Individuals

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Two figures stand alone in the world’s order, and a community stands or falls on whether its members will be corrected.

The Buddha and the monarch (AN 2.52–55)

Four consecutive discourses give the same pair: the Realized One and the wheel-turning monarch arise for the welfare and happiness of the people; both are incredible human beings; both are regretted by many at their death; and both are worthy of a monument.

Readers of the Ones will recognize every one of those four predicates. AN 1.170–173 applied them to the Buddha alone, as the one individual. Here each is restated with a second holder, and the effect is a considered piece of political theology: the ideal ruler occupies a position structurally parallel to the Buddha’s, one at a time in the world, and honored in the same terms.

What is not said is as clear as what is. The monarch is not said to be awakened, or to teach, or to end suffering. He shares the public standing and not the attainment. And AN 2.56 then names the pair that does concern attainment — the fully awakened Buddha and the Independent Buddha, one who awakens without a teacher and does not establish a dispensation.

This pairing had a long career. Every Buddhist polity that ever needed to explain what a king was for reached for the wheel-turning monarch, Aśoka above all, and these four discourses are among the places the equivalence is stated most plainly.

Not startled by thunder (AN 2.57–59)

Three discourses on the same image with the second term varied: what is not startled by a crack of thunder? A mendicant who has ended defilements — and a thoroughbred elephant, then a thoroughbred horse, then a lion.

The comparison is doing something specific. Composure here is not presented as a spiritual glow but as the settled steadiness of a well-bred working animal or an apex predator: nothing about the sudden noise is relevant to it. It is the same instinct as the taming vocabulary of the Ones, and it keeps the description physical and unmystical.

Two discourses that need a note (AN 2.60–61)

AN 2.60 in Sujato’s translation reads “Aborigines see two reasons not to use regular speech…”, the two reasons being not to lie and not to misrepresent others falsely. The Pāli word rendered “aborigines” is kiṁpurisā — literally something like “what-sort-of-men” — which in Indian literature names a class of half-human forest beings, the kinnaras of later tradition. Most translators render it that way; Bhikkhu Bodhi has “kinnaras.” Sujato’s choice reads the term ethnographically instead.

It is worth flagging plainly, both because “aborigines” carries a weight in English that the Pāli does not obviously carry, and because this series has spent two chapters of the Ones insisting that representing a text accurately is itself a practice. That standard applies to the translation this site publishes as much as to anyone else’s. The English below is Sujato’s, unaltered, as it is throughout; this note is how the guide handles a rendering it would have made differently.

AN 2.61 states, without argument or elaboration, that women die unsated in two respects: sexual intercourse and giving birth. There is nothing to interpret — it is a bare generalization about half of humanity, offered with no reasoning and no parallel statement about men anywhere nearby. This series prints it because printing the collection means printing it, and says of it only what can be said honestly: it is unargued; it sits in the same collection as the chapter naming thirteen women foremost in wisdom, insight, and mastery of the monastic law; and a reader who finds it worthless is not thereby failing to understand it.

The question that decides everything (AN 2.62)

This is the chapter’s centerpiece and it is built out of one reflection, held by seniors, middles, and juniors alike.

Living with bad people: No mendicant, whether senior, middle, or junior, should admonish me; and I shouldn’t admonish any mendicant. If one were to admonish me, they wouldn’t be sympathetic, and I’d bother them by saying “No!” And anyway I wouldn’t deal with it even if I saw what I did wrong.

Living with good people: the same sentence, inverted at every clause. Any mendicant may admonish me; and I’ll admonish any mendicant. If one were to admonish me, they’d be sympathetic, so I wouldn’t bother them, but say “Thank you!” And I’d deal with it when I saw what I did wrong.

Three things are worth pulling out. First, the reflection is identical for every rank. The senior is not exempt from being corrected by the junior, and the junior is not exempt from correcting the senior; the discourse states the same words for all three positions and makes no allowance for seniority.

Second, the operative assumption is about the other person’s motive. The bad version assumes an admonisher wouldn’t be sympathetic; the good version assumes they would. Everything downstream follows from that reading of intent, which means the difference between the two communities is not a rule but a default assumption about one’s colleagues.

Third, the last clause is the honest one. “And anyway I wouldn’t deal with it even if I saw what I did wrong” concedes that the person may well be right. The refusal is not a claim of innocence. That is a more accurate portrait of how people actually resist correction than any account in which they think they are blameless.

And what remains afterward (AN 2.63)

The chapter closes on the residue of a dispute. Where the endless talk, the contempt for each other’s views, the resentment, bitterness, and exasperation are not settled, the issue leads to lasting acrimony; where they are settled, it does not.

Note that the list is of feelings and habits, not of facts. Nothing here concerns who was right. A disciplinary matter can be correctly decided and still leave every item on that list in place, and the discourse says the community will not live comfortably if it does. Read with AN 2.15 and AN 2.51, this completes the Twos’ account of conflict: trace your own thread, be persuadable, and then clear the residue, because settling the question is not the same as settling the quarrel.

Key terms