Oh, I don't think the qualifiers are neccessarily a sign of him not being a stream-enterer. It's how he feels about the qualifiers. One of my favorite Ajahn Chah talks is the one where he explains how "Not sure" became sort of his touchstone frame of mind. When one realizes the impermance of all conditioned things, the uncertainy of the mind and sense contacts, then really everything is "not sure." Someone once asked Ajahn Chah if he was an arahant. He replied something to the effect of, "When the birds come to a tree and eat the fruits, they say 'This fruit is bitter' or 'This fruit is sweet' but the tree doesn't even have a concept of it."JohnK wrote: ↑Wed Feb 14, 2018 6:32 pm Based on my reading (and not any attainment), I think you have too many qualifiers to be.
As a practical matter, it may not make any difference: Would you stop practicing either way -- with so much more to attain regardless?
Keep on keepin' on.
(It might be useful to try to see the cause of your question; to see/know any dukkha and its cause.)
You hit the nail right on the head about looking at the cause of the question. Asking the question in a semi-public forum does have a flavor of "Validate me!" "Label me!" "I want to be a something!" "I need to have achieved something!" In those cases, not a streamwinner.
The way I imagine it, becoming a streamwinner is a sneaky, surreptitious process. You start off as a worlding, but then you begin practicing and one day you think to yourself "The Buddha was so right! The Dhamma is so true! The Sangha is so wonderful! How can anyone see it any other way?" It's like when you take a maths class and The Dunce asks the professor a question and she looks at The Dunce like that person has three heads with five eyes on each one. "How can you even think that, given what I've taught you so far?" And so, the streamwinner looks back how they acted and thought in the past, before encountering the Dhamma and says to themself "Gosh, I was so deluded! Wow, very anger! Much greedy! I can't think that way with what I know now!" (Sorry about the doge-grammar, couldn't resist it.) Where before becoming a streamwinner one might have been taken by surprise at the hole that seemed to suddenly appear at the bottom of the shoe, the streamwinner notices day by day that the soles of his shoes are slowly scraped away. As one's faith in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha becomes stronger and less shakable, the violition to keep precepts and practice meditation is stronger and less easily swayed by worldly arguments. Eventually the question "Would you like some wine?" isn't answered by "Well, I shouldn't, but okay" but by "Well, I'd like to, but I keep the five Buddhist precepts, so no." (I imagine an arahant would say "Why on earth would I want to????") And so on. It's often stated that one of the fruits of streamwinning is that one will never do anything that will send them to a lower rebirth. But probably it should be taken as a measurement. Can you simply, lightly break a precept in everyday life? Yes? Then you're not a streamwinner. I'm not talking about hypothetical situations like "Drink this bottle of wine or I'll shoot your family." That's one of the places that "not sure" comes from. I'm talking in everyday life. Streamwinning isn't just a white shirt that you put on to attend a dhamma talk. It's not an achievement or a title. It's a mode of being, moment to moment, that is a result of sila, sati, panna.
(By my own standards, I'm not a streamwinner. I crave and eat bacon and cold-cuts and other meat and buy and prepare meat for my non-Buddhist family members, and, knowing what I do about the Law of Supply and Demand, I feel guilty about indirectly not keeping the First Precept. Working on such things, though! Plus, like, is a "Sangha" member still a Sangha member if they do things that are very un-Buddhist? I'm talking about those Muslim-hating "monks" in Burma. 'Cause, like, if they're the Sangha that I'm supposed to have unshakable faith in, heck no, I'm not a streamwinner by the Mirror of Dhamma standards.)
Anyway, I love Ajahn Amaro's talk on Sotapanna-ship https://youtu.be/5YdRFlLupUM. This is where I learned that whenever someone asked Ajahn Chah "What is sotapanna?" He would reply "Sotapanna is fish sauce." Turns out there is a Sotapanna-brand fish sauce in Thailand. I think it's sort of the Ajahn Chah version of Forrest Gump's "That's all I have to say about that."