Gratification (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The three questions were not answered by reflection but by looking, and the looking was carried to the end in each case.

From asking to searching

AN 3.103 had the Bodhisatta thinking — then it occurred to me. Here the verb is pariyesanā, search or quest, and each of the three is described as something gone after and found.

That change of frame is the whole difference between the two discourses. A question can be answered by working something out; a search implies going somewhere and looking, and the canon uses the same word for the great search of MN 26.

It is a small shift with a consequence for how the analysis should be understood. The three terms are not the conclusions of an argument. They are reports of what was found when somebody went and looked, which is why the collection can insist elsewhere that the same three can be checked by anybody.

“The full extent”

Each of the three is followed by the same sentence: I’ve seen clearly with wisdom the full extent of gratification in the world — and then drawbacks, and then escape.

Yāvatako, as far as it goes. The claim is not that some gratification was found but that its whole extent was seen, and the same for the drawbacks and for the escape.

That completeness claim is what makes the conditional statement at the end meaningful. Awakening was not announced while the survey was partial. A person who had found some of the world’s pleasure and some of its danger would have an incomplete picture, and the discourse says the announcement waited for the complete one.

It is also, quietly, a claim about the second term that a modern reader may want to resist. Seeing the full extent of the world’s drawbacks is a large thing to claim and it is claimed flatly, in the first person, three times over.

Why two discourses

AN 3.103 and AN 3.104 differ only in whether the three terms are arrived at by thinking or by searching, and both end with the identical conditional sentence and the identical closing knowledge.

This is the collection’s usual pairing habit, seen already in AN 3.76 and 3.77 and in AN 3.89 and 3.90: a fixed frame with one element varied, and no ranking offered.

Here what is being varied is the mode of inquiry. Taken together the two discourses say that the analysis was both reasoned and looked for, which is a more careful position than either alone — and it is consistent with AN 3.65 and AN 3.66, where the instruction excludes both accepting a tradition and relying on inference.

Using it

Teach the pair rather than either alone, and make the shift of verb the lesson. The material is short enough that a class can read both in ninety seconds and find the difference themselves.

The transferable question is the completeness claim. Most people who have concluded that something is not worth pursuing have found some of its drawbacks; the discourse describes somebody who went looking for the extent of them, and did not announce a conclusion until the survey was finished.

Key terms