Two Things

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Eleven pairs, named and not explained, which is what a numbered collection is for.

What a chapter like this is

The Aṅguttara is organized so that a reciter can find things. A chapter of bare pairs is the storage form: there are these two things — what two? — X and Y, eleven times, with the elaboration living somewhere else in the canon and being supplied by whoever knows it.

That is worth understanding rather than resenting, because it explains a great deal about how this literature reads. The Aṅguttara is not a book of essays with some regrettable list-making in it. It is closer to a filing system with essays occasionally attached, and chapters like this one show the filing without the essays.

It also means the honest thing for a guide to do here is not to invent explanations the text withholds, but to say where each pair is explained.

The eleven pairs, and where they live

Freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom (AN 2.87) were given their mechanism at AN 2.31, six chapters earlier: the first comes from the fading of greed, the second from the fading of ignorance.

Exertion, and not being scattered (AN 2.88) pairs effort with collectedness — the two halves that the Ones spent chapters on separately.

Name and form (AN 2.89) is nāmarūpa, the mental and physical together, and one of the twelve links of dependent origination. An entire analysis, filed as a pair.

Knowledge and freedom (AN 2.90) is vijjā and vimutti, the standard formula for the result of the path.

Views favoring existence and views favoring nonexistence (AN 2.91) are bhavadiṭṭhi and vibhavadiṭṭhi — eternalism and annihilationism, the two positions the middle way is described as running between. This is the most consequential entry in the chapter and it gets one sentence.

Lack of conscience and prudence and their positives (AN 2.92–93) return to the pair AN 2.7–9 called the two bright things that protect the world.

Being hard to admonish and having bad friends, with their opposites (AN 2.94–95), pair an internal disposition with an external circumstance — and AN 2.62, in the chapter on individuals, is the long version of the first half.

Skill in the elements and skill in application of mind (AN 2.96) names two competences: knowing what things are made of, and knowing how to attend.

And skill in offenses and skill in resolving offenses (AN 2.97) closes the chapter on the Vinaya, pairing the ability to recognize a fault with the ability to settle it. Recognizing without resolving is exactly the failure AN 2.21 called foolish.

Existence and nonexistence (AN 2.91)

One sentence deserves a paragraph of its own. Bhavadiṭṭhi and vibhavadiṭṭhi — views favoring existence and views favoring nonexistence — are the two poles the canon returns to whenever it describes what the teaching is not.

The first is the view that there is something that persists: a self, a substance, an essence that carries on. The second is the view that at death there is simply nothing, that the person is annihilated and that is the end of the matter. The canon treats both as views, both as held out of craving, and both as obstacles — and the middle way is called middle in part because it runs between them rather than because it is moderate.

This is worth flagging for Western readers in particular, because the second view is the unexamined default in a secular culture, and it is easy to arrive at Buddhism assuming that its rejection of a permanent self amounts to agreeing with it. The canon is explicit that it does not. SN 12.15, on this site, gives the same pair at length with the same verdict.

How to use it

Practically, this is a checklist of things to go and read about. A reader working through the collection can treat the eleven entries as eleven assignments and find where each is developed — several of them within the Twos themselves, which is a good way to notice how much this nipāta cross-references itself.

It is also the shortest possible demonstration of something worth knowing about the canon: that a pair can be a complete teaching, a technical term, a doctrinal controversy, or a pair of practical skills, and the format does not distinguish between them. The reader has to.

Key terms