ACCORDING TO A CERTAIN Pali sutta, there was a monk (or bhikkhu) called Bhaddāli, a disciple of the Buddha who failed to follow his teacher’s rule about eating only one meal a day. After he realized his mistake, he spoke with his teacher about the deleterious effects of ignoring the training rules laid down for monks. The Buddha explained that, in neglecting the training rules, even a monk who spends time in a retreat hut in a secluded wilderness location will fail to “realize any superhuman distinction in knowledge or vision worthy of the noble ones.” A monk who does follow the training rules laid down by the teacher, on the other hand, will accomplish all four of the meditative absorptions (jhana), recollect his own past lives, understand the cycles of birth and death experienced by sentient beings, and finally, destroy his mental defilements.
Following this explanation, Bhaddāli quite reasonably asked why, if this was the case, “there used to be fewer training rules but more enlightened) had appeared in the sangha. He further explained that the reason for this greater number of defilements was the Buddhist community’s ever-increasing size, fame, learnedness, and wealth.
