The Powerful Combination of Concentration and Insight

I'm gonna pick up the thread from my experiment last week.

Uh, you may recall that last week I was so taken with a particular, it's called a sutta or sutra, a piece of teaching in the large and extensive written record of what the Buddha and his contemporaries thought and taught.

And I said, "What the heck? Let's do some sutta study.

Let's get into it here." This is from Majjhima Nikaya number forty-four.

Majjhima just simply means middle length, and Nikaya means collection.

So these are the middle length discourses.

W-with no logic whatsoever, the discourses [chuckles] are gathered in the Nikayas in terms of their actual length.

Uh, so we have the shorter length, you know, discourses, the middle length, and the longer length.

The Majjhima Nikaya is the middle length.

And in particular, the sutta that I'm just besotted with [laughs] is called the Culavagga Sutta.

So I'm gonna give a brief introduction and then pick up the thread in the second half of it.

As we go along, I'm gonna slow down periodically and really invite you, uh, into the spirit, imagining that we are listening to these teachings being offered.

We are gathering sincerely because we care, and we're interested, and we're applying them to ourselves.

And things we don't understand, we try to understand, and things we do understand, we let in, and we have a sense of being in community with others, you know, gathering on the path.

That's kind of the original meaning of the word sangha, a gathering of beings on a path.

And here we are.

And some of the language in the translation is, is pretty ancient.

It tends to be kinda gendered, even though wonderfully.

And one thing I really love about this particular sutta is, uh, as you will see in the very introduction to it, which I'll now read to you, we are being taught here by the nun Dhammadinna.

The Buddha, with some arm twisting, he did establish an order of bhikkhunis, like the male bhikkhus, and Dhammadinna is a bhikkhuni, a nun, and she is answering the questions of a lay follower who happens to be her former husband.

So there are many twists and turns in this that particularly amuse me and make me happy.

So let's just take a look at the very start of this.

So here we have this particular sutta.

We have Dhammadinna the nun, praised by the Buddha as the foremost Dhamma or Dharma teacher among his nun disciples.

And in this discourse, she answers questions put to her by a layman, Visakha, who, according to the commentary, was her former husband, a merchant of Rajagaha and a non-returner.