Ascetics and Brahmins

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

What makes somebody a genuine renunciate is not their tradition but whether they have understood what is good about the world, what is wrong with it, and how one gets out.

What is being claimed

The words are careful. I don’t deem them as true ascetics and brahmins — na sammannāmi, I do not agree to it, I do not acknowledge it. This is the Buddha declining to apply a title, not declaring somebody worthless.

And the reason given is not membership but result: those venerables don’t realize the goal of life as an ascetic or brahmin, and don’t live having realized it with their own insight. The criterion is whether the person has arrived at what their own role is for.

Notice that the goal named is the goal of life as an ascetic or brahmin — their goal, on their own terms, not a Buddhist one imposed from outside. The argument is that a renunciate who has not understood these three has not achieved what renunciation was supposed to achieve, whichever tradition they belong to.

The generosity and the severity together

Read one way this is remarkably open. No school is named, no doctrine is required, and no ordination is mentioned. Anybody in any tradition who has understood the three counts, and the Buddha says he deems them so.

Read the other way it is severe. The three terms are not a general attitude; AN 3.104 claimed the full extent of each had to be seen. A criterion that admits any tradition and excludes anybody who has not completed that survey is not a lenient criterion.

Both readings are correct and they are the same claim. The collection does this repeatedly — AN 3.57’s five-and-five description of a worthy recipient, AN 3.58’s three knowledges, AN 3.59’s redefinition of who deserves an offering. In each case a title is opened to everybody and made harder to hold.

What it does not do

It does not say that other traditions are false, that their practices are useless, or that their members are insincere. AN 3.93 in the previous chapter described the austerities of other ascetics in detail and did not call them wicked; this one withholds a title and gives a reason.

It also does not offer a way of telling from outside. Whether somebody has understood the world’s gratification, drawback, and escape is not visible on inspection, and the discourse provides no test that a third party could apply.

That is worth saying to a class, because a criterion like this is easy to turn into a license for judging other people’s teachers. The discourse is stated in the first person — I deem, I don’t deem — and nobody else is invited to do the deeming.

Using it

This is the fourth discourse in a row on the same three terms, and it is the one that says what they are for. AN 3.103 gave the analysis; AN 3.104 said it was searched out; AN 3.105 argued for it from behavior; this one makes it the standard.

The transferable version is worth having. Applied to any discipline, the question becomes: has this person understood what is genuinely attractive about the thing they have renounced or mastered, what is genuinely wrong with it, and what getting free of it would consist of? Somebody who has only the second of the three is a critic, not a practitioner.

Key terms