Important Suttas:

  The Buddha outlines the complete course of training by which one qualifies as a true contemplative.

  The step-by-step training of a monk, along with the Buddha’s explanation for why not all his monks attain nibbāna.

  Ānanda asks for a teaching to take on retreat. The Buddha teaches him that the senses are impermanent, etc.

  An elderly monk asks the Buddha for a brief explanation of the Dhamma that he can put into practice. The Buddha gives him the same instruction that he gives to Bāhiya in Ud 1:10.

  A brahman looking for a debate asks the Buddha a question. The Buddha’s answer stymies him, and when the Buddha later explains his answer to the monks before returning to his dwelling, they are mystified as well. At their request, Ven. Mahā Kaccāna explains the Buddha’s explanation by showing how conflict derives from the perceptions and categories of papañca: mental objectification.

  Even though craving has no discernible first point, it still has a cause.

  A meditation on inter-relatedness, showing with four striking similes the suffering inherent in everything the body and mind depend upon for nourishment.

  With two striking similes, this sutta describes what happens when consciousness, through passion, lands and grows on any of its four nutriments, and what happens when it abandons that passion.

  Both ordinary and awakened people experience the three feelings. The difference is that when an ordinary person is stricken with feeling, they react, creating more suffering

  Why are people born unequal in terms of such things as status, wealth, health, and discernment? The Buddha explains the actions that lead to a good rebirth and a bad.

  The Buddha describes how he found the path to awakening by dividing his thoughts into two sorts: those imbued with sensuality, ill will, or harmfulness on the one hand, and those imbued with renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness on the other.

  How the Buddha, prior to his awakening, was able to overcome his reluctance to renounce sensuality and the pleasures of the lower concentration attainments

  The Buddha teaches on the importance of seclusion in order to enter fully into emptiness

  The Saṁyutta Nikāya opens with a paradox: The Buddha crossed over the flood without pushing forward, without staying in place.

  Ten qualities by which you create a protector for yourself.

  Beginning with skillful virtues, and ascending all the way through dispassion, the Buddha discusses the purpose and reward of different aspects of the practice, showing how the more basic parts of the practice have the higher ones as their reward.

  How the more basic parts of the practice lead naturally to the higher ones.

  The senses are like a snake, a crocodile, a bird, a dog, a jackal, and a monkey all tied up together, pulling this way and that. Mindfulness is like a post that keeps them grounded.

  The Buddha offers five practical approaches for freeing the mind from distracting thoughts connected with desire, aversion, or delusion.

  The six recollections are a way to escape from greed.

  When the Buddha asks about the topics for recollection, a monk reveals his ignorance. Ānanda then gives an unusual list of five recollections, which the Buddha supplements with a sixth.

  The benefits to be gained by following the Buddha’s sixteen-step program for breath meditation.

  What does it mean to be acute in developing mindfulness of death for the sake of ending the effluents?

  This sutta sets out the full formula for the practice of establishing mindfulness, and then gives an extensive account of one phrase in the formula: what it means to remain focused on any of the four frames of reference—body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities—in and of itself.

  A sixteen-step program for using mindfulness of breathing as a path leading all the way to full awakening.

  The rewards of developing a full awareness of the body as both a mindfulness practice and a concentration practice. This sutta includes graphic analogies to illustrate the four jhānas.

  This sutta sets out the full formula for the practice of establishing mindfulness, and then gives an extensive account of one phrase in the formula: what it means to remain focused on any of the four frames of reference—body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities—in and of itself.

  A deva counsels a monk who spends his meditation engaged in wrong resolves.

  The Buddha has Ven. Ānanda instruct Ven. Girimānanda—who is ill—on ten perceptions that heal body and mind. Interestingly, mindfulness of breathing is listed as one of the perceptions.

  When Ānanda visits the nuns’s quarters they tell him that their meditation is prospering to higher and higher levels. Ānanda reports the good news to the Buddha, who speaks of two ways of developing the four kinds of mindfulness meditation: directed and undirected.

  The parable of the man with the bowl of oil on his head, illustrating the care and attention that should be given to practicing mindfulness of the body.

  A description of how insight can be developed either while in, or immediately after withdrawing from, the different jhānas or formless attainments.

  Four purposes to which right concentration can be applied: a pleasant abiding here-&-now, mindfulness and alertness, psychic powers, and the ending of the effluents.

  Five meditations that train a mendicant to shift their perception at will

  Five-factored concentration and the six higher knowledges that it can lead to.

  How awakening is attained by mastering any of the first seven of the nine concentration attainments and then reflecting on that attainment, analyzing it in terms of the five aggregates.

  Using the simile of the foolish, inexperienced cow, the Buddha shows why it is wise to establish oneself well in a concentration attainment before trying to move on to the next one. When these attainments are well mastered in this way, they lead to the six higher knowledges whenever there is an opening.

  Ven. Sāriputta answers questions on topics of discernment, the first jhāna, and the higher meditative attainments.

  This sutta builds on the previous one, showing how to develop dispassion for the mind through a contemplation of feeling.

  The difference between aggregates and clinging-aggregates.

  Five vivid similes for the insubstantial nature of the aggregates.

  After distinguishing the noble search—for what is deathless—from the ignoble search—for what is subject to death—the Buddha relates the way he sought and found the deathless.

  Dhammadinnā the nun answers questions posed by her former husband, Visākha. Topics include: self-identification, the noble eightfold path, fabrication, feeling, and the cessation of feeling and perception.

  How to cut through the five lower fetters.

  What is the “All” that is to be abandoned?

  Ānanda wonders who will guide the Saṅgha when the Buddha dies, but the Buddha says they should be their own refuge, grounded on the four kinds of mindfulness meditation.

  The ascetic Bāhiya becomes an arahant after receiving a brief teaching about adding nothing to sensory experience.

  The Buddha instructs Ven. Ānanda in the various levels of what it means to dwell in emptiness, and how to go from one level to the next, culminating in full release.

  That dimension is to be experienced where the internal sense media cease and the perception of the external sense media fades away.

  After stating that all the Dhamma is contained in the four noble truths, Ven. Sāriputta appears to embark on a discussion of all four truths. His discussion, though, focuses on only one part of the first noble truth—the form clinging-aggregate—but in the course of the discussion he is able to show how all the other truths relate to that one part.

  Ven. Sāriputta gives a detailed explanation of the four noble truths.

  A discussion of many aspects of the noble eightfold path: how the first seven factors are requisites for noble right concentration; how all the factors depend on right view, right mindfulness, and right effort; how right mindfulness is concerned, not with radical acceptance, but with abandoning the factors of the wrong path and developing the factors of the right; and how the path of the stream-enterer relates to the path of the arahant.

  Anāthapiṇḍika explains to a group of sectarians why right view is a special form of view: Holding to other views, one is holding to stress, but using right view enables you to see the escape even from right view.

  The Buddha describes the highest level of right view, in which the mind abandons thoughts of existence and non-existence, and sees all arising and passing away as stress (dukkha).

  The Buddha lists seven approaches for eliminating the āsavas, or effluents: deep-seated defilements that “flow out” of the mind and prevent liberation.

  The factors of dependent co-arising defined.

  How to investigate dependent co-arising so as to lead to the ending of suffering and stress.