Glossary

Ajaan: Teacher; mentor.

Arahant: A Worthy one or Pure one. A person whose heart no longer has any defilements and is thus not destined for further rebirth. A title for the Buddha and the highest level of his Noble Disciples.

Ariyadhana: Noble Wealth; qualities that serve as 'capital' in the quest for liberation: conviction, virtue, conscience, fear of evil, erudition, generosity, and discernment.

Avijja: Unawareness; ignorance. The basic cause of suffering and stress.

Buddho: Awake. An epithet of the Buddha.

Dhamma (dharma): Event; phenomenon; the way things are in and of themselves; their inherent qualities; the basic principles underlying their behavior. Also, principles of behavior that human beings should follow so as to fit in with the right natural order of things; qualities of mind they should develop so as to realize the inherent quality of the mind in and of itself. By extension, "dhamma" is used also to refer to any doctrine that teaches such things. Thus the Dhamma of the Buddha refers both to his teachings and to the direct experience of the quality of nibbana at which those teachings are aimed.

Dhutanga: Voluntary ascetic practices that monks and other meditators may undertake to strengthen their practice — such things as eating only one meal a day, staying in the forest, or not lying down for a set period of time.

Gotarabhu-ñana: Change-of-lineage knowledge. The stage of insight that changes one from an ordinary, run-of-the-mill person to a member of the Noble Sangha (see below).

Jhana: Absorption in a single object or preoccupation, either a physical sensation or a mental notion.

Kamma (karma): Acts of intention that result in states of becoming and birth.

Lokadhamma: Affairs of the world. The standard list gives eight: wealth, loss of wealth, status, loss of status, praise, criticism, pleasure, and pain.

Lokavidu: Knower of the cosmos. An epithet of the Buddha.

Mahasatipatthana: The great frame of reference. Ajaan Lee's term for the sense of the body as a basis for mindfulness practice when the mind is in jhana.

Nibbana (nirvana): The "unbinding" of the mind from sensations and mental acts, preoccupations and suppositions. As this term is also used to refer to the extinguishing of a fire, it carries the connotations of stilling, cooling, and peace. (According to the physics taught at the time of the Buddha, the property of fire exists in a latent state to a greater or lesser degree in all objects. When activated, it clings and is bound to its fuel. As long as it remains latent or is extinguished, it is "unbound.")

Nivarana: Hindrances; mental qualities that hinder the mind from attaining concentration and discernment: sensual desire, ill will, torpor & lethargy, restlessness & anxiety, and uncertainty.

Sangha: The community of the Buddha's disciples. On the noble or ideal level, this refers to all those, whether lay or ordained, who have attained at least their first glimpse of Awakening. On the conventional level, it refers to the Buddhist monastic orders.

Sankhara: Formation, compound, fashioning — the forces and factors that fashion things (physical or mental), the process of fashioning, and the fashioned things that result.

Vipassana: Insight meditation. Seeing events as they actually present themselves to the awareness in terms of the three characteristics of inconstancy, stress, and "not-selfness."

Vipassanupakkilesa: Corruption of insight; intense experiences that can happen in the course of meditation and can lead one to believe that one has completed the path. The standard list includes ten: light, psychic knowledge, rapture, serenity, pleasure, extreme conviction, excessive effort, obsession, indifference, and contentment.