So there’s this really common view nowadays that stream-entry is attainable without a major degree of restraint. That basically, you only need to keep the five precepts and live a moral life, don’t do the obvious bad stuff, and that sense restraint and celibacy and all these things are for monks, or for people who are striving higher than just stream-entry. And the proof for that, supposedly, is that people in the Suttas, these laypeople, were getting the right view in the Buddha’s time, despite the fact that they were clearly living with their spouses and enjoying their wealth, and all that stuff. But what people fail to see is that there is a very big difference, in terms of both what those people had that we don’t have, and something that we have that they don’t have, which is not necessarily a good thing.
If you actually read carefully, the descriptions that the Suttas give of the wider context within which those attainments of the right view were happening for those people, you will see first of all that many of them had never met the Buddha. So they were talking to him for the first time. And second of all, they heard one discourse, and they got the right view after that. Furthermore, you also see that the Suttas themselves say exactly what is the thing that allowed the insight of the four noble truths to take root in their minds. And every single time, it says the Buddha was giving them a talk on virtue, on the basic virtue, living a moral life that leads to rewards in the next life and so on, and then he went on to describe the dangers of sensuality. Even in the next life, the danger even in those heavenly rewards that you would get out of keeping the five precepts, for example. And then they say that when their minds were actually withdrawn, that they were free from hindrances specifically, which mainly means sensual desire, then the Buddha went on to teach the four noble truths, and then they understood it and became sotāpannas.
But the thing is, people fail to see specifically, and most importantly, what it means for the mind to be ‘free from hindrances’, as the Suttas say. So, fundamentally, one of the main wrong views today is that your mind is free from hindrances when you happen not to be thinking about sensual objects at the moment, or you happen not to be angry or whatever. But the hindrances are much deeper than that. The hindrances are on the level of your most fundamental state of being. So, to put it concisely, it’s inconceivable for a person who has any sort of even remote view that sensuality is valuable to be free from the hindrance of sensual desire, because that is what the hindrance of sensual desire is. Even if, at the moment, you are completely focused on your bodily sensations, and you’re not thinking (supposedly). If you are capable of valuing sensual objects if they were to arise, regardless of whether they have arisen at the moment, your mind is not free from sensual desire at that moment. So the hindrance is still there, regardless of whatever special meditation pleasure you might be having.
Which by the way was not even a factor, these meditation techniques were not even a factor in the procedure leading up to that attainment of the right view for those laypeople back in the day. They were not doing any of that at all, neither there nor before, evidenced by the fact that many of them were following the views of other teachers who didn’t even teach meditation. So the point I’m trying to make is, the thing that actually withdraws your mind from the hindrances is actual dispassion towards sensuality. So for those people, since their minds were naturally, you could say, ‘pure’, they didn’t need as much of a discrete, separate effort beforehand to really develop that dispassion to the point where their minds could really just see sensual pleasures for what they are, simply on account of hearing a discourse.
But for most of us today, we’re so far down the rabbithole of sensuality that even years of practice is not necessarily enough. In fact, even becoming a monk is not a guarantee that your mind will actually be withdrawn from sensuality. Because the Buddha said in another Sutta that it doesn’t matter how many external observances a person might adhere to. Fundamentally, if internally there is still that value that I mentioned, that leaning towards the possibility of sensuality any time in the future, even if it’s in the next life, the mind is not free from sensual desire. And because of that, it won’t actually be able to give rise to true knowledge, simply on account of that.
So he gave a simile that it’s like two wet sticks that you try to use to make a fire, but obviously, because they’re wet, you can’t even light a spark with them. You actually need to dry out the sticks first, and then you can light the fire. So lighting the fire in that case refers to getting the right view, pretty much. All that is just pointing to the fact that the mind needs to be internally dispassionate towards sensuality in order to actually understand the Dhamma. Because basically, the valuing of sensuality is the coarsest, the most hindering way of not seeing the second noble truth. Everyone wants to be free from pain, and to the degree that they still regard sensuality as a potential solution to that problem, they’re not seeing the second noble truth. It’s that simple. So any attempt to see it, even hearing a discourse from the Buddha himself, won’t really make a difference.
But obviously the argument that is made, and there’s in fact another Sutta where there’s this layman who’s already a stream-enterer, and he’s drinking. So he’s breaking even the basic five precepts. And people were criticising him, and the Buddha explained to them that, no, even though he’s drinking he’s still a stream-enterer, because he actually understood the four noble truths. So obviously, there is a truth in the sense that once you understand the Dhamma, you can afford to not be restrained. But the problem is that before that, if you allow yourself the possibility to not just engage with, but value sensuality, even if you’re not engaging with it (for example as a monk, you’re limited from engaging with sensuality) but internally you can very much be valuing it. So if that value is not given up, you won’t be able to get the right view, which means your non-restraint is something very different from what’s happening internally, let’s say, when a stream-enterer is not restrained.
So there is a huge, immense difference between what’s internally happening in a stream-enterer when they, say, break the five precepts, and what’s happening in a puthujjana who doesn’t have the right view. Because, fundamentally, no matter how much a stream-enterer might stray away from the path, the fact is, they see the path, with perfect certainty. So they can re-establish that which they acquired pretty much in a finger-snap, as an act of will. But whenever a puthujjana engages with sensuality, what they’re doing is essentially sinking deeper in a hole that they already don’t know how to get out of. So that’s what’s happening when somebody who doesn’t have the right view, before having the right view, engages with sensuality.
And there’s actually another simile where the developed mind, let’s say of a stream-enterer, is compared to the great ocean. Where if you were to dump even a big load of salt, it wouldn’t really change anything. Whereas the undeveloped mind is like a little glass of water, where even just a bit of salt is going to make a very noticeable difference. So that salt is basically like the external breeches of restraint that one might have. They are very polluting in the case of a puthujjana, but in the case of a stream-enterer, they might hardly make a difference. So, expanding the mind up to that great ocean with the little glass of water that you start off with, is done through saying ‘no’ to your desires. It’s not done through focusing on one object, which is basically taking you in the opposite direction, narrowing the mind down.
And saying ‘no’ to your desires expands the mind because the only reason why you feel that impulse to say ‘yes’ by default is because the mind is already tunnel-visioned towards those things, it’s already completely constricted. But obviously, you don’t even recognise that that doesn’t have to be that way, because you’ve been living that way since forever. And then, when you justify to yourself that you don’t have to give it up, you’re just justifying that little glass of water that you have, and not going beyond that. There’s even one Sutta where the Buddha says that the cause for the five hindrances is misconduct of body, speech, and mind. You’ll never find a Sutta saying that it’s the inability to focus on one object.
And the issue is not so much the fact that, say, your virtue and your restraint is not perfect right off the bat. The main problem is the view that you don’t have to be restrained. Because as the Buddha said, the wrong view is the most pernicious of all things. Even worse than if there are, every now and then, slips in your behaviour, but you are genuinely trying. The really bad thing is when you have a view that what you’re doing is justified or is fine. That you don’t have to be restrained, because that’s not in the contract when you’re a layman. So that’s the thing that people don’t really see.
Sure, you can get the right view as a layman, but what you have to differentiate is the state of a layman who doens’t have the right view, and the state of a layman who does. And the process that those people underwent in, let’s say an hour or forty-five minutes of talking to the Buddha, to the point where their minds became internally withdrawn from the hindrances, that process, today, would take years for a person. Because that’s how much more pollution there is in the mind due to previous habits and all that. So that’s that additional baggage that we carry that they didn’t have back then.
And in fact, you don’t even see people in the Suttas struggling to get the right view the way we do today. Like, people who heard the Buddha for the first time, developed a real faith in the teaching, and yet they were unable for some reason to get the right view, the way it happens today. Everyone back then who got the right view, it was basically as soon as they recognised that the Dhamma is the true way, they got the right view. As soon as they acknowledged that, that they sort of converted to the Teaching, they got the right view.
The other people who didn’t, you can see like, there was for example this King Pasenadi. He did respect the Buddha, he gave offerings and stuff, but he was still agreeing, to some extent, with the views of other teachers, which means he hadn’t actually accepted fully the rightness of the Dhamma. So he’s one of the people who didn’t get the right view, even though he talked to the Buddha many times. But the point I’m making is, you don’t see people who are the way you see today, people who are genuinely devoted to the Dhamma, they’re giving it their all, and yet they fail, after an entire lifetime of trying to get the right view. That didn’t happen back then. So that is just evidence of the fact that their minds were in a different position than ours are today.
So that process of a few minutes of listening to the Buddha, for you to get to that point where your mind is truly dispassionate towards sensuality, you’re going to have to actually give up that value, and most especially the ways in which you are manifesting that value in the world. So the actual actions through body and speech that are making it clear that you still value sensuality as a potential solution to the issue of suffering. And that is, in essence, that training is the gradual training that we often talk about. You know, virtue, sense restraint, moderation in eating, watchfulness of your intentions and all that stuff. And especially the reason why we say you need to take up that gradual training and really give your 100% to it is that precisely the main characteristic of the state of a puthujjana is that you don’t even see what the problem is. You don’t even see the size of your ignorance, to put it that way.
So whenever you decide, or say to yourself, or justify giving up only a partial amount, there’s like a 99.99999% chance that what you’re not giving up is exactly what you need to give up in order to truly purify your mind from all these obstructions. So that’s another Sutta, the Buddha said it’s like a quail who is tied with a rotten rope, and it says ‘well, this is fine, this is just a rotten rope, I can break out of it at any time’. But because it’s a quail, it can’t actually. Even though technically it’s a weak rope, it can’t break out of it. So that’s like when people think ‘oh, this is fine, I’m not actually attached to all these things’. Well, if that were the case, you wouldn’t be so insistent on that fact, and you wouldn’t get so defensive when people tell you that you need to give it up. In fact, if you’re truly confident that giving up sensuality is for your welfare, which is the direction of nibbāna in general, giving up of craving, which is the confidence that a stream-enterer has, then you wouldn’t have any problem with at least the idea that you need to give it up.
You would only not give it up if you accept that, at the moment, you’re not practising. And that’s one thing that people fail to see as well in that Sutta of the layman Sarakāni, who was drinking as a stream-enterer. The Buddha said at the very end of the Sutta that this man ‘undertook the training at the time of death’. So the key there is, he undertook the training at the time of death because he was not training before that. So even though he was a stream-enterer, he had understood the Dhamma, he had the perfect ‘right meditation’ (as opposed to, you know, what people do today) even he was not able to have that right view and that right understanding, right effort, right composure, all these things, apart from his actual behaviour. So, giving up the restraint meant giving up the training, even for him. That’s why the Buddha said, only at the time of death, when he didn’t have the chance to be careless any more, he undertook the training again. So what is then to be said of somebody who doesn’t even have those wholesome qualities, those wholesome factors, and they allow themselves to cultivate the opposite of them? There’s just, I mean it’s shooting oneself in the foot, ultimately.
The other thing to recognise as well is that the main characteristic of a stream-enterer, or any noble disciple, the Buddha listed the five faculties, and the first two of them are a sense of shame, and fear of wrongdoing (hiriottappa in Pāli). And what that means is, not just towards random stuff, but towards unwholesome states. That’s what the Sutta says, so they have a sense of shame and a fear of wrongdoing in regard to unwholesome states. So that is part of that big gap that I was talking about between when somebody who has the right view engages with sensual pleasures and distractions and somebody who doesn’t, is that fundamental sense of shame (or the lack of that sense of shame, because they don’t know unwholesome as unwholesome fully) is what defines the engagement of the puthujjana. It is a defining factor.
So that’s why you can’t say that the enjoyment that a stream-enterer has is the same as what a puthujjana has, because that sense of shame is standing behind it all the time. Because again, as I said, the view is the most pernicious thing of all. So when the puthujjana is doing it, there is a view there that’s not present in the stream-enterer. Even the external actions are secondary to the fundamental view, and that view is abandoned only by getting the right view. So even though you might see a stream-enterer externally seemingly doing the same stuff, internally it’s not the same. Because if they were to actually just stop for a moment and reflect on what they’re actually doing and just snap out of it, they would immediately recognise that what they’re doing is wrong. It would be impossible to have that justification of ‘no, look, I’m a layman, it’s fine, this is what we do’. It would be impossible for them to think that.
So that’s what needs to be seen. As a puthujjana, one has to tell oneself ‘I don’t know what it even means to be free temporarily from sensual desire’ which is what those people had, at that moment. ‘And if I had reached that state at any point in my practice, with all the amount of knowledge that we have, and teachings that we’ve heard, I would have gotten the right view by that time.’ So you need to recognise that if you really had gone to the point where those people were, you’ve already got like a thousand times more instruction than they did, so you should have the right view—if, at any point in time, your mind was truly dispassionate towards sensuality.
Incidentally, this is one of the biggest pieces of evidence to show that whatever people usually regard today as jhāna is not actually the real jhāna that the Buddha was teaching. Because the actual jhāna is already way beyond the level of development these people had, after which they understood the Dhamma. So if a person today has supposedly been getting jhānas they should be way beyond those people back in the day. So that just goes to show that it’s not even actually taking you beyond the hindrances, which would have to result in seeing the four noble truths if you have heard of them before, and in such copious amounts as we have today.
And you also see in the Suttas that the laypeople who were stream-enterers and were still not fully celibate and so on, they were not getting jhānas. So it goes to show that if it really were a matter of just applying some technique, then a stream-enterer should be able to do it very easily. But they weren’t getting jhānas. If you see which laypeople were getting jhānas, it’s the ones who were non-returners. And you might think, well, they got the jhānas first, and then they became non-returners, and then they became celibate, but it’s actually the other way around. They got the jhānas because they were celibate, and the jhānas made them non-returners.
One needs to recognise that one doesn’t even know what that state means, ‘confidence in renunciation’, which is a phrase that the Buddha used, what that even means. So any little deviation from at least the idea you have (which is inaccurate, but it’s all you have) any willing, volitional deviation from renunciation entails the risk that you will never reach that state. It’s as simple as that.
So you could pretty much say that your situation today, building up the gradual training in the course of years, but allowing yourself to delight in and engage with sensuality and justify it to yourself is essentially the same as, back in the day, when those people were talking to the Buddha, if they were to allow themselves to have sensual thoughts. To regard as pleasant and agreeable that which he was saying, right then and there, is unsatisfactory and unbeneficial. So in both cases, the result would be that there would be no penetrative insight of the four noble truths, despite the fact that it’s the same teaching that you were hearing.
And you will reach that state through actually, as we say, practising the gradual training. So it’s emphatically not the result of a meditation technique, of a meditation retreat. Because for example, you can go on a ten-day retreat, and practise as hard as you can, and be celibate, and keep three-hundred precepts during that time. But, if at any point in the future, your mind is still looking forward to sensuality, then the actual hindrance of sensuality is not abandoned. So that’s why we say it has to be taken for life. For life I will not value sensuality, I will give up the idea that sensuality is worthwhile for the rest of my life. And then, on the basis of that, when that idea is not just abstract, you have to factually be implementing it, and really showing that you actually believe that through your actions. So once that’s fulfilled, and your life is in concordance with that view, then you can actually have a basis, you can have the dry sticks, that might just be able to give rise to the spark of knowledge.
And then after that, once you have the right view, you can relax, and you can go back to sensuality. But you will realise that it’s a completely different thing than any sort of sensual engagement that you could have had in the past. You can’t even fathom the difference as a puthujjana, what it means to have the right view on one hand and value nibbāna, and still be engaging with sensuality. Because everything you have is experienced from the point of view of the wrong view. You can’t magically step out of it for a moment and imagine how things are for a noble disciple. So that’s essentially how it works.
And another thing that you need to think about is, what is the reason for you not renouncing things? So yes, if you have dependants, if you have a wife that depends on you, or children, or ageing parents, then yeah, it would be irresponsible to leave them and potentially make them have a hard time. But does that mean that you need to engage in sexual intercourse in order to take care of your dependants? Does that mean that you need to work extra, to get more wealth than is really necessary to take care of those people? Do you need to be seeking out pleasant sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches that are just for the sake of gratification? No. So you don’t have to do any of these things, but people often conflate the idea of ‘yes, I can become a monk’ with ‘oh ok, so it’s fine to do all the other stuff that laypeople usually do’ and that’s not the case. So even though, again, many of those people in the Suttas you could argue ‘they didn’t ordain, and they were also having sexual intercourse’ or whatever. The point is, again, they were stream-enterers, so there’s a very different thing going on there.
And lastly, it’s important to note that abandoning sensuality is not necessary because otherwise you’re violating some sort of commandment, or sacred rule. It’s because it’s part and parcel of the same path towards attaining one’s own welfare. If abandoning sensuality was not for the sake of one’s own welfare, the Buddha wouldn’t have instructed anyone to do it. So what will happen if you’re not willing to take on trust that abandoning sensuality is for your own welfare, is that you will instead take up the first watered-down version of the Dhamma that seemingly offers you the same thing, or so you think, while at the same time allowing you to engage with those very things that are obstructing true insight from taking place. So the ‘results’ of that are going to be not the actual fundamental freedom that the Buddha was teaching.
Like he said, the suffering that’s left for a stream-enterer is like seven grains of sand compared to the great mountain that was there before. It’s just going to be some sort of management method that might make you feel like there are no grains of sand left at the moment, so, seemingly better, but in the end it’s only because you’re ignoring that there’s a great mountain behind you. That’s why it always revolves around all that focusing and concentration. Ignoring the full truth in order to feel a relief. So it’s in fact precisely because the actual understanding of the Dhamma frees you completely, to the point where suffering can’t even arise even if you want it to arise, that these people were able to pretty much give up the training. Like completely just get careless, on the surface, and go on with their lives as if nothing happened. Because it’s actually applying to that core of your existence. Whereas what people teach today is just a management method that’s going to wear away within a few weeks if you stop doing it. So that’s why people are always afraid of giving it up. And it’s just reinforcing that clinging to virtue and practices. So in the end, the results will speak for themselves.