The Four Great Kings (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Whether “be like me” is a good thing to say depends entirely on who is saying it.

The inspection

The four great kings are the guardian deities of the four directions — familiar to anyone who has walked into a Chinese temple past the 四大天王 at the gate. Here they run a three-tier survey on the three sabbath days of the fortnight: ministers on the eighth, the kings’ sons on the fourteenth, the kings in person on the fifteenth.

What they count is precise, and it is the same list AN 3.31 was about: whether people are paying due respect to parents, ascetics and brahmins, honoring the elders of their families, observing the sabbath, and making merit.

The reporting scene is worth reading slowly. If the numbers are low the gods of the thirty-three are disappointed — the heavenly hosts will dwindle, while the titan hosts will swell. If high, the reverse. The gods are not concerned for human welfare here. They are watching their own demographics, since human conduct determines who is born into which realm next, and the gods have an ongoing conflict with the titans to staff.

Whether to be uneasy about the surveillance

A modern reader may find the whole apparatus unattractive: invisible officials walking the world on fixed days, checking whether you were good, and filing a report. It reads like the celestial bureaucracy of a later Chinese imagination, and in fact it is one of the places that imagination came from.

Two things are worth saying plainly. The first is that the Buddha is using a picture his audience already held rather than announcing a discovery; the four great kings and the gods of the thirty-three were part of the furniture, and the discourse assumes them without arguing for them.

The second is what he then does with the picture, which is to demolish the standing of the being at the top of it. That is the actual content, and it is unfriendly to surveillance rather than reliant on it. The related discourse AN 3.40 makes the point without any gods at all: what watches you most reliably is you.

Sakka’s verse, and its rejection

Sakka, lord of the gods of the thirty-three, is quoted encouraging the sabbath complete in all eight factors, on the fourteenth, fifteenth, and eighth days of the fortnight, and on the special displays. The content is unobjectionable; the Buddha recommends the same observance elsewhere.

“But that verse was poorly sung by Sakka, lord of gods, not well sung; poorly spoken, not well spoken. Why is that? Sakka, lord of gods, is not free of greed, hate, and delusion.”

The defect is not in the recommendation. It is in the first two words. Whoever wants to be like me converts a piece of good advice into an offer of a model, and Sakka is not one. A being who still has the three roots intact may say true things, and this is a true thing, but he may not hold himself up as the destination.

Then the identical verse is given to a mendicant who is perfected — defilements ended, burden laid down, rightly freed through enlightenment — and it becomes appropriate, for the reason stated with the same flatness: because that mendicant is free of greed, hate, and delusion. Not because the monastic outranks the god, but because in the one respect the sentence depends on, the monastic has finished and the god has not.

The eight-factored sabbath

The observance in question is the uposatha kept with eight factors: the five precepts, with the third tightened from misconduct to celibacy, plus abstention from eating at the wrong time, from entertainment and adornment, and from high and luxurious beds. Laypeople take it for a day and a night, on the days named here.

East Asian Buddhism inherited the practice as the 八關齋戒 and the days as the 六齋日, still marked in temple calendars. A class in Taiwan is likely to have relatives who keep them, and this discourse is where the schedule is set out in Pāli.

It is worth noticing that the sabbath is one of the five items the kings are counting, and that all five are things a layperson does. The heavenly census is not measuring meditation or insight. It is measuring whether ordinary households look after their parents and keep a day.

Using it

Teach it for the reversal at the end, which is unusually clean. The class hears an unimpeachable piece of religious advice, agrees with it, and then watches the Buddha reject it on grounds that have nothing to do with its content.

The transferable question is a good one for teachers in particular: what makes someone entitled to say do as I do? This discourse gives an answer with no wiggle room — that the speaker has actually finished the thing they are recommending — and it applies the test to a god rather than to a person, which makes it easier to discuss without anyone in the room feeling accused.

AN 3.38, the next discourse, repeats the whole exchange and changes the reason. Read them together and the pair says something neither says alone.

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