Itivuttaka

doctrine, teaching; (4) nibbana. Sanskrit form: Dharma.

Enlightened one (dhira): Throughout this translation I have rendered buddha as “Awakened,” and dhira as “enlightened.” As Jan Gonda points out in his book, The Vision of the Vedic Poets, the word dhira was used in Vedic and Buddhist poetry to mean a person who has the heightened powers of mental vision needed to perceive the “light” of the underlying principles of the cosmos, together with the expertise to implement those principles in the affairs of life and to reveal them to others. A person enlightened in this sense may also be awakened, but is not necessarily so.

Fabrication (sankhara): Sankhara literally means “putting together,” and carries connotations of jerry-rigged artificiality. It is applied to physical and to mental processes, as well as to the products of those processes. In some contexts it functions as the fourth of the five aggregates—thought-fabrications; in others, it covers all five.

Fermentation (asava): One of four qualities—sensuality, views, becoming, and ignorance—that ferment in the mind and flow out of it, creating the flood of the round of death and rebirth.

Heart (manas): The mind in its role as will and intention.

Jhana: Meditative absorption. A state of strong concentration, devoid of sensuality or unskillful thoughts, focused on a single physical sensation or mental notion which is then expanded to fill the whole range of one’s awareness.

Jhana is synonymous with right concentration, the eighth factor in the noble eightfold path.

Kamma: Intentional act, bearing fruit in terms of states of becoming and birth.

Sanskrit form: karma.

Mara: The personification of temptation and death.

Patimokkha: The basic code of monastic discipline, composed of 227 rules for monks and 310 for nuns.

Sakka: King of the devas in the Heaven of the Thirty-three.

Samsara: Transmigration; the “wandering-on”; the round of death and rebirth.

Sangha: On the conventional (sammati) level, this term denotes the communities of Buddhist monks and nuns; on the ideal (ariya) level, it denotes those followers of the Buddha, lay or ordained, who have attained at least stream-entry.