Choices

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The character of what you choose becomes the character of the world you are in, of what meets you there, and of what you feel.

The four-step chain

It is stated identically three times. First, an individual makes choices — saṅkhāra — by way of body, speech, and mind, of a certain character. Second, they are reborn in a world of that character. Third, contacts of that character strike them there. Fourth, touched by those contacts, they feel feelings of that character.

The steps are not redundant. A world of a certain character is not the same as contacts of that character; one could in principle be in a pleasant place and be met by something unpleasant. And contact is not the same as feeling; the canon elsewhere spends a great deal of effort on exactly that gap. What this discourse asserts is that in these three cases the character propagates through all four without loss.

That is worth noticing precisely because the canon usually insists on the gap. AN 3.100 argues at length that the same deed produces very different results depending on the person; the whole framework of dependent origination is about where the chain can be broken. This discourse describes what happens when nothing intervenes.

The third case is ours

The first two illustrations are extreme: the beings in hell, whose feelings are exclusively painful, and the gods of universal beauty, whose feelings are of perfect happiness. Both are stated as limit cases — unmixed.

The third is like humans, some gods, and some beings in the underworld: hurtful and pleasing choices together, a world that is both, contacts that are both, feelings that are a mixture of pleasure and pain. That is the discourse’s description of ordinary human experience, and it locates the mixture in the choices rather than in the circumstances.

It is a plain claim and worth stating plainly: on this account the mixed quality of ordinary life is not bad luck. It is the shape of what has been chosen, arriving back.

What saṅkhāra is doing here

The word is one of the hardest in the canon and it carries a wide range — formations, conditions, volitional activities, constructions. Sujato’s “choices” is a strong and defensible narrowing for this context, where the term is being used of something a person does by way of body, speech, and mind and which then bears fruit.

It is worth flagging the range anyway, because saṅkhāra in other contexts means something quite different — the conditioned in general, as in all conditions are impermanent, where nothing is being chosen by anyone. A reader who meets the word in both places and assumes one meaning will be confused by at least one of them.

Here the choosing sense is clearly right: the discourse is about what a person does and what follows from it.

Key terms