Hopes Hard to Give Up

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Two hopes are effectively permanent; two kinds of person are rare and two insatiable; and every mental state named here needs both an outside occasion and an inside handling.

The two hopes (AN 2.118)

The hope for wealth and the hope for long life are called duppajaha, hard to give up. That is all the discourse says. There is no instruction attached, no warning, and no claim that these hopes are unskillful.

The restraint is worth noticing in a collection that is elsewhere quite willing to tell people what to abandon. What is offered here is an observation about how strongly these two run, and a reader can do what they like with it. For most people the honest response on first reading is recognition rather than resolve, which is probably the intended effect: a person who has just noticed that they will very likely hope for both of these things until they die is in a different position from one who has not.

Rare, and hard to satisfy (AN 2.119–122)

Two individuals are rare in the world: one who takes the initiative — pubbakārī, the one who acts first, before being asked or repaid — and one who is grateful and thankful. The pair belongs with AN 2.32, where gratitude marked the true person; here it is joined to its counterpart, the person who starts things.

Then two who are rare in another sense: one who is satisfied and one who satisfies others. And then, as a mirror, two who are hard to satisfy: one who continually hoards wealth and one who continually wastes it. Both are named as the same failure, which is a sharper observation than the usual moralizing about either. The miser and the spendthrift are united by never arriving at enough; the direction of travel differs and the condition does not.

Two conditions each (AN 2.123–126)

The chapter’s densest passage. Greed arises from the feature of beauty and irrational application of mind. Hate arises from the feature of harshness and irrational application of mind. Wrong view arises from the voice of another and irrational application of mind. Right view arises from the voice of another and rational application of mind.

Two things about this structure. First, each state needs both an occasion and a handling. The feature of beauty by itself does not produce greed; irrational attention to it does. This is the same architecture the Ones used in the hindrances chapter, stated here as a general principle: nothing outside you is sufficient, and nothing inside you operates on nothing.

Second, and more striking: for both right and wrong view, the external condition is the same. Parato ghosa — the voice of another, what someone else says to you. Views do not arise from looking at objects; they arise from being told things. The only variable that decides which kind you get is how you attend to what you are told.

This is the passage that should be read beside the collection’s repeated praise of good friendship. Good friends matter enormously because the voice of another is the sole external source of view, right or wrong. But the same discourse denies that good company is sufficient: the voice of another produces wrong view too, under irrational attention. Whom you listen to and how you listen are two separate variables, and both appear here.

Three ways to classify an offense (AN 2.127–129)

The chapter closes with three of the Vinaya distinctions the Ones treated at length: light and serious, with and without corrupt intention, requiring and not requiring rehabilitation. Here they are simply named as pairs, with no verdict attached — the Dhammavagga’s filing method applied to disciplinary categories.

Their appearance at the end of an otherwise psychological chapter is a reminder of how the Aṅguttara is put together. A vagga is a container of roughly the right size, and material that shares a number can share a chapter without sharing a subject.

Key terms