Eight Kinds of Knowledge
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“Eight Kinds of Knowledge”
1. The knowledge or ability of attaining insight (With this knowledge, He knows, “my body is material, made from four great elements, born of mother and father, fed on rice and gruel, impermanent, liable to be injured and abraded, broken and destroyed, and this is my consciousness which is bound to it and dependent on it.”),
2. the knowledge of the production of a mind-made body, or the supernormal power of the mind-made body (With this knowledge, out of this body He produces another body, having a form, mind-made, complete in all its limbs and faculities.),
3. the various supernormal powers (With the super-normal powers, being one, He becomes many, and being many, He becomes one; He appears and disappears; He passes through fences, walls, and mountains unhindered as if through air; He sinks into the ground and emerges from it as if it were water; He walks on the water
without breaking the surface as if on land; He flies cross-legged through the air like a bird with wings; He even touches and strokes with His hand the sun and moon, mighty and powerful as they are, and He travels in the body as far as the Brahma world.),
4. the divine ear (With the divine ear, He hears sounds both divine and human, whether far or near.),
5. the knowledge of others’ minds understanding the ways of others’ thought) (With this knowledge, He knows and distinguishes with His mind the minds of other beings.),
6. the knowledge of previous existences [the remembrance of one’s former states of existence) (With this knowledge, He remembers many previous existences: one birth, two births,. . . . a hundred thousand births etc.),
7. the divine eye or the knowledge of the passing-away and arising of beings (With this divine eye, He sees beings passing-away and arising, inferior and superior, well-favored and ill-favored, to happy and unhappy destinations as kamma directs them.), and
8. the knowledge of eradicating defilements (With mind concentrated, purified and cleansed, unblemished, free from impurities, malleable, workable, established and having gained imperturability, He applies and directs his mind to the knowledge of eradicating defilements or destruction of corruptions. With this knowledge, He knows as it really is: “This is suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path leading to the cessation of suffering.)
(Dighanikaya, Vol.1,Samathaphala Sutta)