Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Crookedness that cannot be seen in a finished thing shows the moment the thing is put in motion.
The arithmetic of the story
The timings are exact and worth following. Six months are allowed. At six days less than six months, one wheel is finished — so the first wheel took almost the whole period. The second is then made in the remaining six days.
The story is careful to make the second wheel a real achievement rather than a botch. The chariot-maker says he can do it and does; the wheels are delivered on time; and the king, examining them, can see no difference at all. Nothing was skipped that shows. Whatever is wrong with the fast wheel is invisible to an interested and competent observer holding it in his hands.
Then it is rolled. Both wheels roll as far as the initial push carries them. The fast one wobbles and falls. The slow one stood still as if fixed to an axle — it comes to rest upright, balanced, as though still mounted. The defect was in rim, spoke, and hub: crooked, flawed, and defective. Every part.
What the simile is not about
It is easy to read this as a discourse about haste, and it is worth being precise, because it is not quite that. The chariot-maker was not rushed by his own impatience; he was given a deadline and met it. Nor is the point that the fast wheel is useless — it rolls exactly as far as the slow one.
What separates them is what happens when the momentum runs out. Under the initial push the two are indistinguishable. The difference appears only when the wheel has to stand on its own accumulated trueness, and at that moment the fast wheel has nothing to draw on.
Applied to a practitioner, which is what the discourse does, that is a specific and uncomfortable claim. Someone whose practice has crooks and flaws is not thereby incapable; they will go exactly as far as their initial impetus takes them — the enthusiasm of a new commitment, the momentum of a retreat, the push of a crisis. What they will not do is stand when it is spent.
Rim, spoke, and hub
The three defective parts are given as three, which is what puts the story in the Threes, and the Buddha maps them onto three: the crooks, flaws, and defects of body, speech, and mind.
The vocabulary is worth keeping. Vaṅka is crooked or bent; dosa is a flaw or blemish — the same word as the hatred in greed-hate-delusion, and here meaning something closer to a fault in material; kasāva is a stain or astringency, a defect running through the grain. Three different kinds of wrongness in a piece of wood: bent, blemished, impure.
That is a more useful taxonomy of a person’s faults than good and bad. Something bent has been forced out of true by pressure. Something blemished has a local fault. Something with kasāva is wrong all the way through and cannot be repaired by working on the surface.
“I myself was the chariot-maker”
The turn at the end is the discourse’s real content. The Buddha heads off the expected assumption — you might think that chariot-maker must have been someone else; you should not see it like that — and identifies himself with the craftsman. Then he draws the parallel exactly: then I was skilled in the crooks, flaws, and defects of wood; now I am skilled in the crooks, flaws, and defects of actions by body, speech, and mind.
So the claim is about a transferred competence. What the Buddha has is not a different kind of faculty from a craftsman’s but the same kind applied to a different material: the trained eye that sees a defect in something that looks finished. That is a remarkably deflationary self-description for a collection that elsewhere calls him unequaled and without peer, and the two pictures sit in the same nipāta.
It is also worth putting beside AN 3.13, two discourses earlier, where chariot-makers appear in a list of low families whose members have no hope. Nothing in the text connects them and the juxtaposition may be accidental. But the Buddha of AN 3.15 claims a trade that AN 3.13 uses as an example of hopelessness, and a reader is entitled to notice.
Key terms
The text
At Isipatana
§1At one time the Buddha was staying near Varanasi, in the deer park at Isipatana. There the Buddha addressed the mendicants, “Mendicants!” “Venerable sir,” they replied. The Buddha said this:
The two wheels
§2“Once upon a time there was a king named Pacetana. Then King Pacetana addressed his chariot-maker, ‘In six months’ time, my good chariot-maker, there will be a battle. Are you able to make me a new pair of wheels?’ ‘I can, Your Majesty,’ replied the chariot-maker. Then, when it was six days less than six months later, the chariot-maker had finished one wheel. Then King Pacetana addressed his chariot-maker, ‘In six days’ time there will be a battle. Is my new pair of wheels finished?’ ‘Now that it is six days less than six months, Your Majesty, I have finished one wheel.’ ‘Are you able to finish the second wheel in these six days?’ Saying, ‘I can, Your Majesty,’ the chariot-maker finished the second wheel in six days. Taking the pair of wheels he went up to King Pacetana, and said this to the king, ‘Your Majesty, these are your two new wheels, finished.’ ‘But, my good chariot-maker, what is the difference between the wheel that was finished in six days less than six months, and the wheel finished in just six days? Because I can’t see any difference between them.’ ‘But, Your Majesty, there is a difference. See now what it is.’
§3Then the chariot-maker rolled forth the wheel that had been finished in six days. It rolled as far as the original impetus took it, then wobbled and fell down. Then he rolled forth the wheel that had been finished in six days less than six months. It rolled as far as the original impetus took it, then stood still as if fixed to an axle.
§4‘But what is the cause, my good chariot-maker, what is the reason why the wheel that was finished in six days wobbled and fell, while the one that was finished in six days less than six months stood still as if fixed to an axle?’ ‘The wheel that was finished in six days, Your Majesty, is crooked, flawed, and defective in rim, spoke, and hub. That’s why it wobbled and fell. The wheel that was finished in six days less than six months, Your Majesty, is not crooked, flawed, and defective in rim, spoke, and hub. That’s why it stood still as if fixed to an axle.’
“I myself was the chariot-maker”
§5–6Now, mendicants, you might think: ‘Surely that chariot-maker must have been someone else at that time?’ But you should not see it like that. I myself was the chariot-maker at that time. Then I was skilled in the crooks, flaws, and defects of wood. Now that I am a perfected one, a fully awakened Buddha, I am skilled in the crooks, flaws, and defects of actions by body, speech, and mind. Whatever monk or nun has not given up the crooks, flaws, and defects of body, speech, and mind has fallen from the teaching and training, just like the wheel that was finished in six days. Whatever monk or nun has given up the crooks, flaws, and defects of body, speech, and mind is established in the teaching and training, just like the wheel that was finished in six days less than six months.
§7So you should train like this: ‘We will give up the crooks, flaws, and defects of body, speech, and mind.’ That’s how you should train.”
Self-check quiz
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