The Seven Purifications

The first three maps in this series describe the path with images: a castle, a journey through valleys, a waking from a dream. The fourth describes it as a training. It comes from the Theravāda Buddhism of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, and from the most influential book that tradition has produced outside the scriptures themselves: the Visuddhimagga, the Path of Purification, written in the fifth century by the monk Buddhaghosa.

The Visuddhimagga is not a poem or a dialogue. It is a manual, long, methodical and precise, the work of a scholar who wanted to set out the whole of the Buddha’s path in order, with nothing left to guesswork. It describes how to keep the precepts, how to choose a teacher and a place to live, how to practise forty kinds of meditation, how to analyse body and mind into their elements, and how insight unfolds, stage by stage, into liberation. Its last third is organized around seven purifications. They make it, in its own way, a sevenfold map of the inner ascent, and the most detailed of all.

The tangle within§

Buddhaghosa opens with a verse from the scriptures. A deity asks the Buddha a riddle: there is a tangle within and a tangle without; this generation is entangled in a tangle; who can untangle it? The Buddha answers that a wise person, established in virtue, who develops concentration and understanding, ardent and discerning, can untangle this tangle (Buddhaghosa 1923, ch. I). The tangle, Buddhaghosa explains, is craving, which twists through all of life like a bamboo thicket, within one’s own experience and without.

The answer gives the whole book its structure. Virtue (sīla), concentration (samādhi) and understanding (paññā) are the three trainings of the Buddhist path, and the Visuddhimagga is built on them: two chapters on virtue, eleven on concentration, ten on understanding. The seven purifications are laid over this frame. The first is the purification of virtue; the second, of mind, is concentration; and the remaining five are the stages of understanding.

Seven chariots§

The seven purifications were not Buddhaghosa’s invention. They come from a discourse in the scriptures, the Discourse of the Relay of Chariots. In it the monk Sāriputta meets another monk, Puṇṇa, and asks him why he lives the holy life. Is it for the purification of virtue? No. Of mind? No. Of view? No. Through all seven purifications Puṇṇa says no. Then what is it for? For final liberation without clinging, he says, and the purifications are only the way to it.

To explain, Puṇṇa tells a story. A king has to travel urgently from one city to another, and seven relay chariots are stationed along the road. He mounts the first, which takes him to the second; he leaves the first and mounts the second, which takes him to the third; and so on, until the seventh brings him to the gate of the city. If someone asked him whether he had come all the way in one chariot, he would say no: each took him only as far as the next. So it is with the purifications. Each is for the sake of the one that follows, and the last is for the sake of liberation.

The image says something that all of these maps share, but says it with unusual clarity. The stages are not the goal. They are means, each to be left behind once it has done its work. A person who mistook the purification of virtue for liberation would be like a king who stayed in the first chariot and called it the capital.

The first purification: virtue§

The purification of virtue (sīla-visuddhi) is the restraint of conduct: keeping the precepts, guarding the senses, living by right livelihood, using the necessities of life with reflection (Buddhaghosa 1923, chs. I–II). For monks it includes the rules of the order; for everyone it means not harming, not stealing, not lying, not misusing the senses or intoxicants.

Buddhaghosa is clear that virtue is not merely moral. It is the ground of everything else, because a mind troubled by remorse cannot settle. The person whose conduct is clean has nothing to regret, and the absence of regret brings gladness, gladness brings joy, joy brings tranquillity, and tranquillity makes concentration possible. Virtue is the first chariot because a mind still fighting its own actions cannot go anywhere.

The second purification: mind§

The purification of mind (citta-visuddhi) is concentration: the stilling of the mind until the five hindrances, sensual desire, ill will, sloth, restlessness and doubt, are set aside, and the mind becomes unified (Buddhaghosa 1923, chs. III–XIII). This is the longest section of the book. It describes forty subjects of meditation, from coloured discs and the elements to the recollection of the Buddha, the contemplation of death, loving-kindness and compassion, and the breath. It explains how to choose one suited to one’s temperament: a person given to greed is directed to the contemplation of the body’s foulness, a person given to anger to loving-kindness, a person given to faith to the recollections.

The purification of mind is reached either at the level of access, where the hindrances are suppressed and the mind is close to absorption, or in the meditative absorptions themselves (jhāna), states of deep stillness and joy. Buddhaghosa describes them in great detail, and the powers that may come with them. But he is clear that concentration does not liberate. It is the second chariot. It calms and steadies the mind so that it can see; the seeing is the work of the purifications that follow.

The third purification: view§

With the purification of view (diṭṭhi-visuddhi), understanding begins. The meditator, with a concentrated mind, examines their own experience and discerns that it consists of two kinds of process: materiality (rūpa), the body and the physical world, and mentality (nāma), feeling, perception, intention and consciousness (Buddhaghosa 1923, ch. XVIII). They see these processes clearly, each by its own characteristics, and see that there is nothing else: no self standing behind them, no owner of the experience apart from the experience.

Buddhaghosa uses an old simile. Just as the word “chariot” is only a way of speaking of axle, wheels, frame and pole assembled in a certain way, with no chariot apart from them, so “a being” or “a person” is only a way of speaking of mentality and materiality, with no being apart from them. The view that is purified is the view of self. It is not destroyed by argument but seen through by observation.

The fourth purification: overcoming doubt§

The purification by overcoming doubt (kaṅkhāvitaraṇa-visuddhi) follows. Having seen what experience is made of, the meditator now discerns its conditions: how mentality and materiality arise from causes, from ignorance, craving, clinging and action, and from present conditions such as food and the senses (Buddhaghosa 1923, ch. XIX). This is the teaching of dependent origination, no longer as doctrine but as something observed.

The doubts that are overcome here are the ones that trouble every thoughtful person: did I exist in the past, and what was I? Will I exist in the future? What am I now, and where did I come from? Once it is seen that experience is a flow of conditioned processes, arising from causes and passing away, these questions lose their grip. They assumed a self that persists through time, and no such self has been found. Buddhaghosa says that one who has reached this purification has found a footing in the teaching, and is sometimes called a lesser stream-enterer.

The fifth purification: what is and is not the path§

The fifth purification, by knowledge and vision of what is and is not the path, is the most psychologically acute passage in the book (Buddhaghosa 1923, ch. XX). The meditator now contemplates all formations, all conditioned things, as impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self, and begins to see them arise and pass away moment by moment. As this insight strengthens, something happens that Buddhaghosa describes with great care.

Ten experiences arise that he calls the imperfections of insight. A brilliant light appears. Knowledge comes easily. There is intense rapture, deep tranquillity, exquisite happiness. Faith becomes strong, effort balanced, mindfulness steady, equanimity firm. And with all this comes a subtle attachment to it. The meditator, Buddhaghosa says, is likely to think: surely I have reached the path; surely this is the fruit. And so, mistaking the light for the goal, they stop.

The purification consists in seeing through this. The experiences are not bad; most of them are good qualities. But they are not the path. They too are impermanent, conditioned, not-self. The wise meditator recognizes them for what they are, does not cling to them, and goes on. The path, Buddhaghosa concludes, is insight that is free from these imperfections.

Every tradition in this series has a version of this teaching. Teresa warned at length against mistaking visions and consolations for union, and tested them by humility. ʿAṭṭār’s hoopoe mocked the birds who wanted to stop at pleasant places. Here it is given its sharpest form. The most dangerous moment on the path is not the hardest but the most beautiful, because beauty is easily mistaken for arrival.

The sixth purification: the way§

The sixth purification, by knowledge and vision of the way, is a sequence of nine insight knowledges (Buddhaghosa 1923, ch. XXI). They describe, with uncomfortable precision, what happens when the meditator goes on seeing conditioned things as they are.

First comes the knowledge of rise and fall, now free of the imperfections. Then the knowledge of dissolution: the meditator sees only the passing away, as if everything were continually breaking up. Then the appearance of all formations as terror, and as danger, since nothing that passes can be relied on. Then disenchantment, a turning away from the whole of conditioned existence. Then the desire for deliverance. Buddhaghosa’s image for it is a man who reaches into a fish trap and grasps what he thinks is a fish, and, lifting it into the light, sees it is a snake; he wants nothing but to let go of it.

Then the knowledge of reflection, in which the meditator contemplates formations again in order to find the way out. Then equanimity about formations: neither fear nor delight, but a balanced, even regard for everything that arises. Here Buddhaghosa uses the image of the crow on a ship. Sailors at sea carry a crow; when they cannot see land, they release it, and it flies to each quarter of the sky in turn. If it finds no shore it returns to the mast. If it sees land, it flies to it and does not come back. So the mind in equanimity looks out from formations again and again, and when it sees the peace of liberation, it goes there and does not return.

Last comes conformity, the knowledge that fits the insight so far to what follows, like a bridge.

The seventh purification: knowledge and vision§

The seventh purification, by knowledge and vision itself, is the arising of the path (Buddhaghosa 1923, ch. XXII). At this moment, for the first time, the mind takes as its object not conditioned things but the unconditioned, nibbāna. Between the last moment of insight and the path there is a single moment that Buddhaghosa calls change of lineage: the mind leaves the lineage of ordinary people and enters that of the noble ones. Then the path knowledge itself arises, followed by its fruit.

The tradition counts four such paths: stream-entry, once-return, non-return and arahantship, each cutting off certain fetters for good. With the first, the view of self, doubt and attachment to rites are destroyed; with the last, every trace of craving and ignorance. Buddhaghosa compares the path moment to a lamp, which in a single instant burns the wick, dispels the darkness, makes light and uses up the oil: in one moment it understands suffering, abandons its cause, realizes its cessation and develops the path.

Not a ladder, again§

Even here, in the most systematic map of all, the sequence is not rigid. Buddhaghosa allows that some meditators develop insight without first mastering the absorptions, and so pass through the purification of mind only at the level of access; the commentaries call them practitioners of bare insight. The four paths may be reached in one life or many. The stages describe the order in which understanding unfolds, not a timetable.

And the relay of chariots makes the deepest point. None of the purifications is liberation. Liberation is the city, and the chariots are left at its gate.

What this map teaches§

The Visuddhimagga differs from the first three maps in almost every respect of tone. There is no beloved, no longing, no dream. There is a training, and the analysis of experience into its parts. Where Teresa speaks of love and ʿAṭṭār of fire, Buddhaghosa speaks of mentality and materiality, conditions and characteristics. Where the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha finds at the end one consciousness, he finds the unconditioned, of which almost nothing positive is said.

Yet the resemblances are hard to miss. The path begins in ethics and the ordering of life. It turns on a stage of stilling and gathering the mind. Its hinge, the move from concentration to insight, corresponds to Teresa’s fourth dwelling and the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha’s fourth stage: the point where something is seen that cannot be produced by effort. It warns, more sharply than any other map, against mistaking beautiful states for the goal. It passes through a terror and disenchantment that recall ʿAṭṭār’s bewilderment and the dark night of the Christian contemplatives. And it ends in a peace that it refuses to describe.

Perhaps the deepest lesson of this map is its patience. It assumes that liberation is reached by seeing clearly, and that seeing clearly can be trained. Nothing is left to inspiration; everything is taught. That is a different kind of trust from Teresa’s trust in grace, but it is trust nonetheless: that the path is real, and can be walked.

The next essay stays with Buddhism, but goes back behind the commentaries to the Buddha himself, and to a shorter list that he gave many times: the seven factors of awakening, which describe not a sequence of stages but the qualities of a mind ready to wake.