Three Trainings (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Ethics is the code kept, the higher mind is the four absorptions, and the higher wisdom is the four noble truths understood.

The first definition

“A mendicant is ethical, restrained in the monastic code, conducting themselves well and resorting for alms in suitable places. Seeing danger in the slightest fault, they keep the rules they’ve undertaken.”

Four elements: restraint in the code, good conduct and resort, seeing danger in the slightest fault, and keeping what has been undertaken. The third is the one that carries the weight — aṇumattesu vajjesu bhayadassāvī, seeing danger in faults the size of an atom.

That phrase has to be held against AN 3.86, where a person at every stage of attainment breaks some lesser and minor training rules. The two are not in conflict and the difference is worth making: seeing danger in a small fault is about how one regards faults, not about never committing one. A person can take a minor rule seriously, break it, and be restored, and this discourse and that one are describing the same person.

The second definition

The higher mind is the four absorptions, given in the standard sequence and abbreviated here as the collection usually abbreviates them.

This is worth stating plainly because it is often blurred: in the canon’s own definition, adhicitta is jhāna. Not mindfulness in general, not calm in general, and not a good attitude — the four absorptions, which are described elsewhere in this collection at length.

That has a consequence for the correlation in AN 3.86. If the higher mind is the absorptions, then a stream-enterer with limited immersion is somebody who has not fulfilled them, and the first two stages of awakening are being placed within reach of somebody whose meditation is incomplete.

The third definition, and why it differs from AN 3.90

The higher wisdom, here, is understanding the four noble truths: this is suffering; this is the origin; this is the cessation; this is the practice that leads to the cessation.

AN 3.90, the next discourse, is identical except at this point, where it defines the higher wisdom instead as the realization of the undefiled freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom, in this very life, through the ending of defilements.

So the pair offers wisdom as understanding and wisdom as liberation — the seeing and the result of the seeing. Given the correlation of AN 3.86, where fulfilled wisdom is what produces freedom in this life, the two definitions describe the same thing at its beginning and at its completion.

This is the same pairing habit as AN 3.76 and AN 3.77, four discourses apart, where consciousness and intention were offered in one slot. The collection does this deliberately at points where a single definition would over-determine something.

Using it

This is the reference discourse for the whole chapter and the one to hand a class as a single page. Everything the chapter has said about the three trainings — the donkey, the farmer, the Vajji monk, the four attainments — presupposes these three definitions.

The point to draw out is the second. A class that has heard 戒定慧 all their lives will generally have an unexamined idea of what 定 means, and this discourse says: the four absorptions, as described in AN 3.58 and AN 3.63. Whether that is achievable is a separate question and a live one; what the definition does is stop the second training from quietly becoming a synonym for being calm.

Key terms