Freedom From Death

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Whatever you do or fail to do with mindfulness of the body, you do or fail to do with the deathless.

A grammatical device carrying a doctrinal claim

The whole chapter is one sentence with twelve verbs substituted into it: enjoy, have enjoyed, lose, miss out on, neglect, forget, cultivate, develop, make much of, have insight into, completely understand, realize. Each is stated negatively and then positively.

The device is not decoration. By running the identity through every available verb, the chapter closes off the possibility that the relation holds in one respect and not another. You cannot have developed the practice but not the deathless, or realized the deathless without having realized the practice. The equation is total, and stating it twelve times is how a text without the word “therefore” says so.

It is also a good illustration of how this literature works generally. Where a modern writer would state a principle once and add a qualification, the canon states it once per case and lets the completeness of the enumeration do the work. Readers who find the Aṅguttara repetitive are noticing a real feature; what is worth adding is that the repetition is usually an argument rather than an emphasis.

The deathless

Amata — not-death, the deathless — is one of the canon’s oldest names for the goal, older in Indian usage than nibbāna and carrying a different flavor. It is what the Buddha is said to have declared open after the awakening: the doors of the deathless are open.

The word needs a little care in English, because “immortality” is the obvious translation and the wrong one. What is meant is not endless continuation, which the collection has just spent a chapter calling worse than excrement, but freedom from the process in which dying happens at all. Sujato’s “freedom from death” is a careful rendering for exactly this reason, and it is worth pointing out the difference in class, because a student who hears “deathless” as “living forever” has the whole thing backward.

Why the body, again

That mindfulness of the body should be equated with the deathless is a striking place for the Ones to finish, and the strangeness is worth naming rather than smoothing. The collection has spent six hundred entries on the mind — developing it, taming it, guarding it, clearing it — and it ends by putting the body at the center.

The two chapters are of a piece, and the reason is the same one the previous guide gave: the body is where anything true about a person is available to be checked. But there is a further point in ending here. A collection that opened with the sight of a woman occupying a man’s mind — the body as the thing attention gets caught on — closes with the body as the thing attention rests in. Whether that arc was designed is impossible to say. It is there either way, and it is a good note on which to finish reading the Ones.

The colophon

The last lines are not the Buddha speaking. “The thousand discourses of the Ones are completed” is the compilers’ own note, followed by the standard closing formula and then “The Book of the Ones is finished.”

The number is worth a comment. This series has published the Ones as thirty-one chapters covering six hundred and twenty-seven numbered discourses, which is how SuttaCentral and the Mahāsaṅgīti edition count them. The tradition’s own colophon says a thousand. Different editions divide the abbreviated passages differently, and expanding every peyyāla in the nipāta produces a considerably larger number than leaving them folded. Neither count is wrong; they are counting different things, and the discrepancy is a useful last lesson in what “how many suttas” means in this literature.

Key terms