Preface · A Ruler for Measuring Progress

A practitioner usually carries one question: am I actually making progress?

The question is seldom spoken and often carried. Light arises on the cushion—does that count? Years pass without one moment of meditative joy—was the practice wasted? Someone nearby enters absorption with ease while one's own concentration stays dry—is the fault in one's faculties? Asking and asking, most people end up measuring with experience—how deep the absorption, how bright the light, how high the state—and the more they measure themselves with that ruler, the less at ease they become.

Few ever turn around and ask: what does the canon itself measure with?

This book places the canon's own ruler, whole and unaltered, into your hands.

Four Names, Four Markings

The book is called The Four Fruits of the Renunciant's Path. A renunciant—śramaṇa—is one who has gone forth to practice; the fruits are the attainments of that road. Four of them: sotāpanna, sakadāgāmin, anāgāmin, arahant—the stream-enterer, the once-returner, the non-returner, and the one in whom defilements are forever exhausted.

The names sound remote, like four unreachable titles. In truth they are four markings on a scale, and the scale is startlingly plain: every fruit, the World-Honored One defined with one and the same syntax—which fetters are severed. A fetter is a rope binding the mind; a fruit is "which ropes are now cut, never to grow back." It measures not what you have gained, but what is gone.

So this book has a single thesis, said in one sentence: the four fruits are a measurable subtraction. From three fetters severed at the first station to all ten ended at the last—wall after wall, torn down until nothing is left to tear. Deep absorption and radiance the canon never lists among the definitions of a fruit; a person of plain experience and dry concentration can be a true noble one—while the Buddha was in the world, He set His seal on exactly such people.

Where This Book Ends

One thing must be settled on the first page.

This book writes the walking—four fruits, station by station, how they are walked to. It is written up to the threshold of the last station: the instant the final fetter is severed, the pen stops. The view inside the door—what the freedom is, once the defilements are ended—this book does not write a word of.

Not because it cannot be written, but because another volume writes it. This book has a twin, on the axis of attainment, devoted to "after the arriving": the arahant's mastery, opening from the other face of the same threshold. Walking writes the going; attainment writes the arrival. Two volumes, one threshold. When you finish this one and wish to see inside, that one is waiting.

This Book Is Written for You

This book is not written for scholars. It does not debate, does not compare; it does one plain thing: it takes the ruler the World-Honored One Himself laid down—what it measures, how, and why—and tells it to you, station by station.

It is written above all for this reader: one who has practiced for some years, whose experience is plain, and who keeps wondering, "have I actually made any progress." What this book most wants to put in your hands is that ruler—which will tell you that your progress was never entered in the ledger of experiences; it is entered somewhere else, somewhere more solid, somewhere that does not lie.

You need no Sanskrit or Pāli, and need not remember the numbers of the suttas. The numbers and the romanized terms are gathered in the appendices at the back; the body of the book keeps itself clean, and simply tells you the road.

Walk Slowly

Five parts, like five stretches of one road, each deeper than the last. Best is to walk from the first page to the end—the book is a single running argument, and every earlier step is used later. If you are in a hurry, finish Part One first: the ruler is handed over there; ruler in hand, you can walk the rest on your own feet.

At the Last

Measuring progress, in the end, is the exchanging of one question: from "what have I attained" to "which wall, here in me, is down—and can never be rebuilt."

However long this book runs, it runs for that one exchange. May you, reading along, set down the ruler of anxiety and take up the ruler of fact; and from then on, on the road, measure steadily, and walk steadily.

Homage to our original teacher, Śākyamuni Buddha.