In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [199]
Later tradition calls a person who has faith in the Dhamma and aspires to reach the state of stream-entry a virtuous worldling (kalyāṇaputhujjana). To reach the attainment of stream-entry, the aspiring disciple should cultivate the “four factors leading to stream-entry.” As Text X,2(1) explains, these are: associating with wise and virtuous spiritual guides; listening to the true Dhamma; attending carefully to things (for example, by way of gratification, danger, and escape); and practicing in accordance with the Dhamma (by undertaking the threefold training in moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom). The peak of the training undertaken by the aspiring disciple is the development of insight: the thorough contemplation of the aggregates, sense bases, and elements as impermanent, bound up with suffering, and devoid of a substantial self. At a certain point, when insight reaches its peak, the disciple’s understanding will undergo a major transition, which marks the entry upon “the fixed course of rightness,” the true Noble Eightfold Path that leads irreversibly to Nibbāna. As Text X,2(2) puts it, such a disciple has risen up from the plane of worldlings and reached the plane of the noble ones. Though not yet a stream-enterer, a person at this stage cannot pass away without having realized the fruit of stream-entry.
As we have already seen, among disciples who attain the path there is a distinction between those who arrive through faith, called faith-followers, and those who arrive through wisdom, called Dhamma-followers. But while faith-followers and Dhamma-followers differ by way of their dominant faculty, they are alike in that both must further cultivate the path they have entered. Once they know and see the essence of the Dhamma—when they “obtain the vision of the Dhamma” and “make the breakthrough to the Dhamma”—they become stream-enterers, bound to reach full enlightenment and attain final Nibbāna in a maximum of seven more lives; see Text X,2(3). Stream-enterers eradicate the first three fetters and acquire the eight factors of the Noble Eightfold Path. They also have “four factors of stream-entry”: confirmed confidence in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and Saṅgha, and “the moral virtues dear to the noble ones,” that is, firm adherence to the five precepts; see Texts X,2(4)–(5).
Having seen the truth of the Dhamma, the stream-enterer faces the challenge of cultivating this vision in order to eliminate the remaining defilements. The next major milestone, the attainment of the plane of the once-returner, does not eliminate any defilements completely. However, it does attenuate the three root defilements—lust, hatred, and delusion—to a degree sufficient to ensure that the disciple will return to “this world,” the sense-sphere realm of existence, only one more time and then make an end to suffering.
A disciple who attains either of the first two stages, stream-enterer or once-returner, need not remain fixed there but can advance to the two higher stages. Descriptions of attainment in the Nikāyas suggest that it is also possible for a virtuous worldling with extremely sharp faculties to advance directly to the stage of nonreturner. The state of nonreturner is always said to be attained simply through the destruction of the five lower fetters, the three fetters eradicated by the stream-enterer along with sensual lust and ill will. From the Nikāyas, it appears that one with extremely sharp wisdom can achieve this stage at a single stroke. The commentaries, however, explain that in such a case the person actually passes through the first two paths and fruits in very quick succession before reaching the third path and fruit.
According to Text X,3(1), to abandon the five lower fetters, a monk first attains one of the four jhānas or one of the three lower formless attainments; the constituent factors of the fourth formless attainment