The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Bhikkhu Nanamoli [593]
463 The word khandha here has a different meaning than in the more common context of the five aggregates affected by clinging. It here refers to a body of training principles, the three divisions of the Noble Eightfold Path into virtue (sı̄la), concentration (samādhi), and wisdom (paññā).
464 The four foundations of mindfulness are the basis of concentration (samādhinimitta) in the sense of being its condition (MA). Here it would seem incorrect to translate nimitta as “sign,” in the sense of either distinctive mark or object. The four right kinds of striving are explained at MN 77.16.
465 MA: Dhammadinnā anticipated Visākha’s intention to ask about the formations that cease when one enters the attainment of cessation. Thus she explained the three formations in this way rather than as wholesome and unwholesome volitions of body, speech, and mind, the meaning relevant within the context of dependent origination.
466 MA explains further that the bodily formation and the mental formation are said to be formations “bound up” with the body and the mind in the sense that they are formed by the body and by the mind, while the verbal formation is a formation in the sense that it forms speech. The verb form vitakketvā vicāretvā has been rendered in a way that maintains consistency with the rendering of the nouns vitakka and vicāra as “applied thought” and “sustained thought.”
467 Cessation can be attained only by a non-returner or an arahant with mastery over the eight jhānic attainments. The meditator enters each attainment in turn, emerges from it, and contemplates it with insight as impermanent, suffering, and not self. After completing this procedure through the base of nothingness, he attends to certain preliminary duties, and then determines to be without mind for a particular length of time. He then briefly enters the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, after which mind and mental functions utterly cease. Thus his determination, backed by his previous accomplishments and preparations, leads him into the attainment of cessation. See Vsm XXIII, 32–43.
468 Applied and sustained thought cease first in the second jhāna; in-and-out breathing cease next in the fourth jhāna; and perception and feeling cease last in the attainment of cessation itself.
469 When the time decided upon by the determination for the attainment has lapsed, by reason of that prior determination the meditator spontaneously emerges from the attainment of cessation and the mind-process resumes.
470 MA: When one emerges from cessation, the consciousness of fruition attainment arises first, and the perception and feeling associated with that are the mental formation that arises first. Then, with the subsequent descent into the life continuum, the bodily formation, i.e., breathing, recommences. And subsequently, when the meditator resumes his ordinary activity, the verbal formation arises.
471 The first state of consciousness to arise on emerging from cessation is that of fruition attainment, which is called voidness, the signless, and the desireless because of its own inherent quality and because of its object, Nibbāna. Here these three names for fruition are assigned to the contact associated with fruition.
472 Ṃ: Nibbāna, the object of the fruition consciousness that arises on emerging from cessation, is called seclusion (viveka) because it is secluded from all conditioned things.
473 Ṃ: The three defilements are called anusaya, underlying tendencies, in the sense that they have not been abandoned in the mental continuum to which they belong and because they are capable of arising when a suitable cause presents itself.
474 MA explains that the bhikkhu suppresses the tendency to lust and attains the first jhāna. Having made the tendency to lust well suppressed by the jhāna, he develops insight and eradicates the tendency to lust by the path of the non-returner. But because it has been suppressed by the jhāna, it is said “the underlying tendency to