What do magga and phala—path and fruit—mean to someone who is practicing today? How do these teachings become something we know through our own experience?
In the context of noble attainment, magga is the liberating breakthrough that cuts through particular fetters, and phala is its fruit, the corresponding freedom realized. The training prepares the conditions for this breakthrough. The suttas describe the development of virtue, concentration, and wisdom, and distinguish the stages of awakening through what has been abandoned and what remains. [1]
This framework helps us understand the direction and results of practice. However, people differ in their histories, dispositions, difficulties, and pace of development. The suttas themselves describe different relationships between tranquility and insight in the development of the path. We should allow room for differences in how practitioners experience and describe their journeys. [2]
I would like to share my experience as a contemporary practitioner. I recorded these events in my practice journal and later included them in my book, I Experienced Liberation and Nibbāna. This is how the journey unfolded for me.
Before the seven factors of enlightenment matured, I noticed that I was naturally observing the five precepts. Keeping them no longer required struggle or restraint. Mindfulness was strong in both my jhāna and insight practice.
As my practice developed, rapture, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity became exceptionally refined. On September 9, 2021, after a slight jolt to my mind, my mind became distinctly clear, bright, firm, and peaceful; in other words, it became equanimous. I tested whether this equanimity would remain when I thought, moved my arms, stood up, and walked. It remained.
A week later, I experienced the extremely rapid arising and passing away of the Three Poisons in my mind, accompanied by bodily sensations. Through this experience, impermanence, suffering, and non-self became experientially understood. My relationship with body and mind changed.
This understanding also brought energy. For the first time in my journey, I had confidence that the practice would work, and I wanted to practice more.
As the understanding settled, equanimity strengthened further. Thoughts and feelings rooted in the Three Poisons decreased substantially. Loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity became more prominent. These changes continued beyond sitting meditation and became observable in daily life.
Later, I experienced cessation of perception and feeling and continued practicing concentration and insight. Further attachments became apparent and fell away. Eventually, I encountered the deeply embedded perception of being the owner of this body and mind. What I described as the death of self concerned the relinquishment of that identification.
The particular sensations, timing, and sequence belong to my account. Other practitioners need not reproduce every detail of my experience. The suttas provide the framework for examining the understanding and release that develop through practice.
For practitioners, the fruit must become personally knowable. We can observe whether greed and hatred still take hold, whether keeping the precepts requires struggle, how we respond when circumstances are unpleasant, and what we continue to identify with or cling to. Recognizing a period of calm is one observation; knowing that a particular fetter has been abandoned is a further distinction.
My account offers one living example of this process. Teachings I had previously understood intellectually became directly understood, and that understanding changed how I lived.
Nancy Acord
Sutta references