aware of each exact moment in which you experience solidity and its beginning and ending. Remember that each experience of solidity is a separate, impermanent sensation!

Don’t struggle too much with reality, except to break the bad habits of being lost in stories, poor concentration, and a lack of understanding of the Three Characteristics.

So don’t make stories, but know this: things come and go, they don’t satisfy, and they ain’t you. That is the truth. It is just that simple.

Bare experience is just dancing, flickering color, form, energy and space, basically, and the knowledge of these (which is not as fundamentally different from them as you might suspect). Try to stay close to that level when you practice, the level of the simple, direct, obvious, literal. But whenever you are lost in interpretation much beyond this, that ain’t insight meditation, as much as people would like it to be. Have I said this enough? Okay, then.

The Five Spiritual Faculties are said to be like a cart with four wheels and a driver. If any of the four wheels is too small or wobbly or not in balance with the others, then the going on the spiritual road will be rough. If the driver is not paying attention then there will also be problems. The four wheels symbolize faith, wisdom, energy and concentration. The driver symbolizes mind-fulness.

If people start with “just open to it” and yet don’t develop strong mindfulness, look into the Three Characteristics and gain deep insights, then their practice may be less like meditation and a lot more like psychotherapy, daydreaming, or even self-absorbed, spiritually-rationalized, neurotic indulgence in mind noise. It was noticing the high prevalence of this activity and the pervasive and absurd notion that there was no point in trying to get enlightened that largely demolished my vision of being a happy meditation teacher in some mainstream meditation center somewhere. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, can be a fine undertaking, but it is a completely different endeavor from meditation and falls squarely in the domain of the first training. I do not, however, advocate wallowing in self-absorbed mind noise, and anyone who has been to a small group meeting on a meditation retreat knows what I am talking about. This is what happens when people don’t ground the mind in the object of meditation. On the other hand, even if you gain all kinds of strong concentration, look deeply into impermanence, suffering and no-self, but can’t just open to these things, can’t just let them be, can’t accept the sometimes absurd and frightening truths of your experience, then you will likely be stuck in hell until you can, particularly in the higher stages of insight practices. Reflect on these previous three paragraphs now and often, as many, many errors on the spiritual path come from not...

When meditators on retreat focus on content instead of grounding the mind in the objects of meditation (which just might produce the deep insights that will make the big difference that they are looking for), they basically let their minds go, and go they do. After a day or two of silence and a nearly complete lack of distractions, the spinning of their minds on neurotic content may have accelerated like the turbine of a jet engine on full throttle. If they were a mess before, now this has been multiplied by a factor of ten to a hundred. They then hit the small group meeting like a runaway freight train of exacerbated mind noise, and all present get to be bathed in the profound lack of clarity that they have spent so much hard cushion time cultivating. Years go by, and their practice deepens, not into insight territory, but into epoxy-like faith and further fixation on content. They learn how to “talk Buddhist.” They learn the “culture” of Buddhism in just the same way that they learned the culture of transpersonal therapy, transactional analysis or French existentialism. They become fascinated with their growing knowledge of Pali, their fancy brass bell from Nepal, or their knowledge of Tantric iconography. They have taken Bodhisattva vows 108 times. They may become neurotic about “right speech” and self-righteous about “Noble Silence.” They may begin to adopt the gently condescending and overly deliberate speech patterns and mannerisms that quietly scream, “I am sooooo s...

Each stage is marked by very specific increases in our perceptual abilities. The basic areas we can improve in are clarity, precision, speed, consistency, inclusiveness and acceptance. It

Lastly, those who have attained at least stream entry are constantly cycling through the ñanas from the fourth to the eleventh and then to Fruition, so even if they try to do pure samatha practice, the pull towards each next ñana/vipassana jhana is strong,

Note, the A&P Event typically shows up only once per path unless a long period of time goes by without practice after it, whereas Fruition is likely to be repeated naturally.

Even those who are working on the next path will typically have recurring Fruitions from the current path sneak in even if they don’t want them to. This is one way to distinguish A&P Events from Fruitions, as A&P Events quickly diminish in intensity, fade quickly as the focus of one’s practice, and fail to provide the consistent sense of release, ease and sense of well-being that attaining a Fruition does.

The period after completing a progress of insight and after gaining some strong sense of mastery of its stages is also a great time to work on one’s concentration practice abilities. The reason for waiting is that concentration practices and insight practices tend to have a certain inertia to them. If you have recently been trying to get into really stable samatha states, this can make it harder to see things flicker for a while. If you have recently been training hard to see things flicker, it can be hard to get into really stable samatha jhanas. Thus, what you don’t want to do is to gunk up the natural mastery phase of your practice until you are comfortable enough with these stages to get stuck in one and not have it be a big deal. This usually takes at least a few weeks, but this is a very crude guideline, and everyone is different regarding issues of timing. Judge for yourself how well you handle stages such as Re-observation and decide if you would be alright if you got stuck in it for a few hours.

1. The Four Path Model from the Theravada, which involves becoming a stream-enterer, second path, third path and then an arahat (however you spell it). 2. The Five Path Model from the Tibetans. 3. The Ten Bodhisattva Bhumis from the Tibetans. 4. The ideal of Buddhahood from all the Buddhist traditions. 5. The Sudden and Gradual Awakening schools of Zen.

The Theravada Four Path Model is a model involving four stages of awakening, namely First Path or Stream Entry (Pali: sota-panna), Second Path or Once Returner (sakadagami), Third Path or Never Returner (anagami) and finally Fourth Path, Holy One, Saint, or Conqueror (arahat, arhat, arahant,

For reasons completely beyond me, the word “ego” is also used in a high mystical sense to describe the elimination of the experiential illusion of there being a special reference point as described in the chapter on the Three Characteristics, in the section on no-self. One who had eliminated this form of ego, which is in this case a useless illusion, might describe their experience in this way, “In this full field of experience or manifestation, there seems to be no special or permanent spot that is observing, controlling, separated from, or subject to any other point or aspect of the rest of this causal field of experience or manifestation.”

What they are attempting to say is that the sense of the observer, center point, continuous and separate subject, watcher or however you want to describe the sense that there is some Self at the center of all this stuff is, in fact, just a bunch of sensations.

This is a very tough thing to talk about, and certainly doesn’t sell as well as saying: “Do these things, and you will be free from all negative emotions,” or worse: “We did these things and so are free from all negative emotions, and so you should worship us, give us donations, support our center, buy our books, give over power to us, think of us as very special or amazing, stand in awe of us, sleep with us, allow us to act like raving nutcases, etc.” I think you get the picture.

In the Revised Four Path Model, Stream Enterers have discovered the complete discontinuity that is called Fruition and sometimes called Nirvana or Nibbana (Sanskrit vs. Pali). This is the first of two meanings of Nirvana, with the other being Fourth Path. Stream enterers cycle through the ñanas, know that awakening or some different understanding from the norm is possible, and yet they do not have all that different an experience of most sensations from those who are not yet stream enterers. They may correctly extrapolate a lot of good dharma insights from momentary experiences, particularly high up in High Equanimity and the three moments before a Fruition, but this is not the same as living there all the time. In fact, most stream

Those of Second Path have now completed a new insight cycle. They understand the process by which enlightened beings make further progress and equate progress with further cycles of insight, which is partially true.

Those of Third Path have shifted their understanding of what progress is from those of Second Path, and have begun to see that it is about perceiving the emptiness, selflessness, impermanence, luminosity etc. of sensations in daily life and begin to see that they have the ability to do this. This can be a long, developmental process from the first time they notice this to it becoming a nearly complete experience. Thus, Third Path tends to be a long path, though it doesn’t have to be.

Intimacy with reality is bought at the price of attaining transcendence beyond reality. Transcendence is bought at the price of attaining intimacy with reality.

From the point of view of time, cause and effect, things ripple out into the universe like droplets cause ripples in water. This process, that is to say the world and us, has always been empty. If we are anything, it is a pattern of rippling sensations arising from causes and effects and leading to causes and effects. Thus, we send ripples of whatever and however we are out into the causal future. If we are enlightened, that is one aspect of what ripples out into the patterns we call time, and these ripples go on without definable end.

One great traditional analogy goes as follows: If you lit a candle, then lit another candle with that candle and then blew out the first one, what is transmitted? This is causality without a permanent entity, resonance without continuity, an artificial but useful recognition of a pattern, and nothing more.