Glossary

The definitions given here are based on the meanings these terms have in Ajaan Lee’s writings and sermons.

avijjā: Unawareness; ignorance; counterfeit knowledge.

āyatana: Sense medium. The six inner sense media are the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and intellect. The six outer sense media are their respective objects.

bhagavant: An epithet for the Buddha, commonly translated as ‘Blessed One’ or ‘Exalted One.’ Some commentators, though, have traced the word etymologically to the Pali root meaning ‘to divide’ and, by extension, ‘to analyze’, and so translate it as ‘Analyst.’

dhamma: Event; phenomenon; the way things are in and of themselves; their inherent qualities; the basic principles underlying their behavior. Also, principles of behavior that human beings should follow so as to fit in with the right natural order of things; qualities of mind they should develop so as to realize the inherent quality of the mind in and of itself. By extension, ‘dhamma’ is used also to refer to any doctrine that teaches such things. Thus the Dhamma of the Buddha refers both to his teachings and to the direct experience of the quality of nibbāna at which those teachings are aimed.

dhātu: Element; property; the elementary properties that make up the inner sense of the body and mind: earth (solidity), water (liquidity), fire (heat), wind (energy or motion), space, and consciousness.

jhāna: Meditative absorption in a single object, notion or sensation.

kamma: Intentional acts that result in states of being and birth. ‘Kamma debts’ are the moral debts one has to others either through having been a burden to them (the primary example being one’s debt to one’s parents) or from having wronged them.

khandha: Component parts of sensory perception: rūpa (sense data, appearances); vedanā (feelings of pleasure, pain or indifference); saññā (labels, concepts, allusions); saṅkhāra (mental constructs or fabrications); and viññāṇa (consciousness, the act of attention that ‘spotlights’ objects so as to know them distinctly and pass judgment on them).

magga: The path to the cessation of suffering and stress. The four transcendent paths—or rather, one path with four levels of refinement—are the path to stream entry (entering the stream to nibbāna, which ensures that one will be reborn at most only seven more times), the path to once-returning, the path to non-returning, and the path to arahantship. Phala—fruition—refers to the mental state immediately following the attainment of any of these paths.

mala: Stains on the character, traditionally listed as nine: anger, hypocrisy, envy, stinginess, deceit, treachery, lying, evil desires, and wrong views.

nibbāna (nirvana): Liberation; the unbinding of the mind from greed, anger, and delusion, from physical sensations and mental acts. As this term is used to refer also to the extinguishing of fire, it carries connotations of stilling, cooling, and peace. (According to the physics taught at the time of the Buddha, the property of fire exists in a latent state to a greater or lesser degree in all objects. When activated, it clings and is bound to its fuel. As long as it remains latent or is extinguished, it is ‘unbound’.)

saṅkhāra: Fabrication—the forces that fabricate things, the process of fabricating, and the fabricated things—mental or physical—that result. In some contexts this term refers specifically to the fabrication of thoughts in the mind. In others, it refers to all five khandhas (see above).

uposatha: Special days in the Buddhist calendar—the days of the full moon, the new moon, and the half-moon—set aside for meritorious activities.

If anything in this translation is inaccurate or misleading, I ask forgiveness of the author and reader for having unwittingly stood in their way. As for whatever may be accurate, I hope the reader will make the best use of it, translating it a few steps further, into the heart, so as to attain the truth at which it points.

The translator