Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Rebirth itself is suffering and no rebirth is happiness — where there is rebirth, expect cold, heat, hunger, thirst, the indignities of the body, contact with fire and weapons, and the irritations of one's own relatives and friends; where there is no rebirth, expect none of it.
A question answered at the widest possible scale
Sāmaṇḍakāni's question is deliberately unqualified — simply “what is happiness and what is suffering” — and Sāriputta answers at the widest possible scale, bypassing everyday pleasures and pains entirely to locate suffering in the fact of embodied existence itself.
Concrete indignities, not abstract doctrine
Rather than an abstract account of dukkha, the list of sufferings that come with rebirth is strikingly physical and unglamorous — cold, heat, hunger, thirst, bodily functions, violence, and even the mundane annoyance of family gathering — grounding a cosmic-scale claim in the most ordinary discomforts of a body.
The first of this chapter's third pair
This discourse opens a matched pair with AN 10.66, which repeats the identical narrative frame — the same wanderer, the same village, the same greeting — but shifts the question from happiness and suffering in general to happiness and suffering specifically within monastic practice.
Key terms
The text
A wanderer's question
§1At one time Venerable Sāriputta was staying in the land of the Magadhans near the little village of Nālaka. Then the wanderer Sāmaṇḍakāni went up to Venerable Sāriputta and exchanged greetings with him. When the greetings and polite conversation were over, Sāmaṇḍakāni sat down to one side, and said to Sāriputta:
Rebirth is suffering, no rebirth is happiness
§2“Reverend Sāriputta, what is happiness and what is suffering?” “Rebirth is suffering, reverend, no rebirth is happiness. When there is rebirth, you can expect this kind of suffering. Cold, heat, hunger, thirst, defecation, and urination. Contact with fire, clubs, and knives. And relatives and friends get together and annoy you. When there is rebirth, this is the kind of suffering you can expect. When there is no rebirth, you can expect this kind of happiness. No cold, heat, hunger, thirst, defecation, or urination. No contact with fire, clubs, or knives. And relatives and friends don’t get together and annoy you. When there is no rebirth, this is the kind of happiness you can expect.”
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