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Amidst bitter disputes among the Kosambi bhikkhus, the Buddha teaches six principles of cordiality to restore unity, emphasizing shared loving-kindness, ethics, and noble view. The Buddha then outlines seven qualities that when sought out, lead to the fruit of stream-entry and provide the means to verify it.

The Buddha teaches the importance of frequently reflecting upon the five subjects of 1) aging, 2) illness, 3) death, 4) separation from everyone and everything dear and pleasing, and 5) one’s relation to one’s actions.

The Dhamma can be like a snake that bites if grasped wrongly. This discourse tackles the danger of misinterpretation, sparked by a bhikkhu who claimed sensual pleasures weren’t obstructions. The Buddha warns that a “wrong grasp” of the teachings leads to harm, while the right grasp leads to liberation. The ultimate goal is to use the teachings like a raft to cross over, letting go of all views—especially the view of a permanent self—to end suffering.

Using a simile of a deer-trapper laying down bait in order to trap herds of deer, the Buddha illustrates how ascetics and brahmins come under the psychic power and control of Māra and how one can become invisible and go beyond the Māra’s sight.

Prompted by a misquotation of the Buddha regarding mental versus physical and verbal actions, the Buddha clarifies the nature of kamma and its results. He explains, through a framework of four paradoxical cases, how actions may lead to unexpected outcomes based on prior deeds or conditions at death.

Recounting his ultra-delicate upbringing, the Buddha exposes the cognitive blindness of the ordinary mind, which reacts to decay with aversion while ignoring its own vulnerability. By projecting these realities inward, he shattered the three human intoxications with youth, health, and life.

By actively protecting the mind from enticing, irritating, deceptive, and intoxicating phenomena, a practitioner attains freedom from fear, wavering, and they do not go by the mere word of an ascetic.

The Buddha illustrates that his true inheritance is the Dhamma, not material possessions. Venerable Sāriputta clarifies the practice of seclusion by listing numerous harmful qualities to abandon and the Middle Way that leads to abandoning of them, to clear vision, wisdom, tranquility, to full awakening.

The Buddha uses the simile of a defiled cloth to explain how the mind can be similarly defiled by various impurities, and how it can be purified by abandoning them. And it is through this very practice that one arrives at unshakeable faith in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṅgha. The Buddha also addresses a brahmin in verses who believes in purification by bathing in river.

A person endowed with the two qualities of guarding the sense doors and moderation in eating lives with discontentedness in this very life and after death, a bad destination is to be expected.

Three kinds of children - 1.) one who surpasses their parents, 2.) one who follows in their footsteps, and 3.) one who falls below them.

The Buddha contrasts shallow and deep, factious and unified, worldly and Dhamma-centered assemblies. Communities bound by empty talk, indulgence, and discord decline, while those rooted in seclusion, concord, discipline, inquiry, and the good Dhamma flourish.