| Chapter 1: | The Pāli Nikāyas |
|
|
path. But when Buddhaghosa rhetorically asks why practitioners attain nirodha-samāpatti, the answer is,
Being wearied by the arising and passing away of compositional factors, they attain it thinking, “Let us now dwell in bliss by being without consciousness here and now and attaining the cessation that is nibbāna” [nirodhaṃ nibbānaṃ patvā].13
Besides passages that appear to state that the highest stage of samathapractice, the attainment of cessation, is equivalent to nibbāna, there are other passages that present liberating insight as arising from other samatha states. The Mālunkyāputta Sutta of the MN appears to see the liberating insight that the five aggregates are characterized by impermanence, suffering, and selflessness as arising from the immersion in the first jhāna. The relevant passage reads as follows:
Secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by applied and sustained thought, with joy and bliss born of seclusion. Whatever exists therein of material form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness, he sees those as impermanent, as suffering, as a disease, as a tumor, as a barb, as a calamity, as an affliction, as alien, as disintegrating, as void, as not-self. He turns his mind away from those states and directs it towards the deathless element thus: “This is peaceful, this is sublime, that is, the stilling of all formations, the relinquishing of all attachments, the destruction of craving, dispassion, cessation, nibbāna.”
Another example of passages in the Nikāyas presenting the samatha path as eliminating forms of delusion that are usually said to be only destroyable by insight—such as the false idea of “I am” (asmi-māna) or “self” (attā)—is found at the very beginning of the SN’s Sāriputtasaṃyutta, where the chief disciple Sāriputta is said to reach each of the jhānas and samāpattis and gain the following realization every time. For example,