In the abhidhamma and commentaries ‘Path & Fruit’ (magga-phala) are mind-moments that are micro-seconds apart, and are only to be found in this close union. They are the markers of the Aryan Path, and associated with the four stages of true insight. But we do not, whatever their significance, see them referred to as being moments apart in the Nikayas. Clearly, though, the Buddha frequently refers to the four great stages of the path, and to the abandonment or eradication of particular fetters at each of the stages of the Path. This gives at first sight credence to this abhidhamma notion that the stages of insight are achieved in a binary fashion – either you have become such-and-such over a very short time-period, or not. Though this way of looking at the issue is comfortable and convenient to the ordinary mind, I would suggest that a more subtle notion of what is going on on the insight path is a more accurate description and has more use.
A binary notion of attainment assumes a unitary entity that can function in a thoroughly or substantially coherent way. This is far from what it is like to be a human being. It also fails to explain why there would be a number of stages on the Path. A plurality of stages suggests a learning process of some sort, a journey. Arriving at peak A, we are able to see where peak B is relatively speaking, and can ascertain the direction of travel. But there again, if one has arrived at the irreversible first stage of Insight, is it nibbāna that one has seen, or something less? If the latter, then how is it irreversible? This is a taste of the uncertainties that this topic can give rise to.
I was stimulated to return to this topic here by considering why it is that the Buddha spent at least two periods of seven days (surely a mythic number…) tasting the bliss of deliverance after his Enlightenment. Knowing that nibbāna is not about anything we would ordinarily call pleasure or bliss suggested to me that these seven-day periods indicated a useful or necessary process that required some time, and were about something rather less obvious than rejoicing in victory over Mara. At the same time, this process would not be to call in question the central liberating insight of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, as a particular moment in which he had an irreversible appreciation of nibbāna. So what might actually be happening in these subsequent periods, then?
I am coming to the fairly firm conviction that Path & Fruit are indeed not interlocked mind-moments, but refer to and represent the process of transformation on the Insight path far more generally. The path-moment is the establishment in a particular experience, and indeed probably momentary, of an appreciation of nibbāna. The Fruit of that is found much later on, in the completion of the process of re-alignment and assimilation of that path-moment in the messy personality (nama-rupa), which isn’t of the nature to call into question the path-moment, but still requires time and process to align to it. The personality in this respect only is rather like a passive-aggressive that refuses to answer ‘yes’ to what it knows to be true, when push comes to shove. But the clarity of real insight means there is, when the question is asked, in the end no other answer in town. Indeed, that genuine lack of any other answer is a marker for it having been a path-moment. So there can be dismay, and resistance, and a not knowing how to live this new way of being hereafter, and then a gradual accommodation. A spiritual maturation process, which results in less dukkha, and so is acceptable even to the discomfited personality. Because of the contingent nature of what it is to be human, and the inter-dependent layers of our delusion, we go through a number of fairly predictable stages before we are completely free.
Early on the insight path, the identification with personality is still substantial. One largely tries to assimilate what has been seen with substantial aspects of the personality which are still taken for granted or ignored, and are themselves deluded. This is amplified by the fact that the consequences of insight are also felt in the personality (where else?), and seen in terms of it; and thus we can begin to mistake the secondary consequences for the primary insight, because they are more obvious at first. A liberating insight may give rise to bliss, and we identify the bliss as the insight, and start striving for the bliss… that sort of thing. This is quite a problem early on, and I guess is what gives rise to the seven lifetimes issue. Late on the path, substantial disidentification is normalised or baseline, and it is the subtlety of what is left that is problematic. All through though, is the same interplay between the conditioned personality and the appreciation of unconditioned nibbāna. This process, it seems to me, would continue after Enlightenment, at least in terms of an increasingly profound assimilation of an insight that is now in its way complete, and constantly available.
This model that I am proposing has some explanatory usefulness. The process of deepening and establishing an insight within the functioning of the personality is focused on the path-moment, and that moment can be repeated in deep practice. For example, one might be exploring the experience that ‘Yes! There is in all of this no aspect which counts as an enduring or unchanging me’, by a process of meditative exploration and constant review. At a certain point the work is done – one no longer has sufficient interest to pursue the question, and anyways has looked everywhere available. There is no more than the background level of bliss or freedom to be found in exploring the issue any more, and it is now part of the landscape. The fruit has been eaten. Time to move on…
If even Enlightened ones undergo processes of assimilation, you might ask ‘What is special about Enlightenment?’ What is final or complete about it? It seems to me that its distinctive characteristic follows from what I said about early and late stages. For a long time, we tend to review and explore experience on the deluded basis of what is as yet unexamined. To some extent we are still identified with personality, and are using the increasing pacification of personality as a springboard for Insight. That is, profound states of consciousness, redolent of peace, of stillness, of minimal pure functioning. However, even the profoundest pacification is not release, but just a deeper layer or manifestation of the pacification that has gone before. To know how this is is so, and to release even that which is pacified, is the fundamental Enlightenment insight. This insight would depend on assimilating the meditative ‘non-experience’ of cessation or nirōdha, which can be part of one’s meditative practice and experience for quite some time before one appreciates this implication, and releases the personality completely.
If Enlightenment is the path-moment of such a release, this complete collapse of duality leaves no basis for doubt, for it is like coming out of the other side of a forest. There are no trees left to obstruct the view of nibbāna. But, the personality in its prehistoric way still has some adaptation to do. From this point on, there is nothing that the personality can offer which calls into question what is seen and known. Indeed, the personality cannot ‘know’ Enlightenment, and cannot really do anything but express it incidentally, as the personality is limited and partial by nature. And thus we have a description of Enlightenment ‘with remainder’, as it is called. It also works quite well with the descriptions of the transmutation of the Relative Alaya into the Absolute Alaya. There might still be seeds there, but they are karmically ‘denatured’.
I appreciate this is only a sketch – but I hope it is food for thought. It is a way of understanding a traditional idea, that of Path & Fruit, in a way that is reverential about the mysterious interplay of nama-rupa and nibbāna, and does justice to some primary aspects of the deepening experience of Insight. This embracing of the conditioned in the crucible of the unconditioned seems to me to be the crux of any Buddhist metaphysics, the compassionate fruit of which is liberation in, not from, this saha-world.
* T S Eliot : East Coker, Four Quartets