The Rose-Apple Tree and the Two Teachers

I. The Student Who Stood Up and Left — Can the Deepest Concentration Itself Be Liberation?

Picture the scene. A seeker enters a teacher's school, practises without rest, and within a short time reaches the highest state that teacher has spent a lifetime teaching. The teacher is overjoyed and invites the student to sit beside him as an equal, to lead the community together — the highest recognition a student can be given. And at exactly that moment the student rises and takes his leave, saying: the place this path has brought me to is not where I am going. He left to look for another teacher; reached the same height again; and again stood up and walked away.

That student was the man who would become the Buddha. What he twice declined, twice rose and left, was not some mediocre method. It was the very summit of what the entire meditative culture of his India could reach.

This story is worth taking as the real opening of a volume on samādhi because it forces into the open the one thing about concentration that is most easily misunderstood. In the imagination of many modern readers, the goal of meditation is simply "the deeper the better" — stiller, steadier, less disturbed — as though, if one only pushed attention to its limit, one would arrive at some final resting place. The picture is not groundless: concentration does deliver a stillness and ease that come in layers, each subtler and harder to shake than the last. Follow that road to its end, and one conclusion seems to draw itself — the deepest concentration is liberation.

The Buddha rejected that conclusion with his own hand. And he did not reject it from the outside. He was not a bystander who had never tasted deep concentration and yet presumed to comment on it; on the contrary, he reached the top of that road, lived there, and then walked back out. What this chapter follows is precisely that step out: on what grounds did he judge that the highest worldly concentration was not liberation? And on what grounds did he, conversely, decide that an ordinary first jhāna (paṭhama-jhāna), entered in childhood, was the path to awakening?

The previous chapter loosened three words that the modern vocabulary tends to press into one — samādhi as a faculty (the mind's gathering), samatha as a method (the calming approach), jhāna as an attainment (a graded absorption). This chapter lays a narrative thread across all three: the Buddha's concentration was not a concept deduced in a study, but something he had tried at its very deepest and then set down by hand. That trajectory — tried, and released — draws the line between the right concentration of Buddhism and the formless absolute of the other teachers; and that line is the spine the whole volume returns to.

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II. Under the Rose-Apple Tree — The Re-Remembered Jhāna

To understand why the Buddha set down the deepest concentration, one has first to see why he took up the shallowest again.

After his renunciation and before his awakening, the bodhisatta passed through years famous for their austerity. Fasting, breath-suppression, self-mortification, the body driven to its limit — in his day this was an honoured road of search, the purchase of mental purity with bodily pain. But after six years his verdict was clear: the road does not lead through. A Chinese life of the Buddha records the turning point: he had practised austerities for nearly six years, had not won liberation, and therefore knew this was not the path.¹ Pain is not the door. To take suffering as the price of purification is a beautiful equation, and a false one.

It was precisely at this exhausted moment that a long-buried memory surfaced. The bodhisatta recalled a scene from his boyhood: on a day when his father was at work in the fields, he had sat in the shade of a rose-apple tree (jambu), and his mind had withdrawn, of its own accord, from the desire of the senses and from unskilful states, and entered the first jhāna — a stillness born of seclusion, lucid and at ease.² This memory was not sweet nostalgia; it was a flash of method. And so he asked himself, "Could that be the path to awakening?" (siyā nu kho eso maggo bodhāya), and at once concluded, "That is the path to awakening" (eseva maggo bodhāya).³

Between that question and that answer lies the first load-bearing point of doctrine in this volume. For a long time the bodhisatta had lumped the pleasure of meditative concentration together with the pleasure of the senses, treating both as things a seeker ought to fear and renounce — for is sensual pleasure not the very source of bondage? But the memory under the rose-apple tree forced him to draw the distinction again: the pleasure born of that childhood first jhāna and the pleasure born of indulging the senses and giving rein to the unskilful are simply not the same kind of thing. So he undid that fear, and asked himself, "Why am I afraid of that pleasure, a pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality and unskilful qualities?" (kiṁ nu kho ahaṁ tassa sukhassa bhāyāmi, yaṁ taṁ sukhaṁ aññatreva kāmehi aññatra akusalehi dhammehi) — and answered, "I am not afraid of that pleasure" (na kho ahaṁ tassa sukhassa bhāyāmi).⁴

That is the whole weight of this single beat under the rose-apple tree: the pleasure of wholesome concentration is not to be feared — it is the door. The pain of austerity is not the door; the pleasure of indulgence is not the door; only this pure ease, born "secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unskilful states," is the entrance to awakening. Put another way, what the bodhisatta establishes here is not "the deeper the concentration the better," but "the character of the concentration decides whether it is the path." A jhāna cut clean from craving and the unskilful — even the first and shallowest one — is nearer to awakening than any lofty state that has lost that condition.

A red line must be drawn here, to forestall a misreading. The childhood "recollection of the first jhāna" is the recollection of a concentration; it is not sati (mindfulness) itself. The sati treated in the previous volume is the ground-floor of the Six Practice Gates; the samādhi of this volume is the inward gathering built upon that ground. What happened under the rose-apple tree is that the bodhisatta remembered a jhāna he had once lived through, and from it recognized the methodological direction toward awakening; that memory triggered a re-evaluation of concentration — it did not reduce concentration back to mindfulness. To equate "the recollection of the first jhāna" directly with "the cultivation of right mindfulness" would flatten the difference of stratum between sati and samādhi, and that is the reduction most easily committed in reading this passage.

One further matter calls for a plain, restrained handling. Some lives of the Buddha add to the rose-apple scene a detail of the ploughman turning the soil, insects exposed, birds pecking them up — used to stir the bodhisatta's compassion, the compassion then drawing him into concentration. This chapter keeps the structure — compassion as the trigger for entering the jhāna — without dwelling on the chain of "turned soil, exposed creatures, pecking birds" as imagery in its own right; the centre of gravity stays on the line of doctrine, "secluded and still, this is most true,"⁵ and not on a theatre of life and death in the fields.

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III. The Door of the Two Teachers — Mastered to the Limit, Then Set Down

Under the rose-apple tree the direction was fixed: wholesome meditative pleasure is the path. But that is only the road's beginning. At the outset of his renunciation, the seeking bodhisatta had followed the most esteemed meditative tradition of his day upward, until there was no further up to climb. This stretch is the real dramatic core of the chapter — because what it stages is not "finding," but "setting down even after having found."

The bodhisatta studied, in turn, under two teachers.

The first was Āḷāra Kālāma.⁶ Under him the bodhisatta attained the dimension of nothingness (ākiñcaññāyatana) — the seventh of the formless states. The Chinese Discourse on Rāma records the recognition between master and pupil: the bodhisatta asks what attainment is being taught, and Āḷāra answers that, having transcended the dimension of infinite consciousness, he has entered and dwells in the dimension of nothingness.⁷ The bodhisatta soon reached the state his teacher had reached, and Āḷāra offered him the highest courtesy a teacher can extend — an invitation to lead the community together.

The second was Uddaka Rāmaputta. Here the wording must be careful: "Rāma" (Rāma) is Uddaka's father, not Uddaka himself; the text marks the point plainly — it is my father Rāma who, by his own knowledge, realization, and experience, declared this teaching.⁸ What Uddaka proclaimed was the attainment his father Rāma had reached; this generational attribution is explicit in the source. Under Uddaka (transmitting what was Rāma's) the bodhisatta attained the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception (nevasaññānāsaññāyatana) — the eighth of the formless states, the very summit of worldly concentration, which tradition calls the peak of existence (bhavagga).⁹

At this point the bodhisatta had reached the ceiling of the meditative culture of his India. Above it, there was no road. By the logic of "the deeper the better," the story should now close in triumph: the highest concentration attained, the search accomplished.

And yet the bodhisatta rose and left. Twice. The verdict is word-for-word the same, only the final clause changing with the state:

I thought to myself: "This teaching does not lead to insight, does not lead to awakening, does not lead to nibbāna. Better that I set this teaching down and seek instead the unailing, unsurpassed sanctuary, nibbāna …" — and I set the teaching down.¹⁰

The Pāli of this verdict is a complete formula of negation (the nibbidā-formula): this teaching "does not lead to disillusionment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to insight, to awakening, to extinguishment" (nāyaṁ dhammo nibbidāya na virāgāya na nirodhāya na upasamāya na abhiññāya na sambodhāya na nibbānāya saṁvattati).¹¹ On where the two teachers' methods reach, it sets one limit: they lead "only as far as rebirth in the dimension of nothingness / rebirth in the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception" (yāvadeva … ūpapattiyā) — that is, all this discipline can guarantee is rebirth, in a future life, in the corresponding high meditative heaven, and not liberation here and now.

A small philological detail hides here, and it bears on the precision of the chapter's verdict. The criterion on which the bodhisatta sets the two teachers' methods aside is this nibbidā-formula of negation, and not a wording of the "this teaching is not enough" (nālaṁ) type. That "not-enough" register belongs more typically to another set of austerity narratives, not to the two-teachers passage. To summarize the reason for abandonment as "the concentration was not yet deep enough, not yet adequate" would misstate the nature of the problem — the bodhisatta abandoned the formless attainments not because they were shallow, but precisely because they were already the deepest, and the deepest still "does not lead to nibbāna." The problem is not depth. The problem is direction.

The story's coda nails the verdict down harder still. After his awakening, the first thing the Buddha thought of was to bring the teaching to the two teachers who had once led him to the summit. But on inquiry, both had died — Āḷāra seven days before, Uddaka fourteen days before.¹² Their concentration was the highest a person could then reach; and yet both had died on this side of the line of liberation, short by a single step — the one step that concentration itself can never cross.

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IV. What Those Two Attainments Are — The Four Formless Attainments and the Peak of Existence

To grasp what exactly the bodhisatta set down, one has first to be clear about the structure of those two states. But a methodological line must be set here: this section describes what they are, it does not teach how to enter them. To read — or to write — this passage as an operating manual for the formless attainments (how to set the object, how to lay the preliminaries, how to manage entering and leaving) is to step over the line. This volume treats the history and doctrine of concentration, not a meditation handbook; the practical instruction of the formless attainments lies outside the scope of this study.

Above the four jhānas (the four absorptions of the form sphere, born of seclusion), the tradition lists four still finer states, advancing by negation, layer upon layer — together the four formless attainments. The Saṃyukta Āgama distinguishes them by the successive negation of the object: an object of form, an inner object, an object of "there is," an object of "existence," each layer a further letting-go of the object of the one before.¹³ Following that ladder of negation:

• the dimension of infinite space — transcending all perception of form, taking boundless space as object;
• the dimension of infinite consciousness — letting go even of space, taking boundless consciousness as object;
• the dimension of nothingness (taught by Āḷāra) — letting go of consciousness, taking "there is nothing at all" as object;
• the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception (transmitted by Uddaka) — where even the subtle perception of "nothingness" has all but ceased, arrived at the threshold of perception and non-perception, utterly still and utterly fine; and so the summit of worldly concentration, named the peak of existence.

The question is this: at the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception — this highest, stillest, hardest-to-shake of states — what is it, still?

The Āgama verdict is cold and clear. The Madhyama Āgama Discourse on the Analysis of the Dhamma points straight at it: the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception is still conditioned … impermanent … suffering.¹⁴ The weight of that sentence has to be felt slowly. Even the summit of worldly concentration falls within the category of the conditioned (what is fabricated, put together); whatever is conditioned is impermanent; and whatever is impermanent is, in the end, suffering. In other words, however still the peak the two teachers taught, it remains in essence a position within the round of rebirth (saṃsāra), not the exit from it. It is an exceedingly high storey, but still inside the city wall.

The later Abhidharma systematized this ladder into the standard enumeration of the four formless attainments (as set out, for instance, in the Abhidharmakośa),¹⁵ and drew a further distinction: above the four formless states there is one more, the attainment of cessation (saññāvedayitanirodha, the cessation of perception-and-feeling). But the line must be kept clear — cessation does not belong to the four formless attainments; it sits above them, and only the noble ones attain it. The two teachers' instruction caps, structurally, at neither-perception-nor-non-perception, and does not touch cessation. To miscount the teachers' attainment as cessation would misjudge both the height and the nature of the wall they built.

Once this layer is understood, the bodhisatta's judgment is no longer a momentary stubbornness but a structural insight: however high concentration is pushed, however fine its stillness, so long as it is still a conditioned fabrication, still dwelling upon some (however subtle) object, it remains within the category of impermanence and suffering. Deep concentration can let suffering cease for a while, can let the mind hold still for a while, but it cannot cut suffering at the root. That root is tied somewhere else.

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V. Why He Set Them Down — "This Does Not Lead to Nibbāna" and the Anchoring of Right Concentration

So we return to the chapter's central question: on what grounds did the Buddha judge that the highest worldly concentration was not liberation?

The answer lies not in concentration itself, but in the gulf between concentration and liberation — a gulf that no deepening of concentration can cross. "This teaching does not lead to nibbāna" — the point of the verdict is not that the dimension of nothingness or the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception are bad, or false, but that they "do not lead" (do not conduce) to nibbāna. They are high places, but not the exit; ultimate stillings of agitation, but not the final stilling. Concentration, however deep, if it is not turned back toward wisdom, is still only a more refined, stiller, harder-to-detect cell.

Here a positive piece of evidence anchors the Buddha's position very firmly. He set the formless attainments down, but he was not opposed to concentration — on the contrary, he anchored right concentration (sammā-samādhi, the eighth factor of the noble eightfold path) squarely upon the four jhānas. The Madhyama Āgama Discourse on the Noble Path defines right concentration thus: "What is right concentration? A monk, secluded from sensual pleasures and from unskilful states … enters and dwells in the fourth jhāna — this is called right concentration."¹⁶ That is, the Buddha did not expel concentration from the path to liberation; he fixed the scope of "right concentration" upon the four jhānas, and judged the four formless absolutes the teachers taught to be inadequate as the content of right concentration. To abandon the formless attainments is not to be anti-concentration; it is to re-place concentration — its value lies not in being pushed to the formless extreme, but in its working as the four jhānas, as the fulcrum that turns toward wisdom.

A careful qualification must be added, though. "Right concentration is the four jhānas" is the definition given by the Discourse on the Noble Path and by its Pāli counterpart, the Mahācattārīsaka-sutta (MN 117) — a determination with a clear locus, which must not be over-generalized into "all the Āgamas agree." The Saṃyukta Āgama has another passage defining right concentration as "the one-pointedness of mind associated with the taint-free," without enumerating the four jhānas one by one.¹⁷ To acknowledge this difference within the textual record actually makes the claim — "right concentration is anchored on the four jhānas, not on the formless attainments" — more honest: it is a determination with a source and an interlocutor, not a tidy slogan.

What drives the wall home is a piece of reverse evidence. The Saṃyukta Āgama's Discourse to Susīma records a class of arahants called "liberated by wisdom" (paññāvimutti): they "do not gain the attainments" — that is, they lack the deep concentration of the four jhānas and the formless states — and yet their taints are already extinguished, and they are liberated.¹⁸ This case works like a key, opening the same door from the reverse side: if there are those who reach liberation without deep concentration, then what liberation hangs on cannot be the depth of concentration, but must be something else — wisdom. The two teachers spent their lives reaching the summit of worldly concentration and died short of the line of liberation; the wisdom-liberated, without that depth of concentration, crossed the line. Set side by side, the chapter's thesis locks at both ends: liberation hinges on wisdom, not on the depth of absorption.

With this, the volume's thesis is sown. In setting the formless attainments down, the Buddha leaves behind not an answer to the question "which layer of concentration is highest," but a question about "how concentration and wisdom are related." That question will come back again and again across the whole of SAMĀDHI — dramatized here for the first time (in the form of the abandoning of the formless attainments), revisited in chapter after chapter, and finally redeemed in the closing chapter: even the deepest concentration cannot be grasped; concentration must return to wisdom.

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VI. The End of Concentration, the Start of Wisdom — Modern Dialogue and the Volume Thesis

The two-teachers narrative is not only an old biography; it remains a subject of serious argument in contemporary scholarship. The point of setting several scholars' positions side by side is not to judge who is right, but to let this wall — right concentration ≠ the formless absolute — show its weight under a modern eye. (The attributions and dates that follow all await item-by-item checking against the originals; they are offered here for doctrinal dialogue, not as a settled verdict.)

Alexander Wynne, in The Origin of Buddhist Meditation, argues that the two-teachers narrative is authentic early history, and that the formless meditation taught by Āḷāra and Uddaka can be traced back to a Brāhmaṇical–early-Upaniṣadic soil, the formless attainments having entered Buddhism out of that milieu. The reading deserves to be taken seriously — it treats the two teachers as real historical figures, not later literary invention. What is open to question is its tendency to reconstruct the "original meditation" in too much concrete detail, and to read the continuity with the Brāhmaṇical tradition as a kind of direct genetic descent, which inevitably carries a measure of speculation.

Johannes Bronkhorst, in The Two Traditions of Meditation in Ancient India, proposes his "two traditions" thesis: the mainstream meditation of that India (including the formless states and the suppression-style austerities) was not a Buddhist creation but belonged to the Jain and śramaṇa lineage; the four jhānas were the genuine Buddhist innovation. This sharpens exactly the line this chapter sets — that the formless is not right concentration. What is open to question is that the dichotomy may cut too cleanly: the later canon did, after all, incorporate the four formless attainments into the ladder of the nine progressive attainments, rather than expelling them out the door. Buddhism's stance toward the formless is "take it in and judge it inadequate," not "refuse it and drive it out."

Tilmann Vetter, in The Ideas and Meditative Practices of Early Buddhism, emphasizes that the four jhānas are the original core of the path, and examines closely the relation of stratum between concentration and the wisdom of liberation. This supports the judgment that "the jhāna is the heart of Buddhism." What is open to question is that his chronological stratification of concentration and wisdom is itself a hypothesis — one may take the conclusion (the four jhānas at the core) without taking the dating wholesale.

Set the three together, and one finds they are arguing different sides of the same matter: just how deep is the entanglement of what Buddhism calls "concentration" with the Indic meditative tradition it inherited, and at which point does it break away and set up a new meaning of its own? The answer this chapter gives is clear — the point of breaking-away is precisely the wall that the rose-apple tree and the door of the two teachers jointly mark: the value of concentration lies not in being pushed to the formless extreme, but in whether it is turned back toward wisdom.

Finally, the red line that runs through the whole chapter, restated: everything spoken of here is concentration (the inward gathering), not mindfulness (the recollective ground-floor). The childhood "recollection of the first jhāna" under the rose-apple tree is the recollection and re-evaluation of a concentration, and must not slide back into the cultivation of mindfulness; and the concentration of the two teachers, however deep, remains always a matter of concentration, and cannot be underwritten by an achievement of wisdom. Mindfulness and concentration differ in stratum; concentration and wisdom differ in function — hold both distinctions, and one can read why the Buddha rose and left at the very summit.

To close in three turns. In essence: the Buddha's concentration is the concentration he tried at its worldly deepest and then set down by hand; the childhood first jhāna under the rose-apple tree told him that wholesome meditative pleasure is the path, and the formless absolutes of the two teachers told him that the highest state of concentration is still not liberation. In doctrinal direction: right concentration is anchored upon the four jhānas; the formless absolute, however high, is judged inadequate; concentration can still suffering for a time but cannot cut suffering at the root, and the root is cut by wisdom. In the open question: at the door of the two teachers he reached the summit of worldly concentration, then rose and walked toward the tree of awakening — and the question that step leaves behind is the road the whole of SAMĀDHI must travel. Are concentration and wisdom two diverging roads, or two wheels of one cart? That is exactly the question the next chapter, Samatha and Vipassanā: Two Tracks, One Vehicle, will ask: where concentration reaches its end, wisdom begins.

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Footnotes

1. Sūtra of Past and Present Cause and Effect (《過去現在因果經》), fascicle 3, Taishō vol. 3, No. T0189《過去現在因果經》T3, No. 189View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0639a27–b03): having practised austerities for nearly six years without winning liberation, he knew this was not the path; better than this was what he had contemplated long ago beneath the rose-apple tree — secluded and still, this is most true — and so he resolved to take food and then accomplish the way. This belongs to the legendary-biographical genre of the Buddha's life, not to Āgama discourse; it echoes the structure of the Pāli Mahāsaccaka-sutta (MN 36) and serves as the closest Chinese echo, not as a doctrinal equal. ↩

2. Sūtra on the Practice of Former Acts (《修行本起經》), fascicle 2 (last), Taishō vol. 3, No. T0184《修行本起經》T3, No. 184View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0467b18–24): "The prince sat beneath the rose-apple tree … moved by compassion, he attained, beneath the tree, the first absorption." Here "first absorption" (第一禪) preserves the source's own term verbatim; throughout this volume the running term is "first jhāna" (初禪). Jambu is the rose-apple (botanically Syzygium cumini). ↩

3. Pāli: MN 36:31–32, Majjhima Nikāya, PTS edition; quotation following SuttaCentral, Bhikkhu Sujato's translation (CC0): "abhijānāmi kho panāhaṁ pitu sakkassa kammante sītāya jambucchāyāya nisinno … paṭhamaṁ jhānaṁ upasampajja viharitā. Siyā nu kho eso maggo bodhāyā'ti? … eseva maggo bodhāyā'ti." Sujato's English: "Could that be the path to awakening? … That is the path to awakening!" ↩

4. Same source, MN 36:32: "kiṁ nu kho ahaṁ tassa sukhassa bhāyāmi, yaṁ taṁ sukhaṁ aññatreva kāmehi aññatra akusalehi dhammehī'ti? … na kho ahaṁ tassa sukhassa bhāyāmi …" Sujato's English: "Why am I afraid of that pleasure …? … I'm not afraid of that pleasure …" ↩

5. See note 1, the same passage of the Sūtra of Past and Present Cause and Effect, fascicle 3. ↩

6. Name variants: within the Madhyama Āgama Discourse on Rāma the single name Āḷāra Kālāma appears in three transliterated forms; this chapter uniformly adopts the form given at the discourse's opening. Uddaka Rāmaputta is rendered in Chinese as 欝陀羅羅摩子. The Sanskrit/Chinese correspondence is secured by the CBETA collation apparatus. ↩

7. Madhyama Āgama (《中阿含經》), fascicle 56, Discourse on Rāma, Taishō vol. 1, No. T0026《中阿含經》MadhyamāgamaT1, No. 26View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0776b12–13): Āḷāra answers that, having transcended the dimension of infinite consciousness, he has entered and dwells in the dimension of nothingness. Pāli parallel: MN 26:15, Majjhima Nikāya, PTS edition (ākiñcaññāyatanaṁ pavedesi). ↩

8. Madhyama Āgama, fascicle 56, Discourse on Rāma, No. T0026《中阿含經》MadhyamāgamaT1, No. 26View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0776c10–11): having transcended the dimension of nothingness, he has entered and dwells in the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception; "it is my father Rāma who, by his own knowledge, realization, and experience, declared this teaching." This is the plain evidence that "Rāma" (Rāma) is Uddaka's father and not Uddaka himself. Pāli parallel: MN 26:16 (nevasaññānāsaññāyatanaṁ pavedesi). ↩

9. The dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception (nevasaññānāsaññāyatana) is the eighth of the formless attainments and the summit of worldly concentration, traditionally called the peak of existence (bhavagga). ↩

10. Madhyama Āgama, fascicle 56, Discourse on Rāma, No. T0026《中阿含經》MadhyamāgamaT1, No. 26View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0776c01; repeated verbatim for the Uddaka passage at 0777a): "I thought to myself: 'This teaching does not lead to insight, does not lead to awakening, does not lead to nibbāna. Better that I set this teaching down and seek instead the unailing, unsurpassed sanctuary, nibbāna …' — and I set the teaching down." ↩

11. Pāli: MN 26:15.35 / 16.35, Majjhima Nikāya, PTS edition (SuttaCentral, Sujato, CC0): "nāyaṁ dhammo nibbidāya na virāgāya na nirodhāya na upasamāya na abhiññāya na sambodhāya na nibbānāya saṁvattati, yāvadeva … ūpapattiyā'ti." Sujato's English: "This teaching doesn't lead to disillusionment, dispassion, cessation, peace, insight, awakening, and extinguishment. It only leads as far as rebirth in the dimension of nothingness / neither perception nor non-perception." The verdict is word-for-word identical for both teachers, only the final clause (the state reborn into) changing with the state. Note further that the abandonment-criterion here is this nibbidā-formula of negation, not a "nālaṁ / not-enough" wording (the latter belongs to the austerity narratives of MN 36 / MN 85). ↩

12. Madhyama Āgama, fascicle 56, Discourse on Rāma, No. T0026《中阿含經》MadhyamāgamaT1, No. 26View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0777a21–b02): after his awakening the bodhisatta first thought to bring across the two teachers, but Āḷāra Kālāma had died … and Uddaka Rāmaputta had died … — Āḷāra seven days before, Uddaka fourteen days before. ↩

13. Saṃyukta Āgama (《雜阿含經》), fascicle 17, Taishō vol. 2, No. T0099《雜阿含經》Saṃyukta-āgamaT2, No. 99Guṇabhadra (Liu Song, ca. 435 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0116c21–23): the four formless attainments distinguished by the successive negation of the object (an object of form / an inner object / an object of "there is" / an object of "existence"). ↩

14. Madhyama Āgama, fascicle 42, Discourse on the Analysis of the Dhamma (〈分別觀法經〉), No. T0026《中阿含經》MadhyamāgamaT1, No. 26View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0691c22–26): the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception is still conditioned … impermanent … suffering. ↩

15. Abhidharmakośa (《阿毘達磨俱舍論》), fascicle 8, Taishō vol. 29, No. T1558《阿毘達磨俱舍論》Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣyaT29, No. 1558View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0041a28–29): the Sarvāstivāda standard enumeration of the four formless attainments. (Cessation, saññāvedayitanirodha, sits above the four formless attainments and is not counted among them.) ↩

16. Madhyama Āgama, fascicle 49, Discourse on the Noble Path (〈聖道經〉), No. T0026《中阿含經》MadhyamāgamaT1, No. 26View on CBETA online reader ↗ (0736b16–17): "What is right concentration? A monk, secluded from sensual pleasures and from unskilful states … enters and dwells in the fourth jhāna — this is called right concentration." Pāli parallel: MN 117 (the Mahācattārīsaka-sutta), Majjhima Nikāya, PTS edition. ↩

17. Saṃyukta Āgama, fascicle 28, No. T0099《雜阿含經》Saṃyukta-āgamaT2, No. 99Guṇabhadra (Liu Song, ca. 435 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (SA 785, 0204a05–14): an alternative definition of right concentration as "the one-pointedness of mind associated with the taint-free," without enumerating the four jhānas one by one. Hence "right concentration is the four jhānas" must be marked as the locus of the Discourse on the Noble Path / MN 117, and not claimed as "all the Āgamas agree." ↩

18. Saṃyukta Āgama, fascicle 14, Discourse to Susīma (〈須深經〉), No. T0099《雜阿含經》Saṃyukta-āgamaT2, No. 99Guṇabhadra (Liu Song, ca. 435 CE)View on CBETA online reader ↗ (SA 347, 0097a): arahants liberated by wisdom "do not gain the attainments" (lacking the four jhānas and the formless states) and yet their taints are extinguished — liberation hinges on wisdom, not on the depth of absorption, serving as the reverse corroboration of this chapter's thesis. ↩