The Path to No Location

The Buddha’s Instructions to Bāhiya

by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

One of the more dramatic stories in the Pali Canon, our earliest extant record of the Buddha’s teachings, is the account of how an ascetic, Bāhiya of the Bark Cloth, gained full awakening when hearing a short teaching from the Buddha himself.

The story goes that Bāhiya was dwelling by the seashore on the west coast of India, worshipped and honored by the local lay people. He began to suspect that he might be an arahant—a fully awakened being—or at least practicing the way to arahantship. A female heavenly being who had been a relative of his in a previous lifetime saw this question in Bāhiya’s mind and, out of compassion, appeared to him and told him that he wasn’t even on the path to arahantship, much less an arahant. He asked her if there were any arahants in the world, and she pointed him to the Buddha, who was approximately 1,200 miles away, near the city of Sāvatthī, in the northern part of the Ganges Valley.

Bāhiya immediately left to find the Buddha. The story says that he made the journey in one night, which implies that he had some psychic powers derived from practicing concentration. The speed with which he traveled may have also symbolized the speed of his mind. Arriving early the next morning, he went to the Buddha’s monastery outside of Sāvatthī, only to learn that the Buddha had gone into the city for alms. Bāhiya tracked him down and, impressed by his restrained demeanor, threw himself down on the ground with his head at the Buddha’s feet and implored him to teach the Dhamma. At first the Buddha refused, saying that the alms round was not the proper time or place to teach. But Bāhiya insisted, arguing that there was no guarantee for how much longer he or the Buddha might live. After Bāhiya repeated the request two more times, the Buddha relented and taught him:

Immediately on hearing these instructions, Bāhiya attained full awakening. Not long after that, he was killed by a cow protective of her young calf. When the monks informed the Buddha of Bāhiya’s death, he told them to cremate the body and build a memorial over it. Even though Bāhiya had not ordained, his awakening qualified him as one of them. Later, the Buddha cited him as foremost among his disciples in gaining quick realization.

The story has become famous, both for the drama of the events and for the brief instructions that had such a momentous effect, far out of proportion to their brevity. Some people treat the instructions as a streamlined guide to awakening, shorn of what they see as extraneous explanations in the Buddha’s other teachings. However, there’s another sutta in the Canon—SN 35:95—in which the Buddha explains these instructions to the monk Ven. Māluṅkyaputta in such a way as to show (a) that they contain many implications that only a person of sharp intelligence would even suspect, and (b) that the Buddha’s other teachings contain nothing in excess. But even the explanations to Māluṅkyaputta are relatively brief. So it’s no surprise that many people over the centuries have tried to tease out even further the implications of Ud 1:10 and SN 35:95—both for the first part of the instructions, the training they recommend; and for the second part, the rewards the training was supposed to yield—to see how these instructions can be applied in practice.

Of course, in Bāhiya’s case, the instructions were not the whole story. There were also the character traits he brought to them. He wasn’t a blank slate. And an important key to understanding what he saw in the instructions lies in knowing what was on the slate. Some of these traits we can tell from the story, but even those are best understood in the light of the Buddha’s more general observations on the state of mind a listener has to bring to a Dhamma talk in order to gain awakening while listening to it.

How to Listen

In AN 5:151, he lists those qualities as five:

The first three qualities are necessary to guarantee that the listener is fully open to receive the Dhamma with respect and to apply it inwardly. If you don’t respect the talk or the speaker, you won’t open your heart to listen. If you don’t respect yourself, you won’t make the effort to apply the lessons of the talk to observe your own mind in action. You’ll feel that the Buddha is speaking of things far beyond you.

The fourth quality, having a mind gathered into one, is the Canon’s standard definition for concentration. You need to give your full, undivided attention to the talk, both to catch all its nuances and to see its implications.

The fifth quality, attending appropriately, is a factor of discernment. The noun form of this phrase, appropriate attention, has a very precise meaning in the Buddha’s teachings, related to the way you frame your questions: You ask questions, either of others or of yourself, that are conducive to the ending of suffering—in other words, questions framed in terms of the four noble truths and the duties appropriate to each. You don’t pay attention to questions that would get in the way of performing those duties (MN 2; SN 22:122; SN 46:51).

The four truths are: suffering, its cause within the mind, the cessation of suffering, and the path to its cessation. The duties are: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation, and to develop the path to its cessation.

To apply appropriate attention while listening to a talk means applying the lessons of the talk in a way that follows the duties of the four truths as they relate to events occurring in your mind while you’re listening. You ask yourself questions such as, “What am I clinging to? How am I clinging? What’s the cause? How can I let it go?”

It’s possible to see these five qualities as embodying elements of all three parts of the Triple Training in virtue, concentration, and discernment. The connections between the fourth and fifth qualities on the one hand, and concentration and discernment on the other, we’ve already mentioned. The connection between the first three qualities and virtue and not so obvious, but they’re there. MN 110 states that only a person of integrity can know that another person has integrity. And only a person of integrity would have the confidence to apply the lessons of the talk skillfully inside his or her own mind. DN 2 tells a story in which a king listening to a Dhamma talk—one of the most detailed descriptions of the practice in the entire Canon—can only think, with regret, of having killed his father. The Buddha said afterwards that if the king had not killed his father, he would have gained the first level of awakening right then and there.

So virtue is a prerequisite for the respect needed to recognize True Dhamma and to apply it within. And in this way, all three parts of the Triple Training play a role in priming the mind to listen in the right way for gaining awakening at the same time.

Details in Bāhiya’s story suggest that he possessed all five of the qualities for listening successfully to the Dhamma. His desire to find the Buddha immediately, the lengths to which he went to track the Buddha down, and the extreme homage he paid to the Buddha on meeting him are all signs that he respected the Buddha and was primed to respect whatever Dhamma lesson the Buddha gave. A detail that might be easy to miss is the fact that his homage to the Buddha was in immediate response to seeing the latter’s demeanor while on his alms round. In the symbolic language of the Canon, this is a sign of the integrity that holds virtue in respect. There were cases where other people, on seeing restrained monks on their alms round, ridiculed them—“Who is this weakest of weaklings, this dullest of dullards, this most snobbish of snobs? Who, if this one approached, would even give him alms?”—a sign that their virtue was lacking.

Bāhiya’s self-respect is shown in his courage in not getting deflected by the Buddha’s first two refusals. He wouldn’t let etiquette get in the way of his ardent desire for awakening.

His powers of concentration are suggested by his ability to travel long distances in so short a time. We can only assume that he applied those powers to listening to the Buddha’s instructions. And as for appropriate attention, again we can only assume that Bāhiya applied it, but he was steered in that direction by the format of the Buddha’s instructions, which follow the format of the fourth and third noble truths: what training to follow so as to arrive at the cessation of suffering.

The Training

What exactly is that training? In other words, how do you practice in a way that in the seen there is only the seen, and so forth?

Many answers have been given to these questions over the centuries, but three in particular are popular at present:

All three of these interpretations are problematic, although each is problematic in its own way.

The first interpretation is problematic because Bāhiya was already practicing concentration before meeting the Buddha. If the simple act of viewing sensory input from the perspective of a concentrated mind were automatically enough to gain awakening, Bāhiya would have become awakened while staying on the seashore. As the noble eightfold path makes clear, concentration is needed for awakening, but discernment is required as well, and while concentration is necessary for discernment, it doesn’t automatically lead to it.

The second interpretation is contradicted by the fact that, while listening to the Dhamma, Bāhiya would have been using the conceptual framework of appropriate attention. This is a framework that makes distinctions and requires choices based on value judgments, as you figure out what should be developed and what should be let go.

Here it’s worth noting that the Buddha, in his discussions of attention elsewhere in the Canon, mentions only two kinds: appropriate and inappropriate. He never mentions bare attention, and there appear to be two reasons why.

(a) Given that he defined attention in connection with the right and wrong way to frame questions (MN 2), it’s hard to see what bare attention would mean in that context. If bare attention has no framework, what questions would there be without a frame? And given that the Buddha’s own quest for awakening was framed by the questions he asked, what kind of awakening could come to a mind with no questions?

(b) Given that the factor of attention appears in dependent co-arising after other factors with many sub-factors, it’s hard to see how bare attention would even be possible. Every act of attention would have to be shaped by the preceding factors, and so couldn’t possibly be bare.

So neither of the first two interpretations would fit into the larger framework of the Buddha’s teachings on how best to listen to the Dhamma.

The third interpretation, that you have to cut away papañca, seems more likely on its face, in that it fits into the framework of appropriate attention: Papañca is a type of thinking that assails the person who thinks it, meaning that it falls under the first noble truth and so has to be comprehended. This implies that its cause—the perception “I am the thinker”—is to be abandoned. The practical upshot, then—in order to regard the seen only as the seen and so forth—would be to abandon any extraneous thinking around the seen, starting with the thought “I am this.” In other words, if you can avoid such thoughts as, “I am seeing,” or, “This sight is appearing to me,” you would be left with only the seen.

This is precisely what many people who follow this interpretation recommend. As they explain it, all that’s required is a paradigm shift, in which the processes of sensory experience are regarded in impersonal rather than personal terms. When the conceptual error of “I am this” has been removed, all sensory experiences—from sights through ideas, good or bad, skillful or unskillful—are simply registered for what they are on their own. Once the idea of “person” is taken out of the picture, there’s no one who has any further responsibilities beyond that point. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be any responses, simply that there’s no person responsible for them. Some even suggest that this freedom from further responsibilities is the end of suffering.

But there are two passages in the Canon suggesting that the Buddha is actually recommending something that goes deeper than erasing “I am this” as a conceptual error.

The first is the standard description of dependent co-arising (SN 12:2), which points out that there are many steps between sensory contact and the act of assuming a sense of self-identity. Sensory contact conditions feeling—pleasant, painful, and neither pleasant nor painful. Feeling conditions craving—which is equated to desire and passion (SN 42:11)—for sensuality, for becoming, or for non-becoming. Sensuality is fascination with sensual fantasies and plans. Becoming is the conceiving of a self-identity in a world—mental or physical—in which the desired object or activity is found. Non-becoming is the desire to see a state of becoming destroyed. All three of these types of craving lead to states of becoming, meaning that they all contain the beginning of a sense of “I am.”

All of the steps in dependent co-arising that we’ve mentioned so far, from contact through craving, fit under the second noble truth, the cause of suffering, which is to be abandoned.

Craving then conditions clinging. Clinging, like craving, is equated to desire and passion (SN 22:121; SN 35:110). The difference between craving and clinging is indicated by the Pali terms used for them. The term for craving, taṇhā, also means thirst. The term for clinging, upādāna, also means taking sustenance. Craving is the act of hungering for food for the mind; clinging is the act of taking hold of that food and holding on to it as you consume it. In either case, the desire and passion is what is to be abandoned. Under the first noble truth, the fact that suffering consists of the act of clinging to any of the aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, or consciousness—is what is to be comprehended. The desire and passion for those aggregates is what is to be abandoned (SN 22:139; SN 22:142; SN 22:145).

The Buddha lists four types of clinging: for sensuality, for views, for habits and practices, and for ideas of a self. The last of the four is implicit in the other three.

If you look carefully at these steps, you’ll see that a sense of identity doesn’t appear right after sensory contact. It appears a few steps later, as a potential under craving and clinging, and as realized in the “I am this” of becoming. In all these cases, it serves the purposes of desire and passion. This indicates that to go beyond any suffering in a sense of identity, you can’t drop it simply as a conceptual error. You have to cut away the desires and passions it serves.

This is exactly the point of the Buddha’s explanation of his instructions to Bāhiya in SN 35:95. There, after he gives these instructions to Māluṅkyaputta—who, we are told, was already ardent and resolute in his practice—he asks Māluṅkyaputta how he understands them. Māluṅkyaputta’s reply focuses on the first part of the instructions, the training, and explains it in two sets of verses, each set containing one verse for each of the six senses. The first set of verses describes the problem the training is supposed to solve; the second set, the solution. After Māluṅkyaputta states these verses, the Buddha repeats them, saying that his understanding is correct. So they can be taken as the words of the Buddha himself.

The verses in each set all follow the same pattern, so we can focus on the first verse in each set, dealing with the act of seeing.

Seeing a form
	—mindfulness lapsed—
attending
	to the theme of “endearing,”
impassioned in mind,
	one feels
	and remains fastened on it.
One’s feelings, born of the form,
	grow numerous,
Greed & annoyance
	injure one’s mind.
Thus amassing stress,
	one is said to be far
	from unbinding.
  

Not impassioned with forms
	—seeing a form with mindfulness firm—
dispassioned in mind,
	one knows
	and doesn’t remain fastened on it.
While one is seeing a form
	—and even experiencing feeling—
it falls away and doesn’t accumulate.
Thus 	one fares mindfully.
Thus 	not amassing stress,
		one is said to be
		in the presence of unbinding.
  

Notice that neither verse mentions the issue of identity or the thought, “I am this.” Instead—and in line with the standard definition of the second noble truth—the verse from the first set attributes the problem to passion, sparked by the act of attending to the “theme of endearing,” which in turn comes from a lack of mindfulness.

To take these points in order:

Passion denotes the desire and passion found in craving and clinging.

Attending to the theme of endearing denotes the act of looking for something desirable in the sight, even to the extent of making it look desirable if nothing endearing is immediately obvious. Notice that the verse places this act between the sense contact and the resulting feeling. This means that it occurs well before any sense of “I am this.” In fact, according to the standard sequence of dependent co-arising, the act of attention actually occurs before sensory contact, under the factor of name-and-form. This means that the mind is already primed to look for something endearing in a particular sight, even before the sight occurs.

This is a case of inappropriate attention. So to solve the problem, you have to be mindful to develop appropriate attention—and then to remember not to attend to the theme of the endearing the next time you see a sight. Because appropriate attention frames things in terms of right view, this means that the approach Māluṅkyaputta recommends is in line with the fourth noble truth, which begins with right view.

Mindfulness is what keeps it in mind. Here it’s important to remember that mindfulness doesn’t mean bare attention or choiceless awareness. The Buddha defines it as a faculty of the active memory, the ability to call to mind even things that were done or said long ago (SN 48:10). The verse stating the problem doesn’t explicitly mention what you’re supposed to keep in mind in the case of the seen, etc., although the verse describing the solution seems to imply that you should also be mindful of the sufferings—the greed and annoyance—that have come from attending to the theme of endearing in the past.

The verse from the second set emphasizes the point that you have to become dispassionate toward sights if you want to solve the problem. It doesn’t say explicitly how to do this, but implicitly it refers to the Buddha’s explanation elsewhere for how you escape from passion: You look for the allure of the object—what you find endearing—and then you compare it with the drawbacks of passion—the greed and annoyance that injure the mind—until you see that the drawbacks far outweigh the allure (SN 22:26). As the Buddha points out in SN 48:4, this approach can be applied not only to unskillful qualities, but also to the factors of the path after they’ve completed their work. This approach can thus take you to an all-around liberation.

What this means is that to practice in such a way that in reference to the seen, there is only the seen, etc., you have to develop appropriate attention well before the stage where papañca arises. The problem is not the “I am” of papañca; it’s the passion that the “I am” is generated to serve. So, in line with the Buddha’s general approach in the four noble truths, you have to attack the “I am” not directly, but at the cause that makes it unskillful.

Because appropriate attention is a mental framework that involves discernment, makes distinctions, and requires choices, the practice of concentration on its own isn’t equal to the task, nor are the practices of bare attention or choiceless awareness. You have to actively want to overcome passion that feeds and is fed by the desire to look for what’s endearing in the objects of the senses. Developing appropriate attention and skillful intentions in this way requires work.

The Rewards

SN 35:95 doesn’t explicitly discuss the other cryptic part of the Buddha’s instructions to Bāhiya—the rewards that come from this practice—but it does contain a passage that provides a background for understanding those rewards.

The issue revolves around the question of location. What did the Buddha mean when he said, “When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of suffering”?

A first step in understanding this passage lies in knowing what it means for the mind to have a location. And this is the point that the Buddha hints at in SN 35:95. Before quoting to Māluṅkyaputta the instructions to Bāhiya, he raises a series of questions about the six senses. The questions all take the same form, so we can focus on the first:

Obviously, it’s possible to have desire for a sight you haven’t seen. However—and this distinction is important—the desire is not “there” at the unseen sight. Rather, it’s there at the idea of the unseen sight as that idea is cognized in the present. Knowing precisely where your passion and desire are located—where craving is located—is a necessary step in ferreting out the craving and abandoning it. If you think it’s located in one spot when it’s actually located somewhere else—as when you think you love another person but are actually in love with your ideas of the person—all your efforts to abandon the craving will be off target. This point has important implications for finding the allure of something so that you can effectively compare the allure with the drawbacks.

Yet the connection between craving and location goes deeper. The Buddha treats craving as a creator of locations, “now here, now there.” Think of the process of becoming: You focus on an object you desire, you identify the world in which that object is found, and then you take on an identity within that world. This can happen in connection with a physical world or a mental world. When this happens, you’ve assumed a mental location in that world. It’s in this way that consciousness gets established and proliferates (SN 22:54).

But when there are no cravings, then concepts of self-identity and even of existence and non-existence that would serve those cravings get called into question (SN 12:15). At the same time, no becomings can form. So when the Buddha says that there is no you in connection with a sight, etc., he’s saying that you haven’t entered into a becoming. When there’s no becoming, there’s no identity within a becoming, so you have no place to stay or to go (SN 1:1). Because time and space allow for only two alternatives here—staying and going—when you engage in neither, you’re released from space and time. That’s when you’re free from location.

This point is in line with many other passages in the Canon stating that those who are fully awakened cannot be located and so are “released everywhere.”

Gone to the beyond of becoming,
	you let go of in front,
	let go of behind,
	let go of between.
With a heart everywhere released,
you don’t come again to birth
		& aging. — Dhp 348
  

	Sister Subhā:
I—unimpassioned, unblemished,
with a mind everywhere released…
Knowing the unattractiveness
	of fabricated things,
my heart adheres nowhere at all. — Thig 14
  

The dimension that you experience at this point, apart from the six senses, is also devoid of the attributes of space and time.

If, after experiencing this dimension, your past kamma brings you back to the six senses, you experience them disjoined from them (MN 140; SN 36:6; SN 47:4). In other words, there’s no desire or passion for the objects of the senses that would inspire you to feed on them. The Canon illustrates this point with a graphic image:

Those who are awakened in this way have cut through the conceit, “I am.” They can perceive the world of the senses without assuming a being who senses an object or an object to be sensed. In other words, they don’t assume anything extra on the near or far side of a sensation.

From this point of view, those who are awakened can still use the concepts of “I” and “me,” but not in the service of the desires and passions that would lead them to cling to the conceit, “I am” (SN 1:25) or the identity, “I am this” (SN 22:89). They can act on intentions, but can burn any seeds coming from those intentions that would lead to karmic results. How they have mastered these skills, though, only they would understand (AN 3:34).

The death of an arahant is described as all the six senses “growing cold right here” (Iti 44). Because the consciousness of unbinding—called “consciousness without surface”—is known independently of the six senses, it’s not affected by the death of the arahant’s body (MN 49). But again, because it has no location, it can’t be traced by anyone else.

In Context

The Buddha’s instructions to Bāhiya, when taken out of context, have often been interpreted as directions not to engage in any processing of sensory input. We’ve been told that for there to be, “in reference to the seen, only the seen,” we have to approach the seen while keeping in check any conceptual framework, any choice, any act of judgment, any assumption of an agent to do the seeing or to process what is seen. Mindfulness, from this perspective, means maintaining an attitude of non-judging acceptance toward whatever happens.

However, when we take the Buddha’s instructions in context, we can see that he’s recommending a skillful pro-active processing of what is seen. What has to be kept in check is something very specific: the passion that would lead to suffering and stress. To do this, you have to develop appropriate attention toward any impulse to regard the seen as endearing, which in turn requires that you judge the allure of the seen—or of the thought of “endearing”—as not worth the drawbacks of falling for that allure. Then you have to keep this judgment in mind with everything you see, hear, sense, and cognize. The ability to keep this judgment in mind is the actual function of mindfulness in this case.

In other words, instead of truncating your mental faculties, you use them wisely to attack the problem precisely at its cause: the passion that wants to find endearing things to feed on in the senses. When your attack is strategically on target, you have a chance of getting the best results.

When we understand the instructions to Bāhiya in this way, we can see that they fall in line with the teaching that provides the framework for all the Buddha’s teachings: the standard definition of the four noble truths. Suffering is caused not by conceptual frameworks or judgments in general, but by the desire and passion that constitute craving. The path to its ending starts with appropriate attention to that craving—in other words, the distinctions drawn by right view, and the choices and duties following on those distinctions.

This explanation may sound more complex than many of the one-factor solutions proposed by other interpretations, and it might be asked how Bāhiya could comprehend all this in one sitting. But remember: Bāhiya was fast. He could see immediately that the problem following on the seen was passion, and that it had to be attacked at whatever fed the passion. Once he had clearly gained that insight, everything else followed in a flash.