In Vesālī, a Licchavi nobleman named Mahāli arrives at the Pinnacled Hall with a puzzle. A man called Sunakkhatta, who had spent three years training near the Buddha, told him something strange. He could see divine forms — the visible bodies of beings on subtler planes. But he could not hear divine sounds. Did those sounds simply not exist? Or did Sunakkhatta fail to hear sounds that were really there?

The Buddha's answer opens a much larger question. What is concentration of mind actually for? What does the holy life under him produce? And why, when two wanderers once pressed him on whether the soul is the same as the body or different, did he refuse to take a side — even though, he said, he knew and saw?

In this episode of the PaliVerse podcast, the sixth discourse of the Dīgha Nikāya, we walk through the Mahāli Sutta carefully, in  ...