With Sāriputta

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Train so that there is no I-making, mine-making, or conceit toward anything inside or outside — and that training is what the canon calls having made an end of suffering.

The opening complaint

“Maybe I’ll teach Dhamma in brief, maybe in detail, maybe both in brief and in detail. But it’s hard to find anyone who understands.”

This is not a rebuke of Sāriputta, who is standing right there and is about to be given the teaching. It is a statement about the general case, and it puts a condition on teaching: the form a teaching takes depends on who can receive it. The canon returns to this repeatedly, most famously in the hesitation after the awakening.

Sāriputta’s reply is the second half of the exchange and the reason it was preserved: now is the time, Blessed One! There will be those who understand the teaching! Somebody has to make that claim before a teaching happens, and here it is not the teacher who makes it.

The same sentence, in a new mood

What the Buddha then says is word for word the formula of AN 3.32, with one change: it is put in the first person plural and prefaced by you should train like this. Ānanda asked whether such a state exists and was told how it is reached; Sāriputta is told to train for it.

That difference is not trivial and it is worth making a class notice it, because the two discourses stand next to each other in the collection deliberately. A description answers a question. A training is an instruction with a second person in it. The compilers put the answer first and the instruction second.

The content is unchanged: no I-making, mine-making, or underlying tendency to conceit for this conscious body, none externally for all signs, and living in the freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom where those three are no more. See the key terms on AN 3.32 for the vocabulary.

The title conferred

Then comes something AN 3.32 does not have: a name for the person who has done it. Such a mendicant has cut off craving, cast off the fetters, and by rightly comprehending conceit has made an end of suffering.

The three clauses are a compressed description of arahantship, and the third is the one to slow down on. It does not say that conceit is suppressed or that the person no longer feels superior to anyone. It says conceit is rightly comprehended, sammā mānābhisamayā — understood in a way that ends it. The canon consistently treats conceit as something that dissolves under accurate seeing rather than something defeated by effort, and this phrase is where the Threes say so.

The verse from the Questions of Udaya

The closing quotation is from the Pārāyana again, this time the Questions of Udaya, on this site at Snp 5.14. It is denser than the Puṇṇaka verse and repays a slow read.

The giving up of both sensual desires and displeasures, the casting aside of dullness, and the prevention of remorse; pure equanimity and mindfulness, preceded by investigation of principles — this, I declare, is liberation by enlightenment, the smashing of ignorance.

The first half is the five hindrances, in order and by name: sensual desire, ill will (“displeasures”), dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and remorse, and — by way of the investigation of principles — doubt. The second half is the fourth jhāna, whose standard formula is exactly purity of mindfulness and equanimity. So the verse walks from the hindrances abandoned to the fourth jhāna and calls the result liberation by enlightenment.

That is a strong claim about meditation, and it is the reason this verse gets quoted. It does not say that the fourth jhāna is liberation. It says that this sequence — hindrances gone, investigation leading, equanimity and mindfulness pure — is what aññāvimokkha, liberation by enlightenment, names. The Chinese meditation manuals build their whole preliminary section on the same order of operations.

Using it

Read AN 3.32 and AN 3.33 in one sitting. They are short, they share a sentence, and the pair demonstrates something a single discourse cannot: that the canon distinguishes carefully between telling you a state exists, telling you how it is entered, and telling you to train for it.

For a class the usable handle is Sāriputta’s line. Somebody in the room has to say there will be those who understand, and the discourse records a teaching that happened because a student said it rather than because the teacher assumed it.

Key terms