Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The disgust an ordinary person feels at age, sickness, and death is a claim to be exempt from them, and nobody has that standing.
The inventory, and why it is given
The details are specific and slightly odd, which is a mark in their favor: lotus ponds with blue water lilies in one, pink and white lotuses in another, all for one person. Sandalwood from Kāsi, and turbans, jackets, sarongs, and upper robes from Kāsi too. A white parasol held over him night and day so that cold, heat, grass, dust, or damp should not bother him. Three stilt longhouses for winter, summer, and the rains, and four months in one of them without coming downstairs.
The purpose of the inventory is comparative. It establishes that the person about to renounce everything had a maximal amount to renounce, and it establishes that nothing in the list worked. The parasol keeps off dust; the discourse is about what it does not keep off.
Two details deserve to be named rather than skated over. The musicians who entertained him were none of them men, and the passage about servants compares his father’s household — where staff got fine rice with meat — against other houses where they got rough gruel with false black pepper. The first is a rich man’s pleasure quarter described without comment; the second is a boast about generous provisioning that simultaneously records that bondservants elsewhere ate badly.
Both belong to a world with slavery in it and with women as furnishing in it, and the discourse is not examining either. It is worth telling a class that plainly. What the discourse does with the household is not to defend it but to establish it as the best case, and then report that the best case failed — which is a use of the material that does not depend on approving of any of it.
The three reflections
Each has an identical structure, and the structure is the argument. An unlearned ordinary person, who is liable to grow old, not being exempt from old age, sees someone else who is old and is horrified, repelled, and disgusted — overlooking the fact that they themselves are in the same situation. Then: since I too am liable to grow old, it would not be appropriate for me to be disgusted.
Notice that the objection is not that disgust is unkind. The objection is that it is false. Disgust at an old person is a performance of not being one, and the performance is a lie about the performer. The word Sujato renders as “it would not be appropriate” is doing the work of a logical therefore.
That matters for how the discourse reads today. A modern reader will hear the description of the old, the sick, and the dead as unkind — horrified, repelled, disgusted — and it is worth pointing out that these are the ordinary person’s reactions being diagnosed, not the discourse’s attitude. The whole passage exists in order to say that the reaction is unwarranted, and the reason given is not that the old deserve respect but that the person recoiling is looking at their own future.
Three vanities
Mada is intoxication, and it gets rendered as vanity, pride, or conceit depending on the translator. The three are the vanity of youth, of health, and of life.
They are not the same as vanity about appearance. Each is an assumed exemption: the background sense that aging happens to other people, that illness is something one recovers from as a matter of course, that death is a fact about the world rather than an appointment. The discourse is precise that these are intoxications, meaning that they distort judgment without being noticed.
The consequences given are two, and the second is unexpected. Intoxicated with any of the three, an ordinary person does bad things by body, speech, and mind and is reborn badly. And then: intoxicated with youth, health, or life, a mendicant disavows the training and returns to a lesser life. Same intoxication, two different failures, and the monastic one is disrobing. It is the discourse’s quiet acknowledgment that the three vanities do not stop at the monastery gate.
What this discourse is not
This is the canonical version of the story everybody knows, and it is worth showing a class exactly how much of the familiar version is not here.
There are no gods arranging encounters. There is no chariot ride outside the palace, no charioteer explaining what an old man is, no father conspiring to hide reality, no fourth sight of a serene renunciant. The Bodhisatta is not shielded from knowledge of aging: he has clearly seen old, sick, and dead people, and the discourse’s complaint is about his reaction to them, not his ignorance of them.
What is here is smaller and much more usable: a young man with everything notices that his response to other people’s aging is disgust, works out that the response is incoherent, and loses his intoxication. The elaborate legend grew later, and it is a good legend; but it makes the turning point an accident of exposure, and the discourse makes it an act of thinking.
The verses close in the first person and end the story where the legend does: zeal sprang up in me as I looked to extinguishment. Now I’m unable to indulge in sensual pleasures; there’s no turning back.
Using it
Read this immediately after AN 3.36. Yama’s question to the person in hell is did it not occur to you — I too am liable to grow old — I had better do good? and the answer is I was negligent. AN 3.39 is the same question, asked in time, by somebody who answered it. Three discourses apart, in the same chapter, and almost certainly on purpose.
For a class of teachers the useful frame is the diagnosis of disgust. Everyone has felt the recoil the discourse describes, in a hospital corridor or on a bus, and most people have filed it under compassion fatigue or squeamishness. This text files it under a false claim about oneself, and the reframing does more work in a lesson than any amount of exhortation to be kind.
Key terms
The text
My father’s house
§1“My lifestyle was delicate, mendicants, most delicate, extremely delicate. In my father’s home, lotus ponds were made just for me. In some, blue water lilies blossomed, while in others, there were pink or white lotuses, just for my benefit. I only used sandalwood from Kāsi, and my turbans, jackets, sarongs, and upper robes also came from Kāsi. And a white parasol was held over me night and day, with the thought: ‘Don’t let cold, heat, grass, dust, or damp bother him.’
§2I had three stilt longhouses—one for the winter, one for the summer, and one for the rainy season. I stayed in a stilt longhouse without coming downstairs for the four months of the rainy season, where I was entertained by musicians—none of them men. While the bondservants, workers, and staff in other houses are given rough gruel with false black pepper to eat, in my father’s home they are given fine rice with meat.
Three reflections
§3Amid such prosperity and such a delicate lifestyle, I thought: ‘When an unlearned ordinary person—who is liable to grow old, not being exempt from old age—sees someone else who is old, they’re horrified, repelled, and disgusted, overlooking the fact that they themselves are in the same situation. But since I, too, am liable to grow old, it would not be appropriate for me to be horrified, embarrassed, and disgusted, when I see someone else who is old.’ Reflecting like this, I entirely gave up the vanity of youth.
§4‘When an unlearned ordinary person—who is liable to get sick, not being exempt from sickness—sees someone else who is sick, they’re horrified, repelled, and disgusted, overlooking the fact that they themselves are in the same situation. But since I, too, am liable to get sick, it would not be appropriate for me to be horrified, embarrassed, and disgusted, when I see someone else who is sick.’ Reflecting like this, I entirely gave up the vanity of health.
§5‘When an unlearned ordinary person—who is liable to die, not being exempt from death—sees someone else who is dead, they’re horrified, repelled, and disgusted, overlooking the fact that they themselves are in the same situation. But since I, too, am liable to die, it would not be appropriate for me to be horrified, embarrassed, and disgusted, when I see someone else who is dead.’ Reflecting like this, I entirely gave up the vanity of life.
Three vanities
§6There are these three vanities. What three? The vanity of youth, of health, and of life. Intoxicated with the vanity of youth, an unlearned ordinary person does bad things by way of body, speech, and mind. When their body breaks up, after death, they’re reborn in a place of loss, a bad place, the underworld, hell. Intoxicated with the vanity of health … Intoxicated with the vanity of life, an unlearned ordinary person does bad things by way of body, speech, and mind. When their body breaks up, after death, they’re reborn in a place of loss, a bad place, the underworld, hell.
§7Intoxicated with the vanity of youth, health, or life, a mendicant disavows the training and returns to a lesser life.
In verse
§8–9For others, sickness is natural, and so are old age and death. Though this is how their nature is, ordinary people feel disgusted. If I were to be disgusted with creatures whose nature is such, it would not be appropriate for me, since my life is just the same.
§10–12Living in such a way, I understood the truth without attachments. I mastered all vanities—of health, of youth, and even of life—seeing renunciation as sanctuary. Zeal sprang up in me as I looked to extinguishment. Now I’m unable to indulge in sensual pleasures; there’s no turning back, I’m committed to the spiritual life.”
Self-check quiz
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