Commemoration

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Both a king and a mendicant have three places worth remembering for life, and the two lists are structurally identical and share nothing.

The king’s three

Birth, coronation, and the battle that established him as foremost. Read as a life they are: what you were given, what you were granted, and what you took. Two of the three depend entirely on other people — a king does not choose to be born royal or anoint himself — and the third is a victory over someone else.

The discourse does not criticize any of this. It is stated as a plain fact about what a king commemorates, and the tone is neutral. The critique, if there is one, is entirely in the parallel.

The mendicant’s three

Where they shaved off hair and beard, put on ocher robes, and went forth. Where they truly understood this is suffering, this is its origin, this is its cessation, this is the practice leading to its cessation. And where they realized the undefiled freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom in this very life.

Line the two lists up. Birth answers to going forth — both are the beginning of a life, one received and one undertaken. Coronation answers to understanding the four truths — both the moment of becoming what one is going to be. And the decisive battle answers to the ending of the defilements — both a victory, except that the second has no opponent outside the person who wins it.

That third correspondence is the discourse’s sharpest move and it is made without comment. A king’s greatest day is the day he defeated somebody. A mendicant’s is the day nothing was left to defeat.

Why places

The Pāli is specific: these are places, not moments. Sāraṇīya is worth remembering, worth calling to mind; and what is to be remembered is where the thing happened.

That the canon locates spiritual events geographically is not incidental. The four places the Buddha is elsewhere said to name as worth seeing — where he was born, awakened, first taught, and passed away — are the origin of Buddhist pilgrimage, and the logic here is the same. A realization has an address.

For a modern reader who has met Buddhism mostly as an interior practice, this is worth sitting with. The discourse does not tell a mendicant to remember three states of mind. It tells them to remember three locations, which means their practice is a thing that happened somewhere, on a particular day, in a body that was standing in a particular field.

Teaching it

The exercise this discourse suggests almost writes itself, and it works with any group. The king’s list is easy to construct for oneself — where you were born, where you were given what you have, where you won. The mendicant’s list is harder and the difficulty is instructive: most people can name the first, few can name the second, and the third is not available.

Read that way the discourse is not a criticism of kings but a description of an incomplete list, and the incompleteness is the ordinary condition. AN 3.13, the next discourse, is about exactly that: what it is like to be partway through such a list, and what it is like not to be on it at all.

Key terms