Introduction

In the Pāli discourses of the Buddha (Sutta), liberation (vimutti) is presented as the ultimate soteriological goal that practitioners should strive to realize. Like in other Indian contemplative traditions—including the orthodox Brahmin one, as well as Jainism—liberation is seen as the irreversible escape from the cycle of rebirth (Bronkhorst, 2007).

However, the discourses are particularly vocal on a point that tends to remain more controversial for other sects, namely, the idea that liberation can be experienced directly and fully in this life (diṭṭha-dhamma, e.g., SN 35.124; AN 8.21; see “Note on texts and translations” at the end paper for the use of abbreviations). That this is the case is stressed in the accounts of the Buddha’s own awakening (e.g., MN 26), which is presented in the discourses as a discrete break-through event, with precise spatiotemporal coordinates, followed by another extensive period during which the awakened Buddha lived, taught, and established a significant community of practitioners (many of them awakened too) in a specific geographical region (Northeast India). Some of the essential qualities of the Buddha’s own teaching (the Dhamma, see, e.g., AN 3.54) also point to this possibility of experiencing the fruits of practice—including ultimate liberation—in this very life, since the Buddha’s teaching is “to be seen here and now” (sandiṭṭhiko) and “to be experienced directly by the wise” (paccattaṁ veditabbo viññūhī). If liberation is to be understood as something to be experienced in life, this entails that the experience of liberation must bring a (fundamental, radical, profound) change in the way in which those who are liberated experience reality, in comparison to an ordinary, non-liberated person. In other words, there must be an empirically and phenomenologically observable dimension of liberation that is open for direct investigation in embodied experience.

This paper investigates how this embodied dimension of liberation plays a pivotal role in how the discourses present the teachings of the Buddha. More precisely, I argue that the way in which liberation is conceptualized in the discourses has a distinctive and fundamental relational dimension. This means that liberation cannot be fully understood—nor actually realized—if one ignores the way in which the individual practitioner functions within the broader social and ecological environment in which their practice unfolds, and can ultimately be achieved.

In the discourses, this point is explored by connecting the experience of liberation to different kinds of persons, differentiated by the ways they experience reality. For the ordinary person (puthujjana), there might be a presumption of being free, but there is actually no experience of liberation. For the disciple in training (sekha), the experience of liberation starts to become real and shows itself to be different from the ordinary person’s way of life. Eventually, for the disciple who has fulfilled the training and reached full liberation (arhat), the ordinary way of life is entirely left behind. This does not necessarily entail an escape from the world of embodied life, but it does open new possibilities for choice and freedom in the overall psychophysical and social ecosystem.

In the following, I shall usually translate the Pāli word vimutti as “liberation” in order to stress how the goal intended by the discourses is reached through a process of cultivation (bhāvanā), but also how this process consists in a progressive freeing oneself from various factors that are considered to cause bondage. Nonetheless, I shall also occasionally refer to “freedom” in order to characterize the degree of liberation that a person can acquire in their life. Since being (relatively) “liberated” means being freed from bondages, liberation also entails having acquired more “freedom” to choose and moving without constraints (this use of the term is in line with the similes used in the discourse to illustrate the process of liberation from the hindrances, see, e.g., DN 2).

While the discussion of liberation invites reflection on freedom, the notion of freedom that is at play in the discourses should not be reduced to or assimilated with the concept of “free will” that is often discussed in Western philosophical debates (see, e.g., List, 2019). In fact, recent scholarship is divided on whether it is possible to square Buddhist sources with the Western treatment of “free will” (at least in its mainstream versions).

For instance (and limiting this overview to early Buddhism only), Gowans (2017) argues that the issue of free will falls outside the pragmatic soteriological agenda of the Buddha. Since knowing whether or not freedom is compatible with causal determinism is irrelevant for ultimate salvation, the Buddha deliberately remains silent on this issue. Adam (2017) takes a more nuanced view, arguing that, on the one hand, the Buddha would have no qualms with empirical freedom (the ability to do what one wants), but would deny metaphysical freedom (the ability to want what one wants). At the same time, the discourses present freedom in negative terms, as a progressive liberation from the deluded view of a self as genuine controller of experience, and from the yokes that bound people to the cycle of rebirth. Accordingly, the ordinary person (puthujjana) is not free from any of these constraints, the disciple in training (sekha) is free from self-view, but not entirely from the yokes, while the awakened one (arahat) is free from both, and indeed, from the will itself.

A similar view is defended by Harvey (2017), who claims that the Buddha’s teachings in the Nikākyas are compatible with “semi-compatibilism and weak free will.” Meyers (2017), moving in a similar direction, stresses that “the cultivation of the path involves a complex play of identification and dis-identification and ever-shifting oscillation between personal and impersonal experience” (Meyers, 2017, p. 189), without undermining the experience of empirical freedom. Taking an even stronger position, Repetti (2017, 2019) argues that a form of soft-compatibilism is available for, and compatible with, the Buddha’s teachings. In particular, he takes the self-regulative abilities developed in meditation as a key piece of evidence in support of an enhanced power of inhibiting otherwise habitual reactions, which amounts to an exercise of free will.

The way in which the scholarly debate just sketched projects the issue of free will onto the discourses tends to rely on the assumption that free will needs to be constructed as the property or power of an individualized causal agent who, in virtue of possessing it, can elicit new actions and control them. While this assumption might find some historical backup in Western debates on free will (for a late-scholastic background, see Penner, 2013), there is no compelling a priori reason to take it as the only way of conceptualizing freedom—neither in the West nor among Asian traditions. As we move away from this individualist assumption, I shall argue that the discourses in fact provide a different (and possibly richer) conception of liberation and freedom, in which the agent’s relation with other agents and their wider environment plays a structural function in defining what freedom is and how it can be enacted.

Uncovering this relational dimension of liberation can help take forward the current dialogue between Western philosophical debates and ancient Indian sources. Francisco Varela and his collaborators (Varela et al., 2016), for instance, inspired by Buddhist thought, advocated for what they called an “enactivist” approach to freedom, according to which any living organism emerges through a constant interplay with its environment. Neither the organism nor the environment should be taken as more fundamental than the constitutive and autopoietic relation from which they emerge. Evan Thompson has further developed this approach by applying it to the nature of cognition and defending an “enactivist” account of the emergence of selfhood (Thompson, 2015). He also draws attention to the potentially misleading individualist bias in some mainstream contemporary Western understandings of Buddhist meditation (Thompson, 2020). Matthew MacKenzie (2013) uses this enactivist account as lens through which to interpret the notion of karma in early Buddhist thought, while Daniel Stuart (2019) explores the interplay between early Buddhist philosophy and meditation practice and contemporary views on embodied cognition. Coming from a completely different perspective, Michael Tomasello (2019) has advanced a new theory of ontogeny which aims to explain the emergence of proper human behaviors from the specificity of human social interactions and how these impact the shaping and training of collective intentionality within human groups (for a more historical point of view, see Lenz, 2022 and Hadot, 1995, pp. 81–125).

These recent developments in Western thought and science show how the convergence between Buddhist ideas and Western perspectives is putting increasing pressure on an overly narrow and individualistic approach to freedom. By taking a more relational approach, this paper aims to contribute to this trend by showing that (1) the Pāli discourses of the Buddha offer a distinctive elaboration of the relational dimension of liberation, and (2) by taking this relational dimension of liberation into account, the reflections offered in the discourses are considerably less scant, puzzling, and incoherent than today’s scholarship might suggest.

To support these points, I shall first present (§2) how the discourses analyze ordinary experience in terms of basic patterns of action, typified in terms of greed, aversion, and ignorance. In this respect, liberation can be initially conceived as liberation from these patterns. Liberation is thus relational not only in the sense that it takes its experiential meaning from how different it is to ordinary life, but also because the patterns that shape ordinary life are themselves interpersonal and relational in their own right. Then (§3), I shall discuss how the path of training outlined in the discourses takes stock of this interpersonal and relational component by devising a set of pedagogical tools to help practitioners abandon ordinary patterns by relying on different ways of relating and socializing with other living beings. This leads to an appreciation (§4) of how the state of full liberation is best seen not as a sheer escape from the world of embodied life, but rather as a new way of inhabiting it, which at the same time discloses new possibilities for all the other living beings that inhabit it, and dissolves the sense of necessity and inevitability that usually accompany the ordinary patterns of life.

However, before entering the details of this discussion, two disclaimers are in order. The first concerns the scope of my discussion. As mentioned at the very beginning, liberation in the discourses is understood as a complex soteriological notion connected with the end of rebirth. In contending that there is a relational dimension of liberation that can be observed and witnessed in embodied life, I do not intend to deny the eschatological implications that follow after death. Nevertheless, I argue that a clearer grasp of the relational dimension of liberation as it can be observed in embodied experience—and as it functions in accounting for the actual practice described in the discourses—provides a first and necessary step for deepening any further soteriological or eschatological reflection. For instance, examining later South Asian Buddhist sources, Daniel Stuart (2015, e.g., pp. 49–54) observes the complex social ontology that underpins Buddhist soteriology, which intertwines the human realm with that of natural and supernatural forces (animals, spirits, ghosts, deities) in a blended ecological field of mutual interaction. To some extent, this is reminiscent of what can also be found in the Pāli discourses (e.g., SN 56.11). However, to appreciate the importance of this sort of social landscape of Buddhist soteriology, it is first necessary to understand why and how the very goal of liberation is conceptualized in such a way that it requires taking a social dimension into account. Addressing this latter point is the purpose of this paper.

The second disclaimer is methodological and concerns my approach to the discourses. The Pāli discourses of the Buddha are a historical corpus that can be studied from different angles and from different purposes (for the basic historical facts about them, see Gethin, 1998, pp. 35–58). For instance, they can provide a means of investigating a certain phase in the relatively early development of the Buddhist tradition in India (Harvey, 2013, pp. 1–113), and be systematically compared with other extant corpora related to early Buddhism preserved in different Asian languages (Anālayo, 2011; Gethin, 2020). They can function as a repository of information about Indian ascetic practices and the social, political, and cultural life in the first centuries BCE in Northeast India (Bronkhorst, 2007). They can also be used to reconstruct what the “original core” of Buddhist teaching amounted to (Wynne, 2007, 2010).

For the purposes of this paper, I shall take a more philosophical approach aimed at uncovering the main conceptual infrastructure created by the discourses in their attempt to articulate the Buddhist teachings. While I shall delve into the actual training commended in the discourses, I consider these teachings as normative prescriptions about how to practice, leaving aside their potential documentary value in reconstructing historical reality. Similarly, in exploring the relational dimension of liberation in connection with the goal of training, its actual practice, and its end result, I shall limit my investigation to the interlinked conceptual elements at play in any of these layers, without seeking to uncover the actual social and historical contexts in which the teachings were embedded at the time when they were conceived or articulated.

When referring to a social dimension of liberation, for instance, I understand this primarily from a conceptual and normative point of view, as indicating that liberation has to be understood in the context of human social interactions, no matter how they might be historically enacted. While different historical instantiations provide examples of the concrete forms in which the notion of liberation could have been realized, there is no reason to assume that such instances should exhaust the whole scope of its conceptual dimension. It is this latter dimension that I tackle more explicitly.

It is also worth emphasizing that I am not seeking to recover the “core teachings” of the Buddha himself by looking at the corpus of the Pāli discourses. In fact, I shall treat the discourses as my source, and the Buddha as simply the main literary character that is portrayed in them. While acknowledging that the discourses are a complex, partially heterogeneous, and stratified source, I do not think that the basic tenets I shall discuss here will be affected or skewed by this complexity, as it is illustrated in the rest of my discussion. With these caveats in mind, I now turn to the discourses and their relational account of liberation.

Liberation from the Ordinary Patterns

As mentioned, the Pāli discourses share with other contemplative traditions—both orthodox and heterodox—the idea that rebirth is fueled by action (kamma, Sanskrit karma). Recent scholarship (Obeyesekere, 2002; Bronkhorst, 2007; Gombrich, 2013) stresses how early Buddhism developed this idea of kamma on at least two fronts: (1) the discourses take the domain of thought (Dhp 1–2) or intention (cetanā, AN 6.63) as the most fundamental dimension of action, and (2) the ethical or moral quality of action (and intention) determines the unfolding of its results and the mechanism of rebirth. For present purposes, I shall focus on the first aspect.

Rooting action at the level of thought or intentions delineates the specific stance that the discourses take from other rival sects. The Jains, for instance, are regarded as holding the view that the effects of kamma can be exhausted through strong bodily ascetic practices (Balcerowicz, 2016). In the discourses, the Buddha is presented as rejecting this view, and contending instead that the true route to liberation is not “physical development” but “development of the mind” (citta-bhāvanā, MN 36; but see also AN 1.51–52 and 3.100).

This general account is further spelled out in the discourses by employing a recurrent scheme, in which the Buddha usually contrasts three ordinary “bases” or “roots” (nidānā) of action, against a set of alternative bases (e.g., AN 3.34, 6.39). The ordinary bases are identified as “greed” (lobha), “aversion” (dosa), and “ignorance” or “confusion” (moha), and their opposite as “non-greed,” “non-aversion,” and “non-ignorance.” The idea behind drawing a distinction between action and its basis is that one can change the basis of action, without having to forfeit all action whatsoever. In other words, while ordinarily one might think that some form of desire or aversion is needed in order to motivate one to act, the discourses suggest that taking desire or aversion as one’s own basis for action is not necessary or unavoidable.

An example is provided for instance by the attitude of friendliness (mettā), which is the positive expression of non-aversion. One can surely imagine a number of actions that can be based upon friendliness and yet entail no form of aversion or desire (for further discussion, see Sangiacomo, 2022a, pp. 167–178). By generalizing this point, we can regard the whole training offered by the Buddha in the discourses as an attempt to learn how to act based on non-greed, non-aversion, and non-ignorance (see discussion in Ñāṇavīra, 2010, pp. 262–263). In fact, on several occasions (e.g., SN 38.1 and 43.1), the end goal of the Buddha’s training and the state of liberation or awakening are defined as the complete and irreversible extinction (in the practitioner) of greed, aversion, and ignorance.

The importance of these three bases in defining both the goals and methods of the Buddhist practice in the discourses can hardly be overemphasized. Nonetheless, it is true that the discourses are not always consistent in labelling and spelling out which factors the scheme of the three bases of action is intended to address. In the famous discourse on the four noble truths (SN 56.11), for instance, thirst (taṇhā) is singled out as the factor to eradicate, while in the teaching of dependent origination ignorance (avijjā) is usually presented as the root problem (e.g., DN 15). However, the scheme of the three bases address both these elements, (considering that thirst is spelled out as encompassing thirst for non-existence, which might be associated with a form of aversion). For present purposes, therefore, I shall retain the model of the three bases as the leading thread for my discussion, assuming that other formulations that can be traced in the discourses can be interpreted as (conceptually and practically) overlapping with it.

Nonetheless, two remarks are important concerning the model of the three bases. First, greed, aversion, and ignorance overlap with both the emotional and intellectual dimension of liberation. They clearly have an emotional tone, insofar as they give rise to a range of emotional attitudes (lust, fear, pride, confusion, and so forth). But they also entail more cognitive and intellectual dimensions, insofar as they also lead one to entertain certain views about external objects, or even about the agent themself. These views can span from misperceptions of what is truly good (e.g., MN 75) to full-blown speculative views about the self and the world (e.g., DN 1). By tackling greed, aversion, and ignorance, then, one is developing the emotional and intellectual dimension together; that is, they are not sharply isolated from one another in the conceptual apparatus of the discourses.

The second remark concerns the nature of “intentions” (cetanā). In its narrower sense, this term refers to deliberate and explicit mental acts, of which their subject is self-aware (e.g., SN 12.38). Thus understood, intentions can be contrasted with seemingly subconscious, involuntary, or automatic actions. However, in a broader sense, “intention” covers all those mental acts that are characterized by their being about something or aiming at a certain result (see discussion in Ñāṇavīra, 2010, pp. 60–65). In fact, all actions are intentional in this sense, since without aiming at a certain result (however defined), no action can be elicited. In this broader sense, “intention” and “(mental) action” (kamma) are synonyms.

The way that greed, aversion, and ignorance are understood in the discourses encompasses both these aspects. The three bases can function as basic patterns or schemes that can be used to voluntarily and self-consciously direct concrete actions in relation to specific objects (by reaching towards the object, steering away from it, or turning a blind eye on it). An instance of how this is manifested is provided by the five hindrances (DN 2; SN 46.51). However, the discourses also acknowledge that the mental world is stratified and not all its components are equally apparent and self-conscious. The term anusaya (underlying tendency), for instance, is used to indicate latent disposition to act in a certain way, which might not be fully conscious or explicit. In some cases, the discourses present a sevenfold division of anusayā (AN 7.11), which include the equivalents of greed, aversion, and ignorance. In one important discourse (SN 36.6), though, the fact of deliberately acting on the basis of aversion, greed, and ignorance (in this order) is regarded as the cause of these latent dispositions, which are aimed at repeating the same actions in the future. This entails that greed, aversion, and ignorance, through habituation, can work subconsciously or become transparent for their subject.

The term āsava (intoxicant or taint) is also used to signal the enaction of the anusaya in actual behavior. The connection with greed, aversion, and ignorance is here slightly less explicit, since āsavā are identified with sensual desire, desire for existence or rebirth, and ignorance (e.g., SN 38.8). However, what is noteworthy (for present purposes) is that āsava also indicates a tendency to act, which might not be fully explicit or self-reflectively clear to the subject. As such, the practitioner must apply specific methods for understanding the presence of the āsavā and uprooting them (e.g., SN 46.111–120). The discussion of both anusaya and āsava signals a sensitivity in the discourses for tackling those dimensions of mental life that are rooted in habitual patterns, which might not be explicitly acknowledged or even self-consciously enacted, and yet can still fall within the (broadly understood) domain of intentionality or mental action covered by the three bases.

For present purposes, the crucial point to emphasize is that greed, aversion, and ignorance (as well as their negative counterparts) cannot be conceived of as completely private and individualized mental states, but necessarily entail a relational dimension. This point is implied by the discourses, which often repeat that all actions can be expressed into the three domains of thought, speech, and body, where the latter two usually concern interactions between individuals. However, I shall contend that even at the level of thought, the bases for action cannot be regarded as a quintessentially private phenomenon.

The discourses reject (AN 10.61 and 10.62) the possibility of tracing a “first cause” for the arising of thirst (taṇhā) or ignorance (avijjā). However, they explain that both thirst and ignorance are sustained by specific factors. This is a clear implementation of the principle of conditionality that is more standardly codified in the 12-fold formula of dependent origination (SN 12.1, see further discussion in Ñāṇavīra, 2010, pp. 15–36; Shulman, 2008; Jones, 2009). For instance, in the discourse on ignorance, the Buddha explains:

When [the factor of] not associating with good persons becomes full, it fills up [the factor of] not hearing the good Dhamma. As not hearing the good Dhamma becomes full, it fills up lack of faith. As lack of faith becomes full, it fills up careless attention. As careless attention becomes full, it fills up lack of mindfulness and clear comprehension. As lack of mindfulness and clear comprehension becomes full, it fills up non-restraint of the sense faculties. As non-restraint of the sense faculties becomes full, it fills up the three kinds of misconduct. As the three kinds of misconduct become full, they fill up the five hindrances. As the five hindrances become full, they fill up ignorance. It is in this way that ignorance is nourished, and in this way it becomes full. (AN 10.61)

While the immediate and middle conditions of ignorance are located in properly mental factors (like the five hindrances) and in the three kinds of misconduct (namely, actions by body, speech, and mind, based on greed, aversion, and ignorance, AN 10.174), the more remote (but no less important) condition is traced back to “not hearing the good Dhamma” and this in turn to “not associating with good persons.” This means that the seemingly private mental state of ignorance is conditionally supported by (and it depends upon) a specific kind of social condition or interaction (in this case, the lack of interaction with people instructed and learned in the Dhamma). If A is conditionally dependent upon B, then A cannot be fully conceived of independently from B. Applied to the case at stake, this means that mental elements that are engrained in the individual mind (like ignorance or thirst) cannot be conceived of independently from the social conditions that support them, and hence, they too have a social dimension—they cannot be viewed as purely private phenomena.

Greed, aversion, and ignorance are engrained patterns or habits that tend to orient action in a predictable and recursive way. How does a person become established in these habits? By getting used to performing and enacting them. This performance, however, does not happen in a void, but always within a certain social setting in which others are also enacting the same habits, and these consequently become the “normal” or ordinary way of operating. Consider for instance the following exchange (which focuses specifically on the case of greed but can be applied to the other bases):

“What do you think, Kālāmas? When greed (lobha) arises inside a person, does it arise for their welfare or for their ruin?”

“For their ruin, Venerable.”

“Kālāmas, this greedy person, overcome by greed, whose understanding is consumed by greed, kills living beings, takes what is not given, commits adultery, speaks falsehood, and induces others to do the same, and this is for their long-term ruin and suffering.”

“Yes, Venerable.” (AN 3.65)

Here, the Buddha’s goal is to illustrate to the Kālāmas how greed (a mental attitude) leads to unwholesome deeds by speech and body (which affect others). However, for present purposes, I would like to stress two seemingly minor and yet crucial points. First, actions based on greed have an intrinsic tendency to reproduce themselves in others—a person overcome by greed “induces others to do the same”—which suggests that this is how the attitude of greed has first taken root in the individual, namely, by exposure to others’ behaviors based on the same basis.

The second aspect is that the exchange does not seem to consider this relational dimension of greed to be controversial, and the Kālāmas are quick to recognize what the Buddha is talking about. This is important because, to a skeptical contemporary philosopher who might want to be presented with more evidence about the fact that greed, aversion, and ignorance cannot be conceived of as purely private states, the discourses seem to take for granted a shared, almost common-sense, background in which this option is not given serious consideration. This might be regarded as a philosophical shortcoming on the side of the discourses—or perhaps on the side of the today’s skeptical philosopher.

Be that as it may, the point that the ordinary bases are not entirely reducible to a private and individualized mental domain receives further validation if we look at it from the point of view of multicultural research on emotions. For instance, comparing different cultural settings in which emotions are enacted (including Buddhist contexts), Owen Flanagan (2021) has argued that emotions like anger (comparable with dosa) can be understood as “scripts” that people execute by following specific and culturally inflected rules, which are in fact learned through social interactions.

I think the same idea can be applied to the way the bases of action are understood in the discourses. They also function as “scripts” that have been learnt in interaction with others, and hence they can (and must) also be unlearned and abandoned by starting to interact with others in different ways. This is a pivotal step to understanding how the Buddhist training is structured in the discourses.

Training for Liberation by Internalizing Social Skills

In the discourses, liberation is not presented as an object of sheer theoretical investigation, but as a goal that orients and shapes a specific training, which is articulated and developed in multiple ways throughout the Pāli corpus (and beyond it, in subsequent evolutions of Buddhist thought). As Daniel Stuart remarks, “practice and theory are not as easily separated as scholars would presume. […] The practice/theory dichotomy finds no significant parallel within early Indian yogic traditions” (Stuart, 2015, p. 24). For present purposes, I shall illustrate how this principle applies to the way liberation is connected with the meditative training outlined in the discourses, which blends together interpersonal social skills and metacognitive reflection.

As I suggested, greed, aversion, and ignorance can be interpreted as basic scripts for relating to both oneself and others and interacting within a social setting. When looking at the training outlined in the discourses to reach liberation from these three bases, we can see that they recommend a progressive interiorization of opposite social habits, scripts, and patterns, which lead to the restraining, weakening, and eventual abandoning of greed, aversion, and ignorance. This occurs first in one’s interactions with others, and eventually also in one’s own attitude towards oneself.

In order to better organize and structure the materials, I shall operationally distinguish between two dimensions of the training (which in actual practice are strongly intertwined), one concerning what needs to be done, and the other how to perform the intended practice. The first point is substantive: it is encapsulated in training rules or precepts. These usually start by focusing at the level of external actions, but the practice can be further refined in order to observe the underlying mental intentions that would generate those external actions. The second point is metacognitive: it consists in the ability to observe, steer, and guide the execution of a certain action (including restraining other competing courses of action). In the discourses, both points are first introduced within the context of social interactions and then interiorized by individual practitioners so they can be executed autonomously. I shall review both dimensions in turn.

The discourses repeatedly emphasize that greed, aversion, and ignorance are the bases for unwholesome actions. The first, and most explicit, way of countering them is represented by the development of morality (sīla). This consists in following certain ethical precepts, which bring attention to forms of actions in which the manifestation of three unwholesome bases is most apparent and which, in turn, are supposed to motivate one to develop alternative (preferable) forms of action (Giustarini, 2017).

The minimal and coarser version of moral training is represented by the five precepts (non-killing, non-stealing, non-adultery, non-lying, non-intoxication, AN 8.25), which are recommended for lay practitioners. On lunar observations (or more often for more committed practitioners), these precepts can be “upgraded” with a higher degree of renunciation (celibacy instead of non-adultery, one meal a day, no entertainment, and sleeping on low beds to minimize sleep time, AN 8.41). The precept against false speech is also often further spelled out as a restraint against false, divisive, harsh, and idle speech (e.g., AN 8.40). But there is no a priori discrete limit to the number of precepts that one might establish. The Pāṭimokkha followed by ordained renunciants includes 227 rules, which are discussed in greater detail in the Vinaya (for further discussion, see von Hinüber, 1995).

For present purposes, it is not essential to dive into the codification of these precepts and what their possible historical or social implementation might have been at the time when the discourses were compiled. The crucial point for our discussion is to highlight that the practice of following moral precepts relies on a twofold relational and social dimension. On the one hand, precepts are first undertaken and implemented in one’s relations with others, either within ordinary society, or in the more specific setting of a cenobitic ordained community; on the other hand, precepts are implemented by often imitating other (advanced) practitioners’ behaviors.

Presenting the eight uposatha precepts (AN 8.41), for instance, the Buddha explicitly phrases them as the effort of a practitioner to live, for one night and one day, as an awakened one, by imitating how the awakened would live every day. This idea of imitation can also be extended beyond moral training. On one occasion (AN 4.159), even conceit—the thought that “if they can reach awakening, why shouldn’t I?”—is presented as something capable of leading to ultimate liberation. Generalizing even further, on another occasion the Buddha famously declares that “admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the training. When a mendicant has admirable friends, companions, and comrades, he can be expected to develop and cultivate the noble eightfold path” (SN 45.2). The training is not enacted by the individual practitioner alone, but is made possible by the practitioner’s interaction with a teacher, or better a “good friend,” who can show them both how to progress and also that progress itself is actually possible. This is perhaps a warmer account of the otherwise drier (but conceptually equivalent) principle according to which the factors that give rise to the “right view” (the foundation of the eightfold path) are wise attention and “hearing the voice of another” (AN 2.126), namely, being exposed to someone else capable of teaching the path—and showing how to practice it by instruction and example.

Understanding, practicing, and developing moral life as based on the precepts is often presented (e.g., AN 3.65) as resulting in an increased ability to “dwell” (viharati) in special meditative attainments, which consist in holding attitudes of boundless friendliness, compassion, sympathy, and equanimity towards all living beings; these attitudes are associated with ceto-vimutti or “liberation of the heart-mind” (see discussion in Martini, 2011; Anālayo, 2015). This connection makes it particularly clear how the countering of external expressions of greed, aversion, and ignorance is also supposed to uproot their mental manifestations, and by that means open up the possibility for the practitioner to gain access to wholesome mental meditative states. In fact, it is a standard trope in the discourses to explain how subduing the five hindrances (which can be seen as an expression of greed, aversion, and ignorance) is the gateway for accessing the meditative attainments associated with samādhi (e.g., DN 2, see discussion in Anālayo, 2003, 2018; Gethin, 2004; Arbel, 2017).

To illustrate this process with just one example, in the famous Mettāsutta (Sn 1.8), the training starts with an outline of moral integrity as expressed by qualities that clearly embody the lack (or deep restraint) of the three unwholesome ordinary bases, and then progresses with the arising of the “boundless thought” (mānasaṃ aparimāṇaṃ): “may they be happy and safe / may all living beings be pleasing to themselves” (Sn 1.8). Other discourses suggest that this boundless thought can be observed as a particular state of mind (MN 10) and can function as the basis for furthering samādhi (AN 8.63). But most importantly, the way in which the discourse naturally transitions from a description of relatively outward behavior to the cultivation of a mental state strongly suggests that the practitioner capable of performing that outward behavior is invited to follow it up to its mental roots and discover its boundless source (in this case, the basis of non-aversion or universal friendliness). Notice how in both cases one is still practicing in relation to others, while drifting from the outward level of bodily actions of non-aversion, to the mental level of a boundless wish for happiness and well-being for all living things. This is an important pattern that also reoccurs, albeit in different ways, in the context of the reflection on universal themes (AN 5.57). Pondering the human predicament is linked with moral purification. Universalizing this reflection as applicable to both oneself and all other living beings gives rise to an attitude of universal compassion, which is then presented as the tipping point for the “arising of the path” and ultimately for the eradication of all unwholesome underlying tendencies (anusayā).

As anticipated, this sort of practice requires that one not only knows what to do (or not to do), but also has the ability to monitor how this performance is executed by developing appropriate metacognitive skills. In several discourses, it becomes apparent that metacognitive skills are also learned in a relational way, by progressively internalizing patterns of interaction that are enacted first in socialized and inter-personal scenarios.

In one instance (MN 19), the Buddha presents an account of his own awakening by explaining a practice of dividing thoughts into two groups: those based on sensuality, ill-will, and violence, and those based on the opposite. After this first parsing, the Buddha explains a criterion he used to assess these thoughts:

… when I was dwelling unintoxicated, ardent, and resolute, a thought about sensuality, or ill-will, or violence arose. I knew that: “this thought about sensuality, ill-will or violence arose in me. It leads to my own affliction (attabyābādha), to the affliction of others, and to the affliction of both; it extinguishes wisdom (paññānirodhiko), contributes to vexation (vighātapakkhiko), and does not lead to unbinding (anibbānasaṃvattaniko).” (MN 19)

For present purposes, it is crucial to stress how the consideration of the dyad “me and others” plays a normative role in the Buddha’s assessment. The process that led the Buddha to his own awakening was shaped by an attitude of self-monitoring informed by a reflection on the consequences of intentions on both himself and others. This principle then becomes normative for practitioners (e.g., AN 8.25). They are encouraged to practice for both their own welfare and the welfare of others, which means not only developing qualities and undertaking practices that they find beneficial for themselves, but also helping others to do the same.

The discourse with the Kālāmas (AN 3.65) illustrates an intermediary step in how metacognitive skills are interiorized. First, the Buddha instructs the audience to put aside all inferential means of knowledge (based on external sources or forms of reasoning) and instead rely on a sort of direct moral intuition about what is wholesome (kusala) or unwholesome (akusala), namely, by knowing or recognizing these states “by yourself” (attanāva jāneyyātha). However, this intuition can be verified by comparing it with the reaction that would be expected from “the wise” (viññū) and whether they would approve or reprove it. This sort of reflection entails having interiorized a model of wisdom and moral integrity in the form of an idealized character, and using this as a touchstone for assessing one’s own particular intuitions at specific moments. The idealized character can be the product of memories and actual encounters with real human (accomplished) individuals, and reflect the (aforementioned) idea of learning from other advanced practitioners by example. However, in this context, it also illustrates how the more outward form of imitation of wise behaviors is subjected to a process of abstraction and interiorization, which produces an initial inner mental avatar who can be consulted to approve or reprove certain behaviors.

Eventually, for the advanced practitioner, this process of interiorization yields a fully mastered and autonomous skill of discerning wholesome and unwholesome actions. This is emphasized by the reference to two key qualities, namely, shame of wrongdoing (hiri) and fear of making mistakes (ottapa), which are repeatedly commended as an indispensable endowment of the advanced practitioner (e.g., AN 7.67). The function of these qualities is analogous to that of the inner wise, but their enaction no longer requires the mental image of a wise other that the practitioner consults. The moral character of the inner wise has become one’s own, and the accompanying moral wisdom can now judge immediately. Once one’s practice is fully supported by these qualities, following the precepts or abiding by morality becomes not only a sort of second nature, but also a form of constant self-monitoring.

In order to support and fully develop hiri and ottapa, the discourses also refer to communal practices of questioning and avowal—which are not too dissimilar from the analogous forms that have been discussed in the context of the Greco-Roman pagan and Christian ascesis (Foucault, 2012). On one occasion (AN 10.23), the Buddha illustrates how certain actions are abandoned by body, by speech, or by “having repeatedly seen with wisdom.” In the first two cases, the Buddha presents a scenario in which someone (in this case a bhikkhu) has committed an offence, and his companions investigate him. Because of this social pressure, the bhikkhu is expected to abandon wrong bodily or speech acts and develop wholesome bodily and speech acts instead. But when it comes to underpinning mental defilements (greed, aversion, ignorance, anger, hostility, denigration, insolence, miserliness), the Buddha explains that they cannot be abandoned by body or speech, but by having seen them with wisdom. While this particular discourse does not make it explicit what is entailed by “seeing with wisdom,” it is apparent from the context that this amounts to understanding the inherently problematic nature of mental defilements, their dangerous implications for both oneself and others, and thus seeing a reason not to indulge in them. In this sense, wisdom represents the fully interiorized self-monitoring principle that is initially trained at the level of social interactions by body and speech.

Perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of how social pressure is interiorized and then used in the discourses to motivate awakening can be found in the story of Nanda (Ud 3.2). Nanda is the Buddha’s brother and he is living as a monk, but he does not enjoy the renunciant life and he is longing to return home, where the most beautiful girl of the country is waiting for him. Upon hearing this fact, the Buddha brings Nanda to the heaven of the Thirty-three, where he glances upon five-hundred divine nymphs. Nanda’s infatuation for the human girl is destroyed on the spot, and now the Buddha promises that if he would stick to the training, he might enjoy the divine nymphs. This manages to convince Nanda not to return to his home life. However, as soon as his companions discover that his real motivation for engaging in the training boils down to his infatuation for the nymphs, they start to mock Nanda and look down upon him. So much so, that “humiliated, ashamed, and disgusted […] [he] went to dwell alone, secluded, heedful, ardent, and resolute. And in no long time, he entered and remained in the supreme goal of the training” (Ud 3.2).

This episode can help us better frame an important consequence of the relational dimension of the training. As the discourses make abundantly clear, the three bases of greed, aversion, and ignorance not only generate specific actions, but also proliferate into attitudes of appropriation and self-identification from which the sense of self arises. One who operates upon those bases eventually fully identifies with them (Fink, 2015). Greed is not experienced as a purely impersonal mental condition, but as “my desire for this” and whatever might contrast its satisfaction elicits “my anger against that obstacle”—and so forth.

The crucial point to note here, though, is that the bases of non-greed, non-aversion, and non-ignorance—hence, also the attitudes and actions cultivated by the Buddha’s training—do elicit a sense of self. This might appear striking, given the emphasis in the Buddhist tradition on the teaching of non-self (see discussion in Wynne, 2010). However, the self that emerges from the training is a purely relational and strategic self, a skillful construction which asserts itself only for the sake of carrying over the training and disengaging from the ordinary bases (Ṭhānissaro, 2011).

For the one in training (sekha), the enaction of these three alternative bases is necessary as a replacement. As the Buddha instructs, in order to abandon something, one must first grasp onto something else: “by relying on this, abandon that” (MN 137). In order to abandon greed, aversion, and ignorance, it is necessary to learn how to act in a different way, and the three alternative bases provide alternative scripts for that purpose. Notice that they still entail interaction with others, and in fact enhance the quality of that interaction, steering it towards a domain of ease, safety, and universal compassion. Since the three ordinary bases support themselves through repetition, the disruption of the repetition also disrupts them, revealing that at any time (different) choices are available. The practitioner thus becomes increasingly capable of choosing the negative version of any of the three ordinary bases, until the ordinary bases are no longer enacted at all.

However, it is quite clear that the creation and enaction of a different persona is deeply rooted in the sort of training advocated in the discourses, especially when it takes the form of an official ordination. The scheme of the gradual training is used in the discourses to rationalize and streamline the essential ingredients that can eventually lead to awakening (Gethin, 2020). This scheme usually begins with the moment when “a Tathāgata appears in the world” (which is connected with the idea that the Dhamma needs to be proclaimed first by someone who realized it directly, compare AN 2.126 mentioned above), and the first step is the disciple’s act of faith in the teaching, followed by their going forth from household life to homelessness.

Going forth is clearly a social act—not only in practice, but also conceptually. In the same way that ordinary life (shaped by greed, aversion, and ignorance) leads to the creation and enaction of a certain selfhood or persona, so too the Buddha’s gradual training begins with the symbolic killing of that ordinary person, and the second-birth of a new one. We find here again the scheme of interiorization: by renouncing external living conditions, family bounds, sexual activity, ordinary clothing, hair and beard (for males), even one’s own name, one is led to give up their ordinary self. However, in this process, one also receives a new home environment (in the case of cenobitic monks, a monastery), new social bounds (relations with one’s fellow monks), specific clothes and dress codes (the yellow robe), a specific outer look (the shaved head of the renunciant), and a new name.

José Ignacio Cabezón has provided an extensive study of Buddhist discourse on sexuality, in which he explored the scope and significance of celibacy rules in the context of the Theravāda Vinaya. Trying to move beyond a strictly juridical or sociological interpretation of monastic rules, he contends:

The Vinaya functions, so the Vinaya itself states, on many different levels, and it fulfils different purposes. It has externally directed, social functions […]: to create an institution (the saṅgha) that is an object of faith for the community of Buddhists and for the society at large, an institution that can preserve the doctrine and serve as a source of teachings for generations to come. The Vinaya also functions socially within—that is, internal to—the community of monks and nuns […]: to create and preserve a community that is well-knit, stable, and prosperous—a community that flourishes and is not dysfunctional. Finally, the Vinaya functions soteriologically at the level internal to the individual […]: to bring an end to mental defilements and to prevent their future arising. (Cabezón, 2017, p. 200)

At all three levels, a sense of selfhood and personality is enforced (and progressively so, moving from outward to more inward dimensions): by discriminating between the ordained member of the community in contrast with the lay population, or by way of identification and adhesion to the community values, rules, and etiquette, or finally by way of the very soteriological process of identifying with one’s own role as a practitioner and fully committing to enacting non-greed, non-aversion, and non-ignorance.

The relational dimension of the Buddha’s training, as presented in the discourses, includes not only the process of interiorization of actions and metacognitive skills that are first trained in inter-personal contexts, but also the very idea of enacting a self as the main character and actor within the training. This might appear paradoxical, especially given the emphasis that is usually attributed to the teaching of non-self (anattā) in the Buddhist teachings. To alleviate this paradox, we shall now investigate how liberation is conceived as a result of the training—and why it is precisely its relational dimension that helps us better understanding how the strategic enaction of a form of selfhood for the one in training can in fact lead to the dissolution of all self-appropriation for an awakened person.

The Ecological Impact of Full Liberation

Liberation retains a distinctive relational component even when understood from the point of view of final awakening. On the one hand, ultimate liberation is connected with the insight into the radical contingency and uncertainty of all conditioned reality—including greed, aversion, and ignorance—and hence with the resulting possibility of doing otherwise with respect to what ordinary unwholesome habits present as necessary and compelling. On the other hand, this same insight into radical contingency is also key to undermining any residual sense of self-appropriation and identification with anything in experience, by thus freeing the practitioner from any residual trace of conceit—one of the last fetters to be abandoned (AN 10.13). Let me elaborate on both points.

There are at least two main reasons why an ordinary person fails to notice the contingency of greed, aversion, and ignorance. The first is that these habits are naturalized in their environment, in the sense that seemingly everybody adopts them, and this exercises a strong imitative pull on a newcomer (newborn) to join the current habits by contributing to enforcing and reproducing the status quo. The second is that, in such a context, unless someone explicitly starts challenging the current habits and showing that it is actually possible to withdraw from them, it will be extremely unlikely to conceive of this possibility (in the jargon of the discourses, this amounts to becoming a Buddha, one who discovers this option without the guidance of another, cf. SN 12.65).

In this perspective, liberation begins to appear as the possibility of not-doing or doing otherwise with respect to the ongoing ordinary habits established on the bases of greed, aversion, and ignorance. But since these habits are also a social construction enacted within a certain environment, liberation also has to be conceptualized as an environmental property, something that individuals can enact because of a structural feature of the environment in which they emerge and operate. This structural feature is the fundamental contingency of greed, aversion, and ignorance, which means they cannot be necessary—despite the fact that repetition and social pressure might make them appear so. In this perspective, the relational dimension of liberation becomes apparent: on the one hand, liberation consists in a new way of interacting with other living beings (by steering one away from the ordinary bases), while on the other hand, this ability to choose to do so is enabled by the action of another who is already free from the yokes of the ordinary bases.

In other words, in the same way that liberation has to be conceived in relation to how others can operate, an individual’s ability to act freely also depends on others acting freely, and thus showing that such a way of acting is a viable option. Unless one is a Buddha, one cannot free oneself by relying on one’s own forces, but one can decide to make free choices by learning from others that they are actually possible. This enabling and empowering function that the teacher (the Buddha or a noble disciple) and the whole community of practitioners play reveals that freedom is not wholly in me as my unique and fully individualized power, but it is rooted in the ability to learn from others what can be done, and then endorsing and internalizing that choice as worth pursuing and deciding to actually bring it about in this particular (i.e., my own) condition.

In the perspective outlined in the discourses, liberation must thus be understood from the point of view of the kind of person that relates to it. From the point of view of the ordinary person who is subject to greed, aversion, and ignorance, ordinary liberation is understood as being free, and this appears as a property or a quality of the agent (“I am free, I am subject to freedom, freedom is my power of doing otherwise”). This quality is then assessed with respect to the agent’s ability (or lack thereof) to satisfy that greed, aversion, or ignorance. This ordinary freedom is experienced from a first-person perspective as something that gives to the agent some control over their own actions, although from a more structural point of view it consists in nothing more than the way greed, aversion, and ignorance assume the possibility of fulfilling their goals in a satisfying manner. In actuality, this ordinary freedom rarely challenges the influence of these bases. The ordinary way of acting is so rooted in the three bases that challenging them, or attempting to reject them, would seem as impossible as avoiding all actions whatsoever. This way of thinking would then run into the paradox that wanting to not want anything is ultimately a case of wanting something (it is a form of thirst for non-existence, or vibhavataṇhā, SN 56.11). In short, ordinary freedom, in the perspective of the discourses, is nothing but an ideological articulation of the basic workings of greed, aversion, and ignorance.

From the point of view of the instructed disciple (sekha), trained in the Buddhist path, liberation or freedom is not a property or quality inherent in an agent, but rather a structural, environmental feature of reality. At this level, freedom is the inherent possibility of doing otherwise or taking alternative courses of actions with respect to what others ordinarily do. This possibility is granted by the structural contingency and uncertainty of all conditioned realities, including interpersonal and social interactions. This contingency is inherently relational since it is based on the fact that any state of affair depends on the conditions in which it arises, and hence is also subject to cessation—and in turn cannot be said to be necessary (SN 12.1 and 56.11). Exploring this point would again require delving into the teaching of dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda) which cannot be dealt with here. The most important point for the present discussion is that since greed, aversion, and ignorance are conditioned, they arise and cease (thus they are contingent) and hence it is possible not to enact their script at all.

Incidentally, this helps us understand how the relational dimension of liberation underscored so far can be made compatible with the equally emphatic injunction recurrent in the discourses about seeking solitude and withdrawing from the world. The idea of living alone (eka), secluded (viveka), even outside of a community (asaṅgaṇika), is often iterated. It is presented among the basic criteria for consistency with the Buddha’s teaching, and it is also one of the standards used to judge whether a practitioner should pursue or avoid certain conditions or consider them compatible with the Buddha’s teaching and rules (AN 8.53). Living in crowded communities is regarded as an obstacle (AN 5.78). In many occasions, the Buddha himself is presented as extolling the importance of solitude and the idea that it is impossible for someone intent on seeking company to fulfill the training and gain liberation (MN 122). The Buddha’s own awakening is sometimes described as the culmination of a process of complete withdrawal from society and all human company in general (MN 12), even if solitude per se is not regarded as sufficient for inducing the ultimate break-through.

While there is no denying that a degree of physical seclusion is recommended in the discourses as not only helpful but to some extent necessary for advancing in the training, this is not necessarily inconsistent with the broader relational approach uncovered so far. “Living in the world” is understood as referring to a mental attitude and broader mindset, more than to a physical location. After all, “the world” in the discourses is defined not much in geo-spatial terms, but rather in phenomenological terms, as the whole of experience (SN 35.84 and 85). Ordinarily, living in the world means living in the “five aggregates affected by appropriation” (SN 56.11). Seeking seclusion from the world thus means escaping not from a specific location in time and space but from a specific way of living and relating to experience in general—a way of living shaped by the habits based on greed, aversion, and ignorance. Solitude, at its core, is understood as a mental attitude of freedom from these habits. Even if this might sound paradoxical at first, the discourses clearly suggest that since these habits are first enforced and sustained at the level of social interactions, they must also be uprooted through a process of interiorization of alternative ways of interacting with others. Ultimate solitude is not a perfectly isolated life but rather complete independency from the ordinary way of living, and even this supreme achievement is clearly defined in relational terms, i.e., in contrast to the socialized form of relational interplay that it aims at abandoning.

However, seeing liberation as the revelation of the contingency of ordinary habits has further and deeper consequences. The awakened individual constantly dwells on the clear understanding that all the constituent components of experience are uncertain or impermanent (anicca) and hence contingent and unsuitable for being fully appropriated as “my own” (SN 22.59). The understanding of liberation as the uncovering of the fundamental contingency of experience and reality thus leads directly to one of the distinctive features of the Buddhist account of awakening: its association of this achievement with a complete abandonment of self-identification and self-appropriation (Sangiacomo, 2022b). In fact, this realization can involve a peculiar state of depersonalization in which all personal ways of coloring experience have ceased (see MN 72 and SN 22.85, 22.89, 44.1. See also Ñāṇavīra, 2010, p. 246).

From the point of view of the awakened individual, this amounts to the extinction of any bases for self-oriented actions; that is, actions determined, shaped, and aimed at developing the sense of “I am.” Since the awakened one no longer identifies with any of the constituent components of experience, they cannot intentionally aim at shaping any of these components for the sake of addressing needs, concerns, or desires based on appropriation. For instance, in the discourses, the Buddha is never presented as making decisions or undertaking actions that somehow turn on his own personality, or his own personal needs or concerns. And yet, the Buddha (and the same applies to his awakened disciples) chooses, decides, and acts. But what is the basis of this form of awakened action?

If we take a relational, and even ecological perspective, it becomes apparent that for someone who has relinquished any form of appropriation towards individual components of experience, the whole environment itself becomes the basis of their own action. For instance, relinquishing appropriation of one’s own individual body leads one to see the body as just a body, composed of elements, but inherently impersonal (the same applies to the other aggregates). The body is present, it functions, but it does not come with any specific characteristic or trait that makes it mine, just as any drop of water is just water, a natural element which belongs to nobody (MN 10 and 62). In this sense, relinquishing appropriation leads one to see anything that constitutes one’s experience as just a natural element; unquantifiable, boundless, and transcending individual features. Freed from a conceited personalistic perspective, the awakened one sees and knows the whole environment (or the whole world, the five aggregates) as reflected in their own experience (whichever aggregate is currently present, it is understood through the universal characteristics of all aggregates in all time, places, and fashions—SN 22.59). But since the awakened one has become a point in this environment that is fully impenetrable and inhospitable for the bases of greed, aversion, and ignorance, they start functioning in the environment as a structure that dissipates actions based on these ordinary bases, and by contrast supports and amplifies those based on their negatives.

In this way, awakening to impersonality (anattā) provides a sui generis basis for awakened action, which differs from the sort of action still enacted by the disciple in training, insofar as it is completely free from any residual trace of conceit and appropriation. This vanishing of the person in the environment is expressed in the discourses with the Buddha’s own identification with reality itself (dhamma). The Buddha is no longer a person, but a manifestation of reality. In turn, whoever sees reality (the whole of what appears, the whole environment), sees the Buddha (SN 22.87).

Any course of action based on greed, aversion, and ignorance coming from the rest of the environment towards that awakened one is disrupted, disbanded, and deflected. The individual no longer plays this game, so to speak, and thus also interrupts (to different degrees) the same game as played by others. By contrast, all streams of actions based on the negatives of these three ordinary bases, will find support, amplification, and reinforcement in the awakened one.

In the discourses, this is most often illustrated in terms of teaching, either through explicit verbal instruction or through example. The Buddha might deliberately seek out suitable audiences, and adapt his teaching to them, for the purpose of awakening and amplifying any inclination they might have to abandon greed, aversion, and ignorance. But in either case, there is nothing personal in this way of acting, nor it is based on anything that is appropriated by the awakened one as constituting their own being.

In this sense, the awakening of just one individual plays a catalytic function in the weakening of greed, aversion, and ignorance in the whole environment. Since these ordinary bases self-sustain themselves through repetition (AN 6.39), the fact that an individual systematically disbands their enaction and stops relying on them significantly disrupts their functioning in the whole environment. Moreover, greed, aversion, and ignorance are not always equally strong in all individuals in all circumstances and at all times. If a well-disposed ordinary person gets in touch with an awakened one and learns from them, they might also undertake the training required to reduce or even stop greed, aversion, and ignorance. The awakening of just one individual reveals to everybody the weakness of these bases and their contingency, and hence the ever-present possibility of countering them and even abandoning them for good.

The awakening of a single individual thus has consequences for the whole environment at large. This cosmological dimension of awakening is emphatically marked in the ending of the Dhammacakkapavattana-sutta (SN 56.11, but see also AN 7.69). This discourse presents what is taken to be the first public sermon that the Buddha delivered to a group of five mendicants, with whom he shared ascetic practices in the past. When one of them reaches a thorough understanding of the Buddha’s teaching, by thus “entering the stream” that will lead to the full eradication of greed, aversion, and ignorance, the discourse shows how the deities celebrate this achievement:

And when the Wheel of Reality has been set in motion by the Fortunate, the deities dwelling on earth cried: “At Baranasi, in the Deer Park at Isipatana, the Wheel of Reality has been set in motion by the Fortunate, and it cannot be stopped by any renunciants or brahmins, deities or demons, supreme gods, or by anyone in the world!”

Having heard the cry of the deities dwelling on earth, the deities of the Four Great Kings raised [the same] cry.

Having heard the cry of the deities of the Four Great Kings, the deities of the Thirty-three raised [the same] cry.

Having heard [them], the Yama deities raised [the same] cry.

Having heard [them], the Happy deities raised [the same] cry.

Having heard [them], the Creator deities raised [the same] cry.

Having heard [them], the deities Delighting in Creation raised [the same] cry.

Having heard [them], the devas of the Brahma’s company raised a cry: “At Baranasi, in the Deer Park at Isipatana, the Wheel of Reality has been set in motion by the Fortunate, and it cannot be stopped by any renunciants or brahmins, deities or demons, supreme gods, or by anyone in the world!”

So, at that moment, at that instant, at that second, the cry reached as far as the Brahma world. And this ten-thousandfold world system trembled, shook, quaked, and an infinite sublime light appeared in the world, surpassing the divine majesty of the deities.

Then, the Fortunate uttered this inspired utterance: “Koṇḍañña has indeed understood! Koṇḍañña has indeed understood!” In this way, the excellent Koṇḍañña acquired the name: “Koṇḍañña Who Has Understood.” (SN 56.11)

The fact that the understanding leading to awakening can be communicated from one to another marks a radical new step in how a certain world-system works. The awakening of an individual is a crack in the ordinary system of greed, aversion, and ignorance, but the possibility of teaching that to others marks a further step, in which awakening can also be socialized, communicated, and made available. And since the deities, despite their lofty existence, are still subject to the same predicament of all living beings and are not free from greed, aversion, and ignorance, the “light” brought about by the possibility of teaching others how to escape from this predicament surpasses their majesty and provokes astonished joy and enthusiasm in them.

The world after the awakening of one individual is no longer the same world, even less so if this awakened one, like the Buddha, freely decides to teach others. This does not entail that everybody will have to follow the teaching. A teaching of liberation is not about setting new duties, but simply recovering a structural possibility that is ordinarily overlooked.

Conclusion

The reconstruction I have provided in this paper demonstrates that the discourses present liberation in connection to different sorts of persons, distinguishing mainly between the ordinary worldling (puthujjana), the disciple in training (sekha), and one who is fully awakened (arahat). For the ordinary worldling, acting freely means being unimpaired in one’s striving to achieve intentions based on greed, aversion, and ignorance. Since these bases increase suffering (e.g., SN 35.28 and 36.6, AN 3.65), the ordinary person feels constantly yoked to external conditions that turn out to be restrictive and therefore undesirable. Hence, they conceive of freedom as the possibility of doing otherwise and being unyoked from these external conditions, without realizing that this view is what keeps them yoked to the three ordinary bases that are the source of the problem in the first place. Since the three ordinary bases are carried out by enacting a form of selfhood, the ordinary person will also be led to think of their own freedom from the point of view of a self, understood as the ground and basis of action.

The disciple in training, meanwhile, has abandoned this belief in the self as the controller of action, and has weakened their enslavement to the three ordinary bases. The disciple starts disrupting the established habits based on greed, aversion, and ignorance, through a systematic method of practice, which in itself proceeds from the internalization of social skills learned in interactions with others. The liberation of the disciple consists in the ability to do otherwise, but with respect to what ordinary people usually do. Instead of acting on the basis of greed, aversion, and ignorance, they act on the basis of generosity (non-greed), friendliness (non-aversion), and wisdom (non-ignorance). This loosens the grip of the three ordinary bases not only for the individuals directly involved but in their wider environment. Mental training is training in mental disobedience with respect to the ordinary status quo.

For one who has completed the training and reached full awakening, no action can truly be said to be a personal one. And yet, the awakened one is still functionally operative in their environment. In fact, the whole environment functions as the basis for their own action. They create a point of singularity that constitutes a systematic obstacle for the propagation of greed, aversion, and ignorance, and a means of amplification and development for their opposites. Like a transistor in a radio, an awakened one sends out frequencies that undermine the three ordinary bases and amplify their negatives.

Nowhere in the discourses is it stated that the Buddha’s goal is to convert or save the whole of humanity at once (quite the contrary, AN 10.95). While there are references to actively seeking well-disposed audiences and a commitment to spreading the teaching among those who might benefit from it, this teaching is never presented as aiming to become mainstream or lead the whole of humanity to reach full awakening in unison. This is an important point to acknowledge since, unlike other worldviews, religions, philosophies, or ideologies, the Buddha is never presented as conceiving of humanity as a uniform mass that might advance towards salvation at the same pace.

This means that in the most likely scenario, humanity will continue to be constituted (in various degrees and proportions) by ordinary people, disciples in training, and awakened ones. But an environment in which action is entirely shaped by greed, aversion, and ignorance, and in which these three bases find no opposition or resistance whatsoever (an environment without awakened ones or their disciples), quickly becomes a hellish one and tends towards self-destruction, since these attitudes are naturally supportive of conflict, exploitation, and dominion, and result in suffering and frustration.

In order for an environment to have some sort of sustainable equilibrium, these three bases must be kept in check. Since this cannot be done through moderation alone, a more effective and long-term solution is provided by those individuals who have systematically abandoned the habits based of greed, aversion, and ignorance, by countering the grip that these retain on the rest of the environment. This is the role played by those in training and of the awakened ones. In this sense, their liberation has a deeper ecological function, namely, that of dissipating some of the otherwise unbearable and unsustainable proliferation of greed, aversion, and ignorance, and preventing them from leading the whole ecosystem to collapse under the weight of their unwarranted and unachievable demands.

Before closing, I would like to respond to a methodological objection that can be raised against the approach I used in this paper. One might object that my approach verges too dangerously towards a form of decontextualized rational reconstruction of disembodied ideas, something that is becoming anathema even in today’s methodological reflections on the history of (Western) philosophy (see, e.g., Mercer, 2019). Since concepts—at least those I have been discussing here—are conveyed through words, and the meaning of words is mediated by historical languages and shaped by various cultural and historical factors, trying to understand and relate concepts without considering their historical context might seem like a flawed project. On this point, I completely agree. My way of reading the discourses and reconstructing their conceptual apparatus has been indeed informed by existing historical and philological research on their historical context, which I have referred to throughout, and which provided the general constrains within which my philosophical reconstruction has proceeded.

However, acknowledging the importance of contextualism is consistent with there being two distinct sorts of questions that we can ask about historical sources, namely, (1) how was the source understood and received by their historical audience, and (2) what are the conceptual implications entailed by the way in which the source uses the conceptual apparatus available to them. While related, these two questions remain distinct in nature and, to some extent at least, they can be treated independently (Beiser, 2016). Here, I was concerned mainly with the second question, and hence an internal analysis—although historically informed—of the discourses themselves seemed entirely sufficient. Whether, and to what extent, the view that I have presented is also something that can be traced back to historical audiences and lineages of reception is a surely interesting further question, which I am happy to leave as a cue for further discussion.