Gradually Sudden
June 28, 2023

There was a question that arose in medieval Buddhism, asking whether the practice was sudden or gradual. And as so often was the case with those questions in medieval Buddhism, what we find in the early texts tells us that neither side was right, neither side was wrong. The practice is both sudden and gradual.

The Buddha’s own analogy for the practice is the continental shelf off of India. There’s a gradual slope, followed by a sudden drop-off. What’s gradual about the practice is the gradual development of your discernment. The things we’re going to need to know are all right here, but because our discernment is weak, we don’t see them. We don’t see the connections. We don’t see the steps.

A lot of things come up in the mind and they seem to be unarticulated: a surge of energy, a surge of emotion. A surge like that doesn’t seem to have any words to it, and it’s hard to say where it comes from, or why it comes. But as you get the mind to settle down, you get more and more sensitive not only to little movements in the mind, but also to quick movements. Things slow down as well.

It’s like listening to a bird song. There are many birds that seem to be singing in chords, just a blast of many notes all at once. But it turns out we hear it that way because what you might call the refresh-rate for our ears is slow, slower than theirs. If you were to take a recording of the bird’s song, slow it down, you’d see that the blast of notes was actually an arpeggio, a series of quick notes. Once you hear them distinctly, you can understand what the bird is doing.

Well, it’s the same with the mind: A lot of emotions come up as just a burst of energy. Yet, when the mind begins to slow down, and you begin to see the steps by which the mind goes through its processes of creating thoughts and then dropping them, it all begins to make sense.

Not in the sense that you agree with what the mind has been doing, but you can understand how the mind has been operating under ignorance. If you develop your powers of concentration, develop your mindfulness, and focus on the question of how not to fall for these things, the steps gradually begin to slow down, and you can see them clearly.

When you see them clearly, you begin to see how empty many of them are. The mind does have its funny reasons. And one of the reasons it goes through these reasons so fast is because it knows that if you were to see the steps, they wouldn’t make sense. So it rushes through and tries to pull you along simply with the force of the rush.

When you can see how the mind has made this decision and then makes that decision, you’re not so easily swayed. You can drop things that you held on to because you didn’t realize what they were.

When you drop things, that’s when the practice gets sudden. You see in an instant. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about this. As he says, you go through the practice again and again and again. Whatever your meditation topic, you reflect on it again and again, and you don’t count the times. You just keep doing it because you know that this is the part of the path that’s gradual. But then there will come a point where things click, they fall in to place, and the bottom drops out.

This may be one of the reasons why the phrase for the attainment is stream entry is actually falling into the stream. You’re riding along on the bank, and suddenly you’re in the stream where you weren’t before. The stream will then take you. This is why it’s called a stream: It takes you to a goal, the very first taste of the deathless. And you realize that you’re not doing the stream.

You’ve put together the path, the one the Thai ajaans call *magga-sammangi, *which is the path coming together and falling into place. Then you fall into the stream.

It’s interesting that these images all have to do with falling. The continental shelf goes along gradually, and then you have a drop-off, and you fall over the drop-off. The things that used to support you suddenly give way. But instead of falling into danger, you fall into something that’s of much greater value. Those are the moments we hope for. But you don’t get there by simply hoping for them. You do the work, the gradual work, feeling your way.

We’d like to see that it’s orderly, with nice steps going nowhere but up, and there actually are suttas in the Canon that talk about how orderly the path is. Well, in retrospect it’s orderly, but as you’re feeling your way, you don’t see the order yet. But you know the basic principles: You hold to the precepts. You try to get the mind more mindful, more concentrated, more peaceful. Try to detect disturbances in the mind that you didn’t see before. And learn to be okay with just sitting here for a while.

Some people complain, “You sit there and nothing happens.” It’s like learning how to be a hunter. They say that anthropologists, when they try to learn the skills of the various tribes they study, have found that hunting is the hardest skill to learn because it requires a lot of patience and a lot of alertness: unrelenting alertness, steady alertness, all-around alertness. Which is precisely the quality we’re trying to develop here.

As you maintain that alertness, you’ll begin to see little movements of the mind that you didn’t see before. That’s the discernment that comes from concentration. Your intent is to get things still. And in the process of getting them still, the insights are the bonus.

If you aim too directly at the insights without getting the causes right, it turns into what we call vipassanā-saññā, perceptions of insight, which are not the real thing. Remember, perceptions are compared to mirages. You want to force yourself to have an insight, you’ve heard about what the insights are, and so the mind tries to create them.

It’s the unexpected insights: Those are the ones that are more reliable. And again, as the ajaans say, you don’t have to be thinking about inconstancy, stress, or not self. You simply see the mind doing something and you realize that it’s stupid, that it doesn’t make sense—something that was buried in that squawk of a sound, but now you begin to pick out the different arpeggios. When you see that it was stupid, you just drop it. You see that you were putting effort into something that didn’t repay the effort, so why do it?

The very practical part of the mind is what’s really going to help you here—the part that says, “Is this worth the effort that goes into it? If it’s not, why bother?” It’s simply that you learn how to apply that to areas of the mind that you ordinarily don’t apply it to.

Recently I did an article on the topic of psychic powers that can come from meditation, and I got some pretty snide rebuttals from people who were trapped in their Western point of view, or the materialist point of view, in which psychic powers are delusions. They asked, “How can you possibly believe in this stuff? Didn’t the Buddha teach you to question things?” If they had actually been interested in having a conversation I would have asked them in return, “Well, how about questioning your materialistic presuppositions?” We coast through life assuming a lot of things that are actually detrimental to us, but we don’t question them because we surround ourselves with people who make the same assumptions.

Insight comes when we learn to how to step back from our assumptions, getting the mind quiet, and seeing our thoughts as strange—seeing them as instances of stress arising and passing away, and asking ourselves: Is the stress worth it? In some cases it is. The thoughts that help you understand things, the thoughts that help you clear up doubts about your own practice: Those are useful. Those are worth the stress. But there are a lot of thoughts that just keep us bound, keep us fettered. They’re not worth the stress at all.

So when that practical part of the mind sees that, it’s going to drop them automatically. It’s like seeing something that you’ve been standing on suddenly falling open beneath you—like a trapdoor. That’s the sudden part of the path.

But you can’t plan the sudden parts. You simply follow the instructions that show you how to do things gradually. If you trust in the process, trust in these gradual instructions, they’ll take you to those sudden parts, to where the trapdoors are. You can’t clone your sudden awakening, but you can plan your next step, and your next step. When those steps will reach the goal, you can’t tell in advance, but trust that they will.