The Buddhist Paththereby complete the fourth purification to become a 'lesser
attainer of the stream'.
The meditator now moves on to a more committed and
deeper level of insight practice in which he contemplates the world
as made up of various categories and groupings of phenomena
that are all alike impermanent, suffering, and not self. This
results in knowledge based on 'taking dharmas in groups'; from
this he passes on to 'the contemplation of rise and fall'. At this
stage he begins to experience directly a world made up not, as
we normally assume, of substantial beings and objects, but of pat-
terns of events rising and falling, coming into existence, and pass-
ing out of existence. A feeling for the meditator's experience at
this stage is well evoked by the images (drawn from the earlier
texts) that Buddhaghosa gives in this connection: the world is no
longer experienced as consisting of things that are lasting and
solid but rather as something that vanishes almost as soon as it
appears-like dew drops at sunrise, like a bubble on water, like
a line drawn on water, like a mustard-seed placed on the point
of an awl, like a flash of lightning; things in themselves lack sub-
stance and always elude one's grasp-like a mirage, a conjuring
trick, a dream, the circle formed by a whirling firebrand, a fairy
city, foam, or the trunk of a banana tree.^36
This experience is profoundly peaceful and with it the mind
begins to settle into a state. of peace close to jhiina. Drawing
on an earlier list, Buddhaghosa describes the mind at this time
as characterized by ten qualities: illumination, knowledge, joy,
tranquillity, happiness, commitment, resolve, alertness, equan-
imity, and, significantly, attachment. Because of the presence of
the last these ten qualities are collectively referred to as 'the ten
defilements of insight'. What is being said here is that the mind
being so deeply affected by its experience grasps at it and takes
it for the experience of awakening itself. In other words, the prac-
titioner mistakenly concludes that he has reached the end of the
path. The texts warn that the meditator may live for many years
convinced that he or she has attained arhatship. Only when some
experience-like the arising of strong anger or fear-dissuades
him or her from this view does the meditator complete the fifth