PRESENTED TO THE MEMBERS OF THE BUDDHA CENTER ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2014 AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2024

The Discourse to Mahali

Digha Nikaya 6

Country: Vajji

Locale: Gabled Hall of the Great Forest, Vesali

Speakers: Nagita, Otthaddha, Siha, the Buddha

Date of composition: 5^th cent. BCE

The sixth discourse of the Digha Nikaya takes place at the Gabled Hall of the Great Forest in Vesali or Visala, at the same location as the present village of Basrah in Vaishali District, Bihar State. Vesali was the capital city of the Licchavi, the dominant ethnic group in the Vajjian (Vrijji) Confederacy, one of the sixteen great states, and the birthplace of Mahavira, the great Jain reformer who was contemporary with the Buddha. The Vajjians were located northeast of Magadha, and are a very early example of a quasi-democratic government. 7,707 male heads of households of the dominant warrior caste were the basis of the Licchavi system of government. These met annually to elect a ruling chief and a council of nine to assist him, including a deputy chief, a chief of the army, and a chancellor of the exchequer. Both executive and judicial authority are concentrated in the ruling chief. We would call this some sort of responsible patriarchal despotism but, by the standards of the time, it was democratic, similar to Shakya, the Buddha’s homeland.

At the time of the Buddha, Vesali is large, rich, prosperous, populous, beautiful, and green. Ambapali, the royal courtesan and dancer who would become an arhant, is a friend of the Buddha, and entertains him and his entourage at her home, as we will see in a later discourse.  In this discourse, the theme of the “Brahman emissaries in town on some business” reoccurs. They hear of the Buddha and where he is staying, and go to visit him themselves. At the time of this story, Nagita is the personal attendant of the Buddha. The reference to Nagita ostensibly places this discourse before Ananda, therefore in the first twenty years of the Buddha’s ministry, though Walshe also finds evidence of a late date of composition in the “intolerably laboured repetition” of the discourse. This mixture of indicators is characteristic of many discourses, which suggests that the process of transmission combined earlier and later discourses, pointing to the possibility that one may find earlier in later discourses – another reason for not overlooking the later discourses.

The Brahmans arrive at the Gabled Hall during the day, but Nagita is unwilling to give them access to the Buddha, who is in “solitary meditation.” The Brahmans sit down and indicate that they will wait. We know that sometimes the Buddha likes to take a nap in the afternoon. Otthaddha the Licchavi arrives with a large entourage. Told the same thing, he too indicates that they will wait. The novice Siha suggests to Nagita that, with so many people waiting, he should allow them to see the Buddha. Nagita does not want to be responsible for disturbing the Buddha. However, the young novice Siha has no such compunction.

Siha enters his room and explains the situation to him. The Buddha instructs Siha to prepare a seat in the shade of the building.

The Buddha goes outside, and the Brahmans and Licchavis sit around him. Otthaddha prostrates before the Buddha and sits down to one side, but rather than exchanging courtesies with him, as do the Brahmans, he rudely breaks right in with a question: “Lord, not long ago Sunakkhatta the Licchavi came to me and said, ‘Soon I shall have been a follower of the Lord for three years. I have seen heavenly sights, pleasant, delightful, enticing, but I have not heard any heavenly sounds that were pleasant, delightful enticing.’ Lord, are there any such heavenly sounds, which Sunakkhatta cannot hear, or are there not?”  Sunakkhatta is famous for rejecting the Buddha in discourse 24 of the Digha Nikaya because the Buddha does not perform miracles or teach the beginning of things (in fact, the Buddha teaches the non-beginning of things, so the objection here does not seem to be that the Buddha does not teach ontology, but that his ontology is non-creationist).  Sunakkhatta also expresses admiration for dubious ascetics, such as Korakkhattiya the “dog-man.”

The question provides valuable insight into what practitioners of Buddhism at the time of the Buddha were experiencing. The phenomena described—pleasant, delightful, enticing, celestial sights—are a clairvoyant phenomenon that one associates with the practice of yoga.  The reference to three years provides an interesting insight into how long it takes the Buddha’s followers to develop their practice to this level. Otthaddha also alludes to celestial sounds (clairaudience). This shows that the Buddha’s followers are engaged in cultivating altered states of consciousness and the cultivation of psychic powers, at least as a side effect of the practices.

In the Samannaphala Sutta the Buddha recognizes the reality of psychic powers: self-multiplication, invisibility, the ability to pass through matter, weightlessness, levitation, and the projection of the mental body.  This is the first historical reference in India to the idea that psychic powers produce meditative attainments. It is customary to say that the Buddha does not approve of psychic powers, but he never denies that they exist and he exhibits at least some of them himself, especially recalling past lives.

Otthaddha asks the Buddha if there are such sounds and, if there are, why Sunakkhatta cannot hear them. The Buddha’s answer is complex, and refers to the psychology of spiritual states, but in essence, the Buddha distinguishes between two types of meditation, one-sided and two-sided. In the first, only celestial sights or sounds are experienced and, in the second, both are experienced. There is no indication of how one and two-sided meditations differ from each other, other than by this fact. Clearly, the Buddha knows and approves of such states since he does not criticize them. Rather, he explains them by situating them in their appropriate context, which is the path.

The practice of meditation purifies bad karma, generates merit, creates energy, confers insight, and ultimately carries the practitioner to the exalted heights of Right Effort, Right Awareness, and Right Concentration, which lead to emancipation.

Otthaddha asks the Buddha if these meditative attainments are the goal of Buddhist monasticism. The Buddha answers that the meditative attainments are not the goal, but that there are other higher and perfect states to which they aspire. Rather than deny the value of the meditative attainments, the Buddha seems to recognize and accept them as an inferior but necessary stage of the path, followed by a superior stage. However, he never disparages the meditative attainments; he simply places them in their appropriate context, which is the path (i.e., not delusion). Therefore, the path itself has a lower and a higher aspect.

The first goal of the Buddhist path beyond meditation is the stream entrant, attained by overcoming the three fetters (belief in a self, doubt, and attachment to rites and rituals). When one overcomes these, one will find awakening within seven rebirths. A stream entrant who reduces their greed, hatred, and delusion becomes a once-returner, who will only be reborn as a person once more before attaining awakening. The abandonment of the five lower fetters, especially sensual desire and anger, leads to ‘spontaneous rebirth’ in a divine realm, followed by awakening. This is the state of a non-returner. Incidentally, this addresses the question of whether divine beings can attain awakening. It is certainly true of arhants reborn as divine beings, and there are divine beings who are Buddhists. Finally, a monastic who extinguishes the corruptions (craving for sensual pleasures, existence, and ignorance) experiences the “uncorrupted deliverance of mind, the deliverance through Wisdom, which he has realized by his own insight.”  Thus, they become arhant.

Here we encounter the path of the arhant, the path that the Buddha taught as the “fast path” to emancipation, even though this is not the path that he himself followed. Despite its emphasis on the path of the arhant, the Pali Canon includes references to the path of the bodhisattva, which is the path of the Buddha, and a clear distinction is made between the attainment of the Buddha, who discovered the teaching as a result of following the path of the bodhisattva, and the arhant, who follows the teaching discovered by the Buddha, which I call “the primogeniture of the Buddha.” As Bhikkhu Bodhi admits in his essay on “Arahants, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas,” this distinction pervades the Pali Canon.  Although the arhant too attains a kind of wisdom, his pre-eminent attainment is dispassion, based on the negation of desirous attachment, corresponding to the eighth and ninth links of the chain of interdependent origination, whereas the pre-eminent attainment of the Buddha is Absolute Wisdom, the negation of ignorance, the ultimate root cause, the first and original link. Therefore, if Buddhism has a God, it is Ignorance or Not-knowing. Thus, the Pali Canon implicitly recognizes both the path of the bodhisattva and its superiority to the path of the arhant. The distinction between the arhant and the Buddha corresponds to the distinction between desirous attachment and ignorance, which in turn correspond to the distinction between virtue and wisdom respectively. The highest state is the mind delivered by wisdom and insight, the cure of ignorance, the ultimate root cause of the world.

Otthaddha asks the Buddha if there is a path or method that leads to these higher states. The Buddha reveals the Noble Eightfold Path: “This is the path, this is the way to the realisation of these things.”

The Noble Eightfold Path is the True Eightfold Way that leads to the higher attainments. This way is a sequence of steps, like any path, a point made by Dr. Peter Masefield, beginning with Right View,  the perfection of wisdom, and ending with Right Concentration, the perfection of attention, through three phases: Wisdom, Virtue, and Meditation. From the perspective of one approaching the path, the outer aspect of the path is Wisdom.  Its inner aspect is Virtue. Its ultimate aspect is Meditation.

The Buddha then tells Otthaddha the story of an experience that the Buddha had in Ghosita Park, Kosambi. Mandissa and Jaliya, two wanderers, ask the Buddha, “is the soul  the same as the body, or is the soul one thing and the body another?”.

The Buddha’s answer is subtle and nuanced: “I do not say that the soul is either the same as or different from the body.”  Although this threatens to turn into a paradox, it is not. One can be interpret this in various ways, as:

1. A refusal to answer the question;
2. An expression of agnosticism with respect to the question;
3. A refusal to make the distinction implied (i.e., rejection of the premise);
4. A statement that the question is logically meaningless; thus, there is no answer.

By not saying that the soul is the same as the body, the Buddha affirms the individual transcendent sentient continuity or ‘mind-stream,’ whereas by not saying that the life is different from the body, he affirms the intuition of the body as vital sentience. Thus, the Buddhist practice par excellence is awareness of the body. This story of Mandissa and Jaliya repeats in the Jaliya Sutta (DN 7).

Revised November 15, 2025