Traineetopic View in explorer

The Buddha defines a trainee as one who trains in higher virtue, higher mind, and higher wisdom.

The Buddha maps the stages of awakening to fulfilling ethical conduct, collectedness, and wisdom.

The Buddha explains the difference between a trainee still practicing the path and an adept who is fully awakened. While a trainee discerns the Four Noble Truths as they truly are and has unwavering confidence in the Buddha, the adept has fully contacted the culmination of the faculties.

When the monks led by Assaji and Punabbasuka refuse to stop eating at night, the Buddha asks if they take him to teach that whatever one feels must be wholesome. Felt comfort does not prove a practice wholesome and who should act with diligence.

When the Buddha inaugurates a new assembly hall for the Sakyans of Kapilavatthu, he asks the venerable Ānanda to teach the assembly. Ānanda outlines the comprehensive path of a disciple in training—detailing the perfection of virtue, sense restraint, moderation in eating, wakefulness, the seven good qualities, and the four jhānas—culminating in the breakthroughs of true knowledge.

When a young brahmin claims that avoiding sights and sounds constitutes development of the sense faculties, the Buddha reveals that true cultivation lies in understanding pleasant and unpleasant experiences as constructed and transient through an examination of the six sense bases. He contrasts the trainee, still swayed by agreeable and disagreeable, with the noble one who has attained mastery over perception.

One is a trainee if they have cultivated the four establishments of mindfulness to a limited extent.

When asked if he teaches a gradual training, gradual practice, and gradual progression, the Buddha details a sequence from virtue and sense restraint to the heights of meditation. Through the analogy of a traveler on the road to a city, he explains that while Nibbāna exists, he is merely one who shows the path. Success depends on the practitioner walking the path provided.

One is a trainee if they have the right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right collectedness.

What determines a complete spiritual path? When the wanderer Vacchagotta asks the Buddha to explain wholesome and unwholesome actions, he discovers the remarkable spiritual success spanning the Buddha

There is no other single internal factor as helpful as radical attention for a trainee bhikkhu who is aspiring for the highest goal.

The Buddha describes the three mental faculties - 1.) the faculty that senses ‘I will know the unknown,’ 2.) the faculty of awakening, and 3.) the faculty of one who is awakened.

When one knows and sees the four noble truths, there is the wearing away of the taints.

The Buddha describes three things that lead to the decline of a trainee bhikkhu and three things that lead to non-decline.

A laywoman should wish for her son to become like the foremost lay disciples Citta and Hatthaka, and if he goes forth, wish that acquisitions, respect, and popularity not come upon him while he is still a trainee.

A laywoman should wish for her daughter to become like the foremost female lay disciples Khujjuttarā and Nandamātā, and if she goes forth, may acquisitions, respect, and popularity not come upon her while she is still a trainee.

DhammaPada verses 44-59 share on the trainee, nature of the body, what happens to one who dwells with an attached mind, how a sage should wander in village, one who speaks on virtue and wisdom though various similes. The fragrance of virtue is compared to the fragrance of flowers, and the virtue of the noble person is said to spread in all directions.

Sitting in the open during a pitch-black, stormy night, the Buddha is visited by Brahmā Sahampati, who speaks on the courage of solitary practice and the countless beings who have found release.