With Saviṭṭha

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Three kinds of accomplished person cannot be ranked against each other, because the ranking depends on where each of them has actually got to.

The three individuals

Kāyasakkhī, the direct witness — one whose realization has come through the meditative attainments, experienced with the body. Diṭṭhippatta, the one attained to view — one who has arrived by seeing, through understanding. Saddhāvimutta, the one freed by faith — one whose confidence carried them.

These are technical categories in the canon’s typology of noble persons, and all three are genuinely accomplished; nobody in this discourse is discussing a beginner. What distinguishes them is which faculty predominated on the way in.

Three answers, each defensible

Saviṭṭha says the one freed by faith is finest, because that person’s faculty of faith is extraordinary. Mahākoṭṭhita says the direct witness, because their faculty of immersion is extraordinary. Sāriputta says the one attained to view, because their faculty of wisdom is extraordinary.

Each answer has the same form: the person is finest because the faculty that carried them is outstanding. So all three are arguing correctly from a shared premise, and reaching incompatible conclusions. The disagreement is not a failure of reasoning by any of them.

It is worth noticing who says what. Sāriputta — named foremost in great wisdom — picks the one who came by wisdom. Mahākoṭṭhita, foremost in the analytical knowledges, picks immersion. The canon does not comment, but each man has answered from where he stands, and the discourse is quietly aware of it.

What Sāriputta does next

“Each of us has spoken from the heart. Come, reverends, let’s go to the Buddha and tell him about this. As he answers, so we’ll remember it.”

That sentence is a small model of how to handle a disagreement among people who all have standing. Nobody concedes; nobody is out-argued; the positions are recorded as sincerely held and the matter is referred. And Sāriputta — the most senior of the three, and the one whose answer the tradition would most likely have deferred to — is the one who proposes referring it.

And what the Buddha does

He says four times that it is not easy to categorically declare which of the three is finest, and gives the reason three times over: in some cases the one freed by faith is practicing for perfection while the other two are once-returners or non-returners — and then the same with the direct witness in that position, and then with the one attained to view.

So the reason is not that the question is improper or that ranking is unspiritual. It is that the categories cut across the stages. Knowing which faculty carried someone in tells you nothing about how far they have come, and any of the three types can be found at any of the levels. Comparing a type against a type is comparing the wrong thing.

That is an unusually precise refusal. The Buddha does not say the monks are wrong to rank, or that all paths are equal, or that the question does not matter. He says the question as put cannot be answered because it holds the wrong variable fixed. Anyone who has watched an argument about which kind of practice is best has watched this discourse.

Using it

For a teacher this is one of the most useful discourses in the Threes, because the argument it defuses is perennial: whether devotion, concentration, or study is the real path. All three answers in this discourse are held by named senior disciples, argued well, and left standing.

The practical form of the Buddha’s point is simple enough to hand to a class. Ask not which kind of practitioner someone is, but how far they have got — and notice that the first question is easy to answer about a stranger and the second is not.

Key terms