Good Reasons

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Teaching is worth doing whenever at least one side of the exchange understands what is being said.

Attha and dhamma

The recurring phrase is “understands the meaning and the teaching,” atthapaṭisaṁvedī dhammapaṭisaṁvedī. The pair runs throughout the canon and the distinction is worth having.

Dhamma here is the teaching as formulated — the words, the sequence, the doctrine as it is stated. Attha is what the words are about: the meaning, the point, the thing the formulation is a formulation of. A person can have either without the other. Someone who has memorized the four noble truths and cannot say what problem they solve has the dhamma and not the attha; someone who has grasped the point but garbles the formula has the reverse.

Atthavasa, the title word, is literally the force or sway of the meaning — hence “reason” or “consideration.” The discourse is asking what considerations have force enough to make teaching worthwhile.

The three cases, and the fourth

Teacher understands. Audience understands. Both understand. Enumerate the possibilities and there is obviously a fourth: neither understands. It is not on the list, and its absence is the discourse’s content.

So the rule is: if either party understands, teaching is justified. Only when nobody in the room has hold of either the meaning or the formulation does the reason disappear.

That is a low bar, and deliberately so. It licenses teaching where the audience is ahead of the teacher, which most institutions find uncomfortable, and it licenses teaching where the audience does not yet understand at all, which most modern pedagogy would question. What it does not license is a room in which the material is not actually present on either side of the exchange.

Why the teacher’s understanding is listed first, and alone

The first case is a teacher who understands speaking to an audience that does not. That is the ordinary situation and needs no defense.

The second is stranger and more interesting: an audience that understands, with no claim made about the teacher. The discourse says this is reason enough. One way to read it is as the observation that a good listener can extract the teaching from an imperfect presentation — which any teacher has watched happen, usually with embarrassment.

The third, both, is the case worth aiming at, and the discourse does not rank it above the others. It is simply listed third.

The companion discourse

AN 3.44, the next one, contains exactly the same three cases under a different heading: not reason enough to teach but the situations in which conversation flows. The two discourses are identical except for their first and last sentences.

That repetition is doing something. Motivation and result are being identified: the conditions that make teaching worth attempting are the same conditions under which talk actually goes somewhere. If the reason to teach is present, the conversation moves; if the conversation is not moving, look for which of the three cases has failed.

Read as a pair, they also head off a misreading of this one. AN 3.43 alone could sound like a rule about when a teacher is permitted to speak. AN 3.44 shows that the same three conditions were being described as facts about how discussion behaves.

Using it

For working teachers this is a two-minute discourse with an immediate application. Before a session, ask which of the three cases you are in. Before abandoning a session that is going badly, ask the same question, because the answer distinguishes between a hard room and a pointless one.

It is also a useful corrective to a common anxiety. The list nowhere requires the teacher to understand completely, and nowhere requires the audience to be ready. It requires the material to be genuinely present somewhere in the room, and it counts an audience that already understands as a reason to teach rather than a reason not to.

Key terms