The Buddha describes how to see the three felt experiences that are experienced on contact through the sense doors - pleasant, painful, and neither-painful-nor-pleasant.

The Buddha provides a detailed analysis of the six sense bases, differentiating worldly feelings based on attachment from those born of renunciation and insight. He outlines a progressive path of abandoning lower states for higher ones, guiding practitioners through refined meditative states toward complete liberation.

The Buddha uses a simile of a bronze cup of beverage mixed with poison to illustrate how craving for agreeable and pleasant sense experiences leads to acquisition and suffering, while wisely seeing their impermanent nature leads to the ending of suffering through the abandoning of craving.

The Buddha explains that those recollecting past lives are merely recalling one or more of the five aggregates. He defines each aggregate and shows how a noble disciple sees them as impermanent, dissatisfactory, and not suitable to identify with, leading to disenchantment, dispassion, and liberation.

The Buddha visits the dying lay disciple Dīghāvu and guides him to reflect on his solid foundation of faith and virtue (stream-entry), and then on deeper insights into impermanence. After his death, the Buddha declares him a wise non-returner, now bound for final Nibbāna.

The Buddha describes these four inversions of perception, thought, and view, and the four non-inversions. An uninstructed ordinary person perceives permanence in the impermanent, pleasure in the unsatisfactory, a self in what is impersonal, and beauty in the unattractive.

When approached with abundant offerings, the Buddha expresses a heartfelt wish to avoid fame, and speaks of five contemplations which result in being established in dispassion and wisdom.