All great books have one foot in eternity and one in time. Howsoever perennial the truths they tell, the beauties they reveal, or the virtues they instil, they inevitably bear the marks of the circumstances that gave them birth. So it is for A Survey of Buddhism (hereafter, ‘the Survey’), in which the timeless truths of the Dharma, refracted through Sangharakshita’s remarkable genius, sit alongside evidence of the particular context in which he was communicating, the influences from which he was drawing, and the level of spiritual experience to which he had at that time attained.

This point is particularly relevant to Section 17, on meditation, his experience of which was by his own admission limited relative to what it later became. Referring to a time close to the publication of the Survey, his memoirs state,

Though I had been meditating for a number of years, my achievements in this field were far from commensurate with my aspirations. There were experiences of the bliss and peace of the lower dhyānas; there were visions, usually of the Buddha or Avalokiteshvara; there were flashes of insight, not always in connection with the meditation itself: and that was about all.¹

It therefore seems no coincidence that Section 17 is one of the less remarkable in Chapter One. If the contents of the Survey in general display a combination of Sangharakshita’s faithfulness to the Buddhist tradition and his own particular perspective on that tradition, here the former aspect predominates, and there is little that is distinctive to him. While there is much valuable information in it, those wanting to know of his particular approach to meditation, and especially to the dhyānas, must look to later sources.

We therefore turn instead to the section that follows it, on wisdom, which we will find a richer field to harvest. It will be convenient to divide the contents of the section into five topics:

1. The function of concentration and a conceptual understanding of doctrine in relation to insight
2. The three lakṣaṇas
3. The five skandhas
4. The stages of insight
5. The status of an Arhant

But first, a few words on the Threefold Way, of which wisdom (prajñā) is the ultimate stage. This important formulation of the path consists of trainings in ethics, meditation and wisdom. While these can be seen as three aspects of spiritual training, each requiring separate attention, they are usually also arranged in a progressive sequence. Thus, meditation requires a grounding in ethics, and wisdom, as the highest stage, requires both ethics and meditation as a basis. As Sangharakshita makes clear in Section 16, while ethics may be expressed in terms of lists of training principles for regulating behaviour, its higher purpose is to transform not only outward activity but the mental states from which all action proceeds; and since the cultivation of wholesome mental states is the essence of meditation, it is easy to see how the first stage of the Way leads naturally into the second. There is, however, an ambiguity around the term ‘meditation’ which is not found in the term samādhi, of which it is a translation. Meditation as commonly understood and practised falls short of the blissful, expansive and concentrated states of consciousness denoted by samādhi. Since ethics traditionally comprises action of body, speech and mind, the attempt to replace unwholesome with wholesome mental activity is best classed as the ‘ethics of the mind’, whereas samadhi in the sense I have indicated is among the results of so doing. The different stages of this, including the levels of dhyāna, are described in detail in Section 17.

Concentration and Doctrine

Turning then to Section 18, Sangharakshita’s account of wisdom begins by making clear the function of such states of meditative absorption in relation to it: ‘…it is only the concentrated mind that penetrates reality.’ Concentration, then, ‘…is not an end in itself but a means to an end. That end is wisdom, the seeing of things as in truth and reality they are.’ In fact, we are told, the various stages of samādhi, though useful, are ‘even as a means not indispensable.’

This last point is, however, questionable. Sangharakshita’s treatment of samadhi relies in part on Buddhaghosha’s Visuddhimagga,² which distinguishes between those who attain the transcendental path with the aid of samathā (approximately equivalent to samādhi), and those for whom vipassanā (approximately equivalent to prajñā) is sufficient. But it seems that later Sangharakshita became more sceptical of the notion that samathā can be dispensed with, at least in the great majority of cases. The fact that the idea is found exclusively in the commentaries fits with his view (developed at length in Chapter 2) that the early schools referred to as the Hīnayāna became overly scholastic and mistook conceptual knowledge for transcendental wisdom. If this indeed happened it is easy to see how samathā came to be seen as dispensable, since in the pursuit of an intellectual understanding of the Dharma, it is.³

Not that conceptual knowledge can be dispensed with either. The connection between an intellectual understanding of the Dharma and a transcendental insight into it Sangharakshita proceeds to make clear.

When, with his concentrated mind, the disciple penetrates the true nature of dharmas, his erstwhile distracted and merely ‘intellectual’ understanding of the teaching becomes transformed into transcendental wisdom.⁴

An intellectual understanding of the teaching must therefore be seen (alongside samādhi) as one of the prerequisites for transcendental insight into it, and in fact, Sangharakshita says, ‘must precede any attempt to put into actual practice even its most elementary tenets.’ I do not take him to mean that a complete theoretical understanding of all aspects of the Dharma is to be acquired before there is any question of starting to put the teachings into effect in one’s life. Merely that any attempt to practise the teaching, at however rudimentary a level, must be based on some sound theoretical foundation, however basic. And if one is to progress beyond a rudimentary level of Dharma practice, the theoretical foundation must be correspondingly advanced. Without such a foundation, he tells us, ‘…even though the disciple succeeds in developing concentration it will be of no more use to him than a sharpened pencil to a man who can neither read nor write.’ This is because concentration in meditation, even of the exalted kinds experienced in dhyāna, contains no inherent understanding of things. While it may be enjoyable and beneficial on its own level, it will not lead to an enduring liberation of the mind unless it is guided by the wisdom teachings of the Dharma, just as intellectual understanding will be impotent without the powerful concentration that is generated especially through meditation. Sangharakshita continues,

Wisdom, the ultimate stage of the threefold way, does not consist in the comprehension of truths superior to those which form the subject matter of Sections 10–15 [the sections of the Survey that deal with fundamental Buddhist doctrine], but in making those truths themselves the object, not of a distracted mind, as was hitherto the case, but of a mind concentrated by the practice of meditation. Knowledge stops short at conceptual symbols; wisdom passes beyond them to apprehension of the realities indicated by the symbols. But if the nature of that realization is to be communicated, recourse to those same symbols must again be had.

What is being said here is that there are two approaches to Buddhist doctrine, the first forming a necessary condition for the second. There is doctrine as understood by the intellect, resulting in conceptual knowledge; and there is doctrine as realized by spiritual intuition, resulting in transcendental wisdom. But in either case it is the same doctrine. Therefore, in approaching Wisdom as the third stage of the Threefold Way, we need not be introduced to a new set of doctrines belonging to a higher level of spiritual understanding, but rather try to understand those to which we have already been introduced in an intuitive rather than an intellectual mode.

This necessary distinction, yet intimate relation, between intellectual understanding of doctrine and transcendental insight into it is one of the subtlest aspects of Buddhist thought. Not only is it fundamental to the message of the Survey, it is also a recurring theme in Sangharakshita’s writings, and one about which he is sublimely lucid. For example, The Meaning of Orthodoxy in Buddhism begins,

Buddhism consists of a transcendental essence and a mundane expression which, though incapable of exhausting it, may yet in practice serve as the basis for the realization of that essence in its fullness. One of the most important parts of the mundane expression is the various collections of words which, after existing for centuries as oral traditions, were committed to writing and preserved in the form of sacred scriptures.⁵

And The Three Jewels gives us the following profound passage:

Spirit and letter are interdependent. Divorced from the living spirit of the Master’s teaching, the letter of the Dharma, however faithfully transmitted, is dead, a thing of idle words and empty concepts: separated from its concrete embodiment in the letter, the spirit of the Dharma, however exalted, lacking a medium of communication is rendered inoperative. In writing about Buddhism one should therefore be careful to pay equal attention to both aspects. The ideal account would in fact show spiritual experiences crystallizing into concrete doctrinal and disciplinary forms and these resolving themselves back into spiritual experiences. Full justice would then be done both to the letter and to the spirit of the tradition.⁶

Accordingly, only from the limited standpoint of the intellect can Buddhist ‘philosophy’ appear as one amongst many systems of ideas that can be mastered, classified, compared and contrasted. From the perspective of transcendental insight, there is a peculiar quality to the doctrinal formulations of Buddhism, not shared by any other system of thought. They are uniquely capable of bearing sustained concentration, not merely on the formulations themselves, but on the relationship of such to the true nature of phenomena, of which they are as accurate a description as concepts allow, and a direct apprehension of which they are capable of mediating.

The Three Lakṣaṇas

Sangharakshita goes on to consider one of the most important of such doctrinal formulations, the three characteristics (tri-lakṣaṇa) of conditioned existence. It is, he tells us, ‘…recognized by the vast majority of Buddhists as the keystone of the whole arch of Buddhist doctrine.’ This being the case, most of my readers will have encountered it before. The first two laksanas (aniccata and dukkha) we can deal with briefly. Sangharakshita’s treatment of the third (anattā), however, is distinctive and philosophically dense, and will reward some unpacking.

That Buddhism teaches impermanence is axiomatic. But the impermanence of what, exactly? Of saṅkhāra, comes the answer, or, as Sangharakshita has it here, ‘formations’, which is here being used in the sense of ‘compounds’. Compounded things are impermanent because ‘whatever has been put together must one day be taken apart.’ Nirvāṇa alone is asaṅkhata, or ‘uncompounded’,⁷ and therefore not subject to decay.

Turning to the second lakṣaṇa, Sangharakshita points out that suffering is inevitable if we are attached to the pleasures of impermanent things. Impermanence itself, however, is not the problem, since it is ‘not so much the cause as the occasion of our suffering.’ It is not impermanence that makes us suffer; it is the fact that our relationship with impermanent things is contaminated with desire.

With his examination of anattā, the third of the lakṣaṇas, Sangharakshita is concerned not only to communicate the meaning of the term itself but to show its interrelationship with the other two members of the triad, including the logical connections between them. It is this latter that I particularly wish to explore, especially because it brings us to a theme that I am not aware has received much comment, namely Sangharakshita’s study of logic. He undertook this under the guidance of Jagdish Kashyap in 1950, and it was, it seems, something of a love affair. His delight in the discovery is described in his memoirs:

Though in my early and middle teens I had read quite widely in philosophy, for some reason or other I had completely neglected this ancient and venerable partner of metaphysics, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and rhetoric. It was therefore with some trepidation that I set about making good the omission. But I need not have worried. Once I had emerged from the thorny thickets of Formal Logic I found myself in one of the most fascinating and enjoyable stretches of the intellectual terrain in which it had ever been my lot to wander, and with companions among the most delightful it had ever been my good fortune to meet.⁸ 

His previous neglect of logic is indeed a little surprising. In an extraordinary intellectual feat Aristotle invented the discipline single-handed, and following the rediscovery of his works in the 12^th century his logic became firmly embedded in academic education, and remained there well into the European Enlightenment (when it began to be challenged). In the works of many of the philosophers that Sangharakshita studied so avidly in his teens (Kant, for example) the terminology of formal logic would have been frequently employed, and familiarity with it taken for granted. Nowadays it tends to be confined to philosophy departments – though its application to the development of the semi-conductor has transformed the world in ways previously unimaginable. 

Be that as it may, once Sangharakshita had made good the omission, his fascination with logic spilled out in the pages of the Survey more often than one unfamiliar with the subject would realise. Admittedly, this is often to point out its limitations, especially as regards the study of Buddhism. For example, referring to certain rationalistically inclined scholars, he says,

Few of them…seem even to have paused to consider whether syllogistic reasoning is an adequate instrument for the exploration and elucidation of a teaching which claims to go beyond logic.⁹ 

More language from formal logic is employed in the introduction to the paradoxical methods of the Prajnaparamita.

Accordingly, we find the Prajñāpāramitā literature rejecting formal logic and revelling in a mystifying and bewildering ‘logic of contradictions’ which, to a mind suckled at the breast of Dame Syllogism, and nicely brought up on barbara, celarent, and darii, will seem like the nightmare ravings of a lunatic logician. The Law of Identity states that A is A; the Law of Contradiction, that A cannot be both B and not-B; and the Law of Excluded Middle, that a thing must be either B or not-B; but the Prajñāpāramitā, the texts relating to Perfect Wisdom, declare:

‘Beings, beings’, O Subhūti, as non-beings have they been taught by the Tathāgata. Therefore they are called ‘beings.’

Symbolically, A is B because it is not B.¹⁰

Here one can hardly praise Sangharakshita for wearing his learning lightly, and to anyone not versed in the specialised terminology he is using the passage will likely appear as cryptic as the Prajnaparamita itself. For our purposes, the only term needing explanation is the ‘syllogism’. This is a form of logical deduction consisting (in its standard form) of three terms distributed between two premises and a conclusion, each term appearing twice. Despite his occasional denunciations of it, Sangharakshita is not above using the syllogistic form of argument when it reinforces a point. The following is part of his explanation of the theoretical basis of the Tantra, and is a variant of what is known as a standard-form categorical syllogism:

All dharmas are śūnyatā. But śūnyatā is inseparable from karuṇā. All dharmas are therefore karuṇā.¹¹

This simple example I offer to illustrate both the nature of the syllogism and Sangharakshita’s willingness to use it. His discussion of the doctrine of anattā, however, is far from simple, and the lineaments of his argument might easily be lost among the complexity. I will attempt to present its bare bones in a simpler form, before offering some further reflections on what he is attempting.

The Logic of Anattā

He begins,

Dharmas are anattā (Sanskrit anātman) for two reasons, one of which represents the static, the other the dynamic, aspect of the doctrine of insubstantiality. Things have no ‘own-being’, no permanent identity or unchanging selfhood, firstly, because each one of them is merely the sum of its components, apart from which it is merely a name, and secondly, because it is not self-originated (a contradictory conception) but produced by a momentary collocation of exterior causal factors.

Attentive readers either of the Survey or of my earlier articles will be reminded of the distinction that Sangharakshita draws (in Section 12) between spatio-analytical and dynamic-synthetical methods for undoing delusion and seeing into the true nature of phenomena,¹² since it is basically the same point being made here. This also returns us to a favourite theme of mine, ‘the dyadic nature of human understanding’, of which more later.

Next, we are introduced to the idea of inference from one aspect of anattā to the other, as follows:

When the doctrine of anattā is considered under its first aspect [static], compounds are impermanent because they are insubstantial; under its second [dynamic], insubstantial because they are impermanent.

Looking at phenomena statically, one sees insubstantiality first and deduces impermanence from it; looking at them dynamically, the situation is reversed. Sangharakshita goes on to describe how each deduction might be executed. We will look at each in turn. A warning for the unwary: this will get a little technical, and the reader may be tempted to skim ahead. While this would be understandable, those willing to persist will find that the technicalities lead us to some fascinating philosophical insights.

First Deduction

Sangharakshita begins with impermanence, and deduces insubstantiality from it by way of the notion of ownership. It is assumed that there is a close connection between ownership and ‘substantial’ (fixed and separate) selfhood. However,

Because things are impermanent they can be taken away from us; what can be taken away from us is not our own; and what is not our own cannot be regarded as our self. Thus is the insubstantiality of phenomena deduced from their impermanence.

Now, although I have been talking about syllogisms (which, as we will see, are implied in Sangharakshita’s language), this is itself not a standard-form syllogism but rather, at least implicitly, a polysyllogism, meaning that a chain of syllogisms is required to link all the terms it contains. In this case two syllogisms suffice:

Syllogism 1

• Premise 1: Things that are impermanent can be taken away from us
• Premise 2: Things that can be taken away from us are not our own
• Conclusion: Impermanent things cannot be owned

Syllogism 2

• Premise 1: Things that cannot be owned cannot be a self
• Premise 2: Impermanent things cannot be owned [conclusion to the first syllogism)]
• Conclusion: Impermanent things cannot be a self (and are thus insubstantial)

We will return to this after looking at the second deduction.

Second Deduction

If Sangharakshita’s deduction from impermanence to insubstantiality is by way of the notion of ownership, to engineer a deduction the other way he calls to his aid the well-known doctrine of the five skandhas, according to which the human personality may be divided into the ‘heaps’ of form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness.

Mention of the five skandhas brings us to the static and analytical aspect of the doctrine of anattā in which it is not the conclusion but the major premise of the doctrine of anicca.

Incidentally, this reference to the ‘major premise’ is a strong indication that syllogistic reasoning is deliberately being invoked, since the term has a specific definition and function in a categorical syllogism. Explanation of this, however, may be a technicality too far, especially since Sangharakshita does not tell us in detail what he intends as the full content of the major premise – anattā gives us one term, whereas it takes two to make a proposition. While it is possible that he is using the term a little loosely, to indicate merely that anattā is the starting point for the deduction, this seems unlikely given his familiarity with formal logic.¹³

Anyway, Sangharakshita begins building his case through an examination of the skandhas. First he introduces them as an elaboration of anattā.

Things are transitory because they are compounded. But how are they compounded? What, for instance, are the elements of personality? To the second of these questions, from the spiritual point of view decidedly the more important, the Buddha’s classification of the psychophysical phenomena of so-called individual sentient existence into five ‘heaps’ supplies the answer.

There follows a detailed account of the skandhas, to go over which, in addition to the fact that they are covered by Sangharakshita in many other places, would distract from the main line of my argument. What is more immediately relevant is that having detailed them, he goes on to comment on their nature, thus:

…we are here concerned not with specified numbers of combination between solid and discrete things, but with an uninterrupted succession of permutations of an only more or less stable number of processes.

This identification of the skandhas as a congeries of processes is a necessary step in his argument. The whole line of deduction he summarises as follows:

Personality being neither simple, nor composed of elements that are simple, it follows that personality is a complex and compound thing; being compound it is transitory; because it is transitory it is a source of suffering. Thus from the static aspect of the characteristic of insubstantiality are deduced the two remaining characteristics of all phenomena.

This too requires a twofold polysyllogism to lay bare all the relations between its constituent elements.

Syllogism 1

• Premise 1: Whatever is not simple is complex and compound
• Premise 2: Personality is neither simple nor composed of elements that are simple
• Conclusion: Personality is complex and compound

Syllogism 2

• Premise 1: Personality is compounded (by the skandhas) [conclusion to the first syllogism]
• Premise 2: The skandhas are transitory
• Conclusion: Personality is transitory

A further deduction is implied linking transitoriness with suffering, though that link was made earlier in the discussion and we will not pursue it further here.

A Sequence of Ideas

Having made as explicit as possible the steps in Sangharakshita’s deductions, we are in a position to examine more closely the significance of the sequence of ideas as a whole. I identify four stages.

1) Transcendental Wisdom

Sangharakshita begins — as he so often does, both in the Survey and elsewhere — with an evocation of the purely transcendent, non-conceptual nature of Wisdom. Once again, ‘Knowledge stops short at conceptual symbols; Wisdom passes beyond them to apprehension of the realities indicated by the symbols.’ This is, of course, the essence of the matter, from which everything that follows is from one point of view a necessary or at least helpful set of explications, and from another a sequence of graded descents.  

2) Dyads

The next stage replicates a pattern that, as I pointed out in the first article in this series, runs throughout the first chapter of the Survey. Transcendental truth, when reflected in the medium of concepts, necessarily has to conform itself to what I have termed ‘the dyadic nature of human understanding’. That is, for reasons that I suspect lie outside the realm of rational enquiry, our conceptual models are shaped by an indeterminate number of terms, principles, ideas, or archetypes, which lie a priori in the mind’s capacity to cognize, and which appear to us in pairs, or what I call ‘dyads’. Examples include affirmation/negation, time/space, and analysis/synthesis. The dyad in question here consists of stasis and dynamism. ‘Dharmas are anatta’, Sangharakshita has told us, ‘for two reasons, one of which represents the static, the other the dynamic aspect of the doctrine of insubstantiality.’ It is important to note, especially in relation to what follows, that we are not here referring to a deductive subdivision of anattā into static and dynamic components; rather, that as it appears under the categories of thought (which take the form of dyads), it has a static and a dynamic aspect, and can be approached by way of either.

3) Mutual inference

We are then introduced to the idea of mutual inference between the two aspects, as follows: ‘When the doctrine of anattā is considered under its first aspect, compounds are impermanent because they are insubstantial; under its second, insubstantial because they are impermanent.’ But note that at this stage there is no reference to any third term linking the two aspects of anattā in the way that would be necessary for syllogistic deduction. We are simply told that there is a mutual implication between the two terms, such that each can be inferred from the other.

4) Syllogistic deduction

Finally, two chains of deduction are demonstrated linking each dyad with the other. As I have shown, the introduction of extra terms (ownership and loss in the first; simplicity and compoundedness in the second) make possible a chain of syllogisms, which are implied but not fully stated by Sangharakshita.

Further reflections

Now let us consider more closely the nature of the steps in the deduction, since they are revealing. The point I wish to make is seen most easily with the second set of syllogisms. The second premise of the second syllogism is ‘The skandhas are transitory’. But how was this statement arrived at? Sangharakshita describes the skandhas as ‘…an uninterrupted succession of permutations of an only more or less stable number of processes.’ This statement, however, is not defended by way of logic, but rather by way of a direct pointing to the changeable nature of the skandhas. For example,

Rūpa, or form…is not a phenomenon but a ‘heap’ of phenomena; not ‘matter’ but simply a congeries of events of the ‘material’ order. Similarly, the word vijñāna or consciousness does not represent a permanent unchanging element or ultimate principle of consciousness, but is simply the collective term for all our evanescent mental states.

It seems, then, that Sangharakshita’s claim that ‘Things are transitory because they are compounded’, while being presented as a summary of a chain of deduction, really points us towards the necessary mutual entailment between the static and dynamic aspects of anattā. To establish this relationship does not require deduction so much as a direct examination of the nature of phenomena in the light of these doctrines. On making such an examination, one sees that the connection between impermanence and insubstantiality is given in the nature of things, which is deeper than logic can penetrate. They are, indeed, related less by way of logical deduction than by a mutual implication of the meanings of the words; and they are so related by virtue of the fact that they are the same fundamental truth refracted according to the dyadic nature of human understanding.

It is similar with the argument from impermanence to insubstantiality. The statement ‘Because things are impermanent they can be taken away from us; what can be taken away from us is not our own; and what is not our own cannot be regarded as our self’, depends upon assumptions about ownership in relation to substantial selfhood that illustrate rather than prove Buddhist metaphysics. Thus, though the argument can be presented in syllogistic form as I have done, on a deeper level the propositions in the syllogisms can be seen as various explications of mutually entailing meanings that inhere in their constituent words by virtue of being phenomenologically interdependent aspects of the undifferentiated nature of the phenomena they are describing.

Recondite as these reflections no doubt are, they point to important conclusions. Logical proofs can instil only rational conviction. This is necessary, but limited. It is a unique characteristic of the truth claims of Buddhism that they are both logically defensible, and thus free from the charge of woolly mysticism, and capable of cutting through the very roots of the conceptual fabrication that makes logic, whether formal or otherwise, necessary or even possible. It is this that Insight in the specifically Buddhist sense aims to achieve.

The Skandhas and Insight

We can deal with the remaining headings somewhat more briefly. Although the skandhas are mentioned a number of times in the Survey they are treated most extensively in Section 18 — but according to the complex Abhidharma analyses of various schools, which I won’t replicate. Sangharakshita reminds us that references to them ‘occur again and again in Buddhist literature, and the importance of a right understanding of the truth symbolized by this ubiquitous formula cannot be overestimated.’ To emphasise their importance, he even goes on to propose a visual image which is in part a combination of the eight-spoked ‘Dhammachakra’, and the ‘Wheel of Becoming’.

If the twelvefold conditioned co-production be regarded as the rim of the great wheel of the Dharma set rolling by the Buddha in the Deer Park at Sarnath… and if the eight steps of the Way be taken as its spokes, then the doctrine of the five ‘heaps’ will be the hub of the wheel, and the doctrine of insubstantiality the empty space in the centre of the wheel, without which it would not be a wheel but only a useless disk.

The image is interesting and deserves reflection. The direction, as it were, of our Dharma practice must be from the circumference to the centre. If the outer rim represents the unenlightened human situation as we cycle through births and deaths, the spokes of the wheel symbolise the path that must be trod on our way to a release from the cycle. Treading the Eightfold Path prepares us to see attachment to the five skandhas as the final encasing around the central truth of anātma.

As this implies, Insight itself can be seen in terms of the five skandhas, as Sangharakshita makes clear with a choice quote from the scriptures. From here he discusses the nature of insight experience in general, starting with the traditional comparison with flashes of lightning:

Insight comes, not all at once, but in a series of ‘instantaneous’, that is to say, time-transcending, ‘flashes’ that are as it were not continuous with, but utterly discrete from, the phenomenal order. These flashes, coming with ever-increasing frequency, gradually merge first into a series of more and more sustained emissions of radiance, and then into the unbroken and wholly transcendent illumination of Perfect Wisdom.

Progress with such insight is, Sangharakshita insists, gradual, not sudden, and he quotes the Buddha to support this contention. The idea of ‘sudden Enlightenment’, found particularly in Zen Buddhism,

does not mean that the goal of the holy life can be attained quickly and easily. It merely insists that inasmuch as the mundane and transcendental ‘planes’ are discontinuous there can be from the mundane side no question of a greater or less degree of approximation to insight, whether in the form of a ‘flash’ or as a ‘stream’ of illumination. Either it is there or it is not there. No intermediate positions are possible.

This brings us to the abstruse question of the nature of the connection between the mundane and the transcendental. Here I am well out of my depth, and will only say on this occasion that the path can, as Sangharakshita has emphasized, be formulated in terms of a progressive series of conditions that link the two. Seen as such one can clearly be closer to or further from a realisation of insight. But that is not the same as a degree of insight. With the arising of insight something fundamentally new comes into play, which cannot be explained merely in terms of a refinement of or outgrowth from the mundane conditions that preceded it.

Stages of Insight

The stages of ethics and meditation can be subdivided, the former into (for example) action of body, speech and mind; the latter into (for example) the various levels of dhyāna. Just so, subdivision of the stage of wisdom is also possible, firstly into four, according to the stage of insight reached, and then again each stage into two: the ‘path’ (mārga) and the ‘fruit’(phala) of that stage. The division of the progress of insight into four basic stages gives us four categories of membership of the Ārya-sangha: Stream Entrants, Once-Returners, Non-Returners, and Arahants. Membership of these categories is defined according to which of ten ‘fetters’ (daśa-saṃyojana) has been broken. These relations are shown in the table below. Such abbreviation is justified by the fact that Sangharakshita is communicating information from the tradition without much by way of commentary, and also he has dealt with the topic of the four categories of Ārya-sangha and their relationship with the ten fetters more fully elsewhere.¹⁴ There are, however, a few important points to be made in response.

Stage	Fetters Broken	Rebirths remaining
Stream-Enterer (Sotāpanna)	Identity view (sakkāya-diṭṭhi) Doubt (vicikicchā) Attachment to rites and rituals (sīlabbata-parāmāsa)	Up to seven rebirths in the desire realm
Once-Returner (Sakadāgāmi)	Partially weakens: Sensual desire (kāmacchanda) Ill will (vyāpāda)	At most one more rebirth in the desire realm
Non-Returner (Anāgāmi)	Sensual desire (kāmacchanda) Ill will (vyāpāda)	At most one more rebirth in the ‘pure abodes’, whence they will gain liberation
Arahant	Lust for form realms (rūparāga) Lust for formless realms (arūparāga) Conceit (māna) Restlessness (uddhacca) Ignorance (avijjā)	No more rebirths

If the relations between the categories of the Ārya-sangha and the ten fetters seems a bit technical, that is because it is, and this should raise suspicion. In the centuries after the Buddha’s life his teaching underwent systematization and development, some of which occurred early enough to find its way into the Pāli Suttas themselves, and not all of which was necessarily spiritually helpful. In this case, the attempt to define the four categories of the Ārya-sangha in relation to the ten fetters is unconvincingly artificial. This seems to have been Sangharakshita’s own view, at least later. In The Three Jewels he compares different classifications of the stages of Insight, and says that ‘with its formalistic pattern of four main types, each subdivided according to Path and Fruit, its enumeration of the fetters broken at each stage, and the number of rebirths remaining, this was the most unimaginative, schematic and rigid of them all.’ The problem with this kind of conceptual schematization is that it can make the spiritual life appear as some kind of quasi-scientific formula, rather than as something mysterious, ungraspable, and reason-transcending. One danger of treating such schemata too literally is what Sangharakshita calls elsewhere ‘pseudo-spiritual technism’.¹⁵ The spiritual life having been reduced to a quasi-scientific formula, its practice easily becomes merely the application of the appropriate techniques corresponding to the formula. Then comes the identification with, and championing of, those formulas and techniques as though they were the sole or at least most effective way of understanding the Dharma and its practice.

The Spiritual Status of the Arhant

The section finishes with a discussion of the spiritual status of the Arhant. Sangharakshita is concerned to preserve the full profundity of Arahantship as an ideal. It was considered by the Buddha himself to involve the same perfect liberation of the mind as he himself had attained. ‘The sole difference between him and his Enlightened disciples consists in the priority of his attainment, and in the fact that they attained Nirvāṇa with, he without, the aid of a teacher…’ Therefore, ‘There are no valid reasons for regarding the attainment of Buddhahood and the attainment of arahantship as two different, even contradictory, spiritual ideals – much less still for regarding the latter as a synonym for spiritual selfishness.’ With the rest of this section Sangharakshita is concerned to justify this claim through a number of references to scripture, and especially to demonstrate that compassion was always an aspect of the Arhant ideal. The loss of this perspective from the tradition, its reasons and consequences, are dealt with in detail in Chapter Two. To this we turn in the next article.

1. Sangharakshita, In the Sign of the Golden Wheel
2. The foundational commentarial work of Theravada Buddhism
3. In Chapter 2 Sangharakshita makes the same point at greater length: ‘We may not be drawing too far-fetched a conclusion if we see in the exaggerated scholasticism of the Hīnayāna one of the main factors contributing to the almost total neglect of the practice of meditation which is so striking a feature of modern Theravāda Buddhism. Once we have started regarding as a true picture of reality a list, or even a chart, of dharmas, fully comprehensible to the rational mind, the need for the development of wisdom, and therewith for the practice of meditation, tends to become obscured.’
4. Unless otherwise indicated all quotes are from Sangharakshita, A Survey of Buddhism, Section 18
5. Sangharakshita, The Meaning of Orthodoxy in Buddhism
6. Sanharakshita, The Three Jewels, Chapter 8
7. Sangharakshita more commonly uses ‘Unconditioned’ to translate asaṅkhata
8. Sangharakshita, The Rainbow Road
9. Sangharakshita, A Survey of Buddhism, Chapter 1, Section 3
10. Sangharakshita, A Survey of Buddhism, Chapter 2, Section 2
11. Sangharakshita, A Survey of Buddhism, Chapter 3, Section 12
12. See ‘The Transcendental Principle and Dyads of the Understanding’
13. Traditionally defined, a major premise contains the major term, which appears as the predicate in the conclusion, in contrast to the minor term, which contains the subject. In the classic syllogism, ‘all humans are mortal, Socrates is human, therefore Socrates is mortal’, ‘mortal’ is the major term, which makes ‘all humans are mortal’ the major premise.

    Since Sangharakshita does not tells us the full content of the major premise, we are left to infer it. Ironically, this can be done by another deduction! If our starting point is, as we are told, insubstantiality, and the conclusion towards which we are being led is that ‘all phenomena are impermanent’, according to the rules governing syllogisms the major term could only be some variation of ‘all compounded things are impermanent’ (impermanent being the major term). This necessarily gives us the compounded nature of phenomena as the minor premise.

    • Major premise: All compounded things are impermanent
    • Minor premise: All phenomena are compounded
    • Conclusion: All phenomena are impermanent

    This, however, while technically valid, adds little to our understanding by being expressed in syllogistic form, since one of its premises merely states what we are told the argument is intended to prove, namely the necessary connection between insubstantiality and impermanence.

14. E.g. Sangharakshita, The Three Jewels and A Guide to the Buddhist Path
15. Sangharakshita, The Taste of Freedom