With a Basis

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Nothing bad in the mind arises out of nothing, so there is always something to give up.

The claim, and why it is stated ten times

The sentence is identical throughout. What varies is the noun: nimitta, basis or sign; nidāna, source; hetu, cause; saṅkhāra, conditions; paccaya, reason. Then five more from the analysis of experience: form, feeling, perception, consciousness, and the conditioned.

This is the same rhetorical method the Ones used in their closing chapter, where mindfulness of the body was equated with the deathless through twelve verbs in turn. Enumerating every available term for a relation is how this literature states that the relation holds in every sense, since it has no word for “in every sense.”

So the ten are not ten claims. They are one claim, insured against the objection that it might hold on one construal of “arises from” and not another.

The instruction hidden in the second half

Each discourse has a second sentence that is easy to read past: by giving up that basis, those bad, unskillful qualities do not occur. The whole practical weight of the chapter is there.

It says the work is done upstream. One does not fight an unskillful state; one gives up what it arose from. That is why the collection has spent so many chapters on attention, company, habit, and view — all of them things that stand behind states rather than being states. The five hindrances chapter of the Ones is this principle applied: for each hindrance, what it arises from and what it does not.

It also implies something quietly reassuring. If a state has a basis, then the basis is a finite, identifiable thing, and identifying it is a job that can be done. The alternative — states that simply happen, with no handle on them — is the position the chapter is denying, and it is the position most people implicitly hold about their own moods.

Form, feeling, perception, consciousness

The last five entries are worth a separate note because they change the register. Bad qualities arise with form, with feeling, with perception, with consciousness — and then, by giving up that form, that feeling, that perception, that consciousness, they do not occur.

These are four of the five aggregates, and to a reader who knows the standard analysis the instruction to “give up feeling” sounds impossible. It is worth being clear about what is meant. The Pāli phrasing is not a demand to abolish experience; the sense is closer to giving up the particular form, the particular feeling, the particular perception that a given unskillful state arose in dependence on — letting go of what is being held rather than shutting down the faculty.

That reading is the one the rest of the canon supports. Nowhere is a practitioner told to stop feeling; they are told repeatedly to stop grasping what they feel. But the compression here does invite the harsher reading, and a teacher should expect a student to raise it.

Why this chapter matters more than its length

A one-minute chapter can be skipped, and this one should not be, because it is load-bearing. Every practical instruction in the Aṅguttara assumes it. Sense restraint assumes that what arises at the sense doors has a basis. The five hindrances chapter assumes each hindrance has a feeder. AN 1.306–315 on view assumes that deeds arise from something. Remove this chapter’s claim and none of that has anywhere to attach.

It is also the point at which the Twos touch dependent origination without naming it. The vocabulary here — nidāna, hetu, paccaya, saṅkhāra — is the vocabulary of that analysis, applied not to existence in general but to the specific question of where a bad mood came from.

Key terms