Before Awakening

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Awakening was withheld until three questions about the world had been answered: what is good about it, what is wrong with it, and how one gets out.

Three words

Assāda, gratification — what is enjoyable, satisfying, tasty. The word is not pejorative; the canon uses it of anything that genuinely pleases.

Ādīnava, drawback or danger — the same word Channa used in AN 3.71 when he asked what drawbacks had been seen in greed.

Nissaraṇa, escape — literally going out from. Not destruction of the thing and not indifference to it, but a way out.

The three together are one of the canon’s standard analytical tools, applied to the world here and to feelings, the elements, and the sense fields elsewhere. It is worth teaching as a method rather than as a doctrine, because it can be run on anything.

The three answers

“The pleasure and happiness that arise from the world: this is its gratification.”

That sentence is the one to slow down on, and it should be quoted before any of the others when this material is taught. The world is pleasant. The discourse says so first, in the voice of somebody who went on to renounce it, and it does not qualify the statement.

“That the world is impermanent, suffering, and perishable: this is its drawback.” Three words, and the drawback is not that the pleasure is fake. It is that the thing providing it does not hold.

“Removing and giving up desire and greed for the world: this is its escape.” Notice what is removed. Not the world, and not the pleasure — the desire and greed. The escape is stated as a change in the person rather than in the situation.

What the three do together

The structure is more careful than it looks. If only the gratification were stated, the analysis would be an endorsement; if only the drawback, a complaint; if only the escape, an instruction with no reason attached.

All three together produce something a person can hold without distortion: this is genuinely enjoyable, it genuinely does not last, and here is what to do about the combination. Nothing has to be denied.

That is worth stressing because the analysis is often presented with the first term missing. A version of Buddhism in which the world is simply bad is easier to summarize and considerably less like what the texts say. The Bodhisatta’s first question was about the pleasure.

The claim about awakening

“As long as I didn’t truly understand the world’s gratification, drawback, and escape in this way for what they are, I didn’t announce my supreme perfect awakening.”

This is a strong statement about a criterion. The announcement was conditional on this analysis being complete — not on an experience, a vision, or a state, but on three questions being answered yathābhūtaṁ, as they actually are.

The audience of the announcement is given in full and is worth reading: this world with its gods, Māras, and Divinities, this population with its ascetics and brahmins, its gods and humans. The claim is made publicly and against every available authority.

And then the private counterpart: knowledge and vision arose in me: my freedom is unshakable; this is my last rebirth; now there’ll be no more future lives. The same reflexive knowledge AN 3.85 described as following the first.

Using it

Teach the three questions as a tool and run them on something in the room. What is genuinely good about this? What is genuinely wrong with it? What would getting free of it consist of? The method works on a job, a relationship, a habit, or a country, and it produces a more honest account than any of the three alone.

The chapter that follows uses the same three terms four discourses running — AN 3.104 says he went looking for them and found them, AN 3.105 says what would follow if any were missing, and AN 3.106 makes them the test of a genuine ascetic. This is the one that says why they mattered.

Key terms