Attainment

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Getting into a state and getting out of it are two different skills, and most of what matters is named in pairs of ordinary words.

Entering and emerging (AN 2.163)

Samāpattikusalatā and vuṭṭhānakusalatā: skill in the attainments, and skill in emerging from the attainments. Two skills, named separately, with the second given equal standing.

This is worth more attention than a single line usually gets, because the second skill is almost never discussed. Meditation instruction, ancient and modern, is overwhelmingly about getting somewhere. What this pair says is that coming back out is a distinct competence that has to be developed on its own, and that someone who has one without the other is not fully skilled.

The practical content is easy to recognize once named. Emerging badly looks like: coming out disoriented, or reluctant, or unable to carry anything from the state into what follows, or unwilling to be interrupted. A person who can enter deep states and cannot leave them cleanly is described here as having half a skill. That is a useful thing to be able to say to a student who is doing well in retreat and badly at home.

The ordinary qualities in the middle (AN 2.164–167)

Integrity and tenderness. Patience and gentleness. Camaraderie and hospitality. Harmlessness and purity. Eight qualities in four pairs, none of them technical, sitting between the meditative attainments and the sense doors without a word of explanation.

Their presence here is the point. This is a chapter that also names serenity and discernment, the powers of mindfulness and immersion, and the purification of view — and it puts hospitality on the same list, in the same form, with the same weight. Nothing marks the ordinary qualities as preliminary or lesser.

For anyone whose picture of the path is a ladder from ethics through concentration to wisdom, a chapter like this is a corrective. The Aṅguttara is quite capable of stating that ladder when it wants to. Here it simply files camaraderie beside immersion and moves on.

The pairs already met

Several entries are familiar. Not guarding the sense doors and eating too much, with their positives at AN 2.169, restate the practical material of the Ones. The power of reflection and the power of development (AN 2.170) return from AN 2.11–13, where the second was defined three different ways. Serenity and discernment (AN 2.172) return from AN 2.31 without their mechanism. And AN 2.177 repeats verbatim the two things the Buddha said at AN 2.5 that he had learned for himself — never to be content with skillful qualities, and never to stop trying.

That last repetition is worth noticing. What was, in the first chapter of this nipāta, the Buddha’s account of his own striving, with the vow about skin and sinews attached, reappears a hundred and seventy discourses later as a bare pair on an index. The collection is willing to file its most personal material the same way it files everything else.

Failure and accomplishment in two things (AN 2.173–176)

Four entries turn on ethics and view together: failure in both, accomplishment in both, purification of both, and then — the interesting one — purification of view and making an effort in line with that view.

That fourth entry adds something the first three do not. Having a purified view is one thing; acting on the basis of it is another, and the pair names them separately. It is the same distinction AN 1.342 made in the Ones, where those who understand the teaching but do not practice in line with it were counted among the many. Here it is stated positively and without comment: view, and effort in line with view. Two things.

Closing on mindfulness and awareness (AN 2.178–179)

The chapter ends on the absence and then the presence of sati and sampajañña — mindfulness and what Sujato renders situational awareness. The pair has run through the whole collection: remembering to attend, and knowing what one is attending to.

Ending an index chapter on it is fitting, because it is the pair most of the others depend on. Emerging from an attainment requires knowing that one is in it. Guarding the sense doors requires noticing what came in. Making an effort in line with one’s view requires holding the view in mind at the moment it applies. The last two entries of the chapter are what makes the other fifteen operable.

Key terms