With Ānanda

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The immersion in which self-reference has stopped is reached by giving the mind the one object that has nothing in it to make a self out of.

The three things being asked about

Ahaṅkāra, I-making, and mamiṅkāra, mine-making, are not nouns for beliefs. They are verbs made into nouns: the mind’s ongoing activity of producing an I and producing a mine. A person can hold no philosophical view of a self and go on doing both all day.

Mānānusaya is the underlying tendency to conceit — not conceit as an episode of arrogance but conceit as a disposition, the reflex of measuring: better than, equal to, worse than. The canon treats it as the last fetter to go, which is why it appears here in a question about the highest attainment rather than in a discourse about manners.

The three are asked about in two directions. For this conscious body covers everything on the inside; externally for all signs covers everything else, nimitta being the aspect of a thing the mind takes hold of. Between them nothing is left over. That is why the sentence is so long, and why it is repeated without abbreviation each time.

Why Ānanda asks in that form

The question is not “is there such a thing?” but “could it be that a mendicant might gain a state of immersion such that…?” He is asking whether a describable, attainable state has this property.

That is characteristic of him. Ānanda’s questions in the canon tend to be about the reachable middle of the path rather than its terminus, and they are usually framed so that a yes commits the Buddha to something specific. Here a yes commits him to saying that the end of self-making is not merely a description of an arahant after the fact but a state that can be entered.

The answer, and why it is so short

“It’s when a mendicant thinks: this is peaceful; this is sublime — that is, the stilling of all activities, the letting go of all attachments, the ending of craving, fading away, cessation, extinguishment.”

The formula is a stock one and it names extinguishment, nibbāna, by six descriptions in a row. What the discourse asks the practitioner to do with it is simply to hold it as what the mind is attending to.

The logic is worth spelling out, because a class will otherwise hear a non-answer. I-making needs material: some experience with enough content in it to be claimed. Every object inside the conscious body and every external sign supplies that material. The one object that does not is the stilling of the whole business. Attending to it, there is nothing there to make an I out of, nothing to make a mine out of, and nothing to measure against.

So the answer is not a technique of suppression. It is a change of object, and the absence of self-making follows from what the object is. AN 3.33, the next discourse, gives the identical formula to Sāriputta as something to train in, which is how a state described here becomes an instruction there.

The quoted verse

The Buddha closes by identifying his own earlier words: this is what he meant in the Pārāyana, in the Questions of Puṇṇaka. The verse is on this site at Snp 5.4, and it answers a brahmin who had asked about sacrifice.

Having appraised the world high and low, there is nothing in the world that disturbs them. Peaceful, unclouded, untroubled, with no need for hope — they’ve crossed over rebirth and old age, I declare.

Two things are happening. The first is a claim about continuity: the prose analysis and the old verse are the same teaching, and the Buddha says so himself. The second is a shift of register. Everything the prose states in technical negatives — no I-making, no mine-making, no conceit — the verse states as a condition: nothing disturbs them, they have no need for hope. Nirāsa, hopeless in that sense, is a compliment here, which is the kind of reversal worth flagging to a class before they meet it.

Using it

This is a short text with a high ceiling, and it is easy to teach badly by pretending the answer is simpler than it is. The honest presentation gives the class both halves: an enormous question and a one-line reply, and then the work of seeing why the reply is not evasive.

The transferable part is the general principle that what the mind does depends on what it is holding. That is not a claim anyone needs to be Buddhist to test, and it is the load-bearing move of the discourse.

Key terms