Hi guys and gals,
There's an old sutta from the Samyutta Nikaya called the Upanisa Sutta. This is the source of Transcendental Dependent Origination, which appears to be a 12-link chain describing the process of awakening. There are multiple ways of looking at it, so I'll describe one that seems useful to me (but is not perfect).
I'll treat the sutta as describing how a run-of-the-mill person with no meditation experience gets to stream entry and its review phase. (Another reasonable interpretation is that it goes all the way to arahatship.) However, Transcendental Dependent Origination does not describe the insight stages in rich detail like the Visuddhimagga's 16-stage Progress of Insight. Rather, it starts with suffering, covers the process of developing jhana, and then briefly discusses the vipassana jhanas as experienced by a combined samatha-vipassana meditator. By "briefly discusses the vipassana jhanas," I actually mean that it just lists them. I filled in the details with the help of some notes from Bhikkhu Bodhi.
This is Bodhi's translation of the Upanisa Sutta from his anthology, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha.The entire progression of insight from Mind and Body to Stream Entry is described in 4 links in the chain, and then Review through Arahatship is the last link. Presumably, the Buddha had given enough detail about the meat of the path in other teachings, so he wanted to emphasize the path's beginning in this instruction.
The sutta starts at the 12th link of TDO, Knowledge of the Destruction of the Cankers. Then it works backwards through the 12 links of TDO, then backwards through standard Dependent Origination all the way to Ignorance. I'll give the links of TDO from start to finish, since backwards models aren't too useful for beginners.
I did translate some of the Pali words in unusual ways. Please ask if you have any questions about this, or about anything else in this post.
1. Suffering
No fun, lack of enlightenment is.
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2. Hope/faith
You need to have hope or tentative faith in the possibility of really getting enlightened through following the right instructions.
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3. Gladness
Pamojja. Having begun to follow meditation instructions for Concentrated Insight, aka samatha/vipassana, the hindrances of the meditator start to decrease in strength. Of course it's pleasant when greed, aversion, drowsiness, anxiety, and doubt first start to leave you alone.
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4. Rapturous Joy
Piti. When the meditator uses right attention to zoom in on one of the pleasant sensations of Gladness, these sensations amplify and start to spread through the whole body. So a simple and pure pleasure, isolated from hindrances and fed with attention, turns into waves of energized rapture. Notice that Piti is a factor of the first jhana.
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5. Tranquility
Passaddhi. Rapturous Joy is great fun at first, but it can also be a bit too much like an adrenaline rush. Once the meditator is tired of it, s/he now focuses on increasing calm and restfulness in the body and mind.
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6. Peaceful Bliss
Sukha, sometimes translated as "ease." In the previous step, the meditator spent some time chilling out the excitable aspect of Rapturous Joy. Peaceful Bliss is one phrase to describe the resulting calmer version of pleasure. Hey look, another factor of the first jhana!
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7. Meditative Concentration
Samadhi, which can either mean jhana, or the meditation factor called "concentration." This is a key point! This sutta does not say that one should start learning meditation by practicing the concentration factor. Of course, beginning practice with concentration strength training is a valid way to get to jhana. Lots of people on this very forum have done it that way. But the Upanisa Sutta recommends first learning to gladden the mind, turn the gladness into Piti, and tranquilize some of the Piti into Sukha... THEN drop into the first jhana. Of course, all those "preliminary" practices develop the concentration power, but in a more enjoyable way than breath counting or staring at a kasina.
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8. Seeing things the way they really are
A more literal translation of this stage is "knowledge and vision of the way things really are." This is the beginning of real insight. At the last stage, the meditator got to the first samatha jhana. In this stage, the meditator learns the insight knowledge from the first jhana: Mind and Body. S/he also passes through Cause and Effect, Three Characteristics, Arising and Passing Away, and Dissolution. (The basic thrust of this stage is getting the hang of adding investigation to Jhana, and getting from first jhana through the second.)
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9. Revulsion/Distaste
Eww. All conditioned things suck at least a little bit. They're kinda Scary, kinda Miserable, kinda Disgusting... though if you're doing samatha-vipassana, you still have Sukha going. So yes, you'll have Desire for Deliverance... but it won't be desire for deliverance from the nightmare that the dry vipassana dark night can sometimes be. (Not to knock dry vipassana -- the method clearly works, and it works quickly for the first 2 MCTB paths, and I admire the testicular fortitude it takes to sit through the 3rd nyana and dukkha nyanas without a big cushion of sukha to soften things up.) At this stage, the meditator perceives the imperfections and bothersomeness of Sukha, and anything else s/he might notice. So, the meditator desires deliverance from Sukha, and probably from the doughnutty weirdness of the third vipassana jhana in general. And deliverance will come, after some Reobservation.
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10. Dispassion
This is the Equanimity stage. Whoo! Getting close now.
To split hairs, you could say that the Revulsion/Distaste link ends with the Crisis substage of Reobservation, and the Dispassion link begins with the Defeat/Acceptance substage of Reobservation and continues with Equanimity. But maybe all a beginner cares about is "first you start to see how stuff really is, then you see how it sucks. Keep going, and you'll feel much better once you accept all of the above at a deep nonconceptual level, which will happen once the revulsion/distaste gets strong enough to cause dispassion."
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11. Freedom
Here we go! Nibbana at last. By my interpretation, this link represents the very first taste of Freedom, which happens at the Path and Fruition moment of stream entry. Other interpretations may make more sense to other people; I chose this interpretation because I think Transcendental Dependent Origination is meant to be a beginner-oriented map. It makes sense that when a beginner-oriented map mentions Freedom, it's referring to the very first taste of Freedom rather than to Freedom's perfection at arahatship.
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12. Knowledge of the Destruction of the Cankers
Review, and the rest of the Journey to the Big E. Now that our example meditator has had the first taste of nibbana, s/he knows how to destroy the cankers. That is, s/he has gotten a hold of how samatha/vipassana meditation works, and can now progress to higher and better summits. In the Buddha's words, the knowledge of the destruction of the cankers is the knowledge "such is form, such is its arising, such is its passing away" and the same thing for the other 4 aggregates.
Okay, there it is. I'm sure other people will make slightly different correlations between particular insight stages and particular links in the TDO chain. I'd like to hear about these; something that would be even more interesting is discussion of the overall scheme.
One thing to make absolutely clear: I did not invent this interpretation of the sutta! Bhikkhu Bodhi included it in the footnotes to the sutta, and it seems to have come from either the Samyutta Nikaya commentary or a subcommentary. All I did was make some minor changes to the intepretation, and fill in details.
