Keen

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Effort is called for in three places, and one of them is lying still in pain.

Ātappa

The word is from tapati, to burn or scorch — the same root as tapas, the austerity of the Indian ascetic traditions. In the canon it has been repurposed: it no longer names self-torment but the heat of effort, ardor, keenness.

It is one of the three words in the standard formula for establishing mindfulness — ātāpī sampajāno satimā, keen, aware, and mindful — and this discourse ends with almost that phrase: keen, alert, and mindful so as to rightly make an end of suffering. So the three situations are being offered as the content of the first term in a formula the reader already knows.

The repurposing is worth pointing out. A tradition that rejected austerity kept the word for burning and attached it to something else. What is being burned is no longer the body.

Two of the four efforts, and a third thing

The first two situations are familiar: preventing bad, unskillful qualities from arising, and giving rise to skillful ones. Those are the first and third of the four right efforts, which in their full form also include abandoning bad qualities that have arisen and maintaining good ones that have.

The discourse takes two and does not take the other two, and then adds something that does not belong to that scheme at all. That is a signal rather than an accident: this is not a compressed version of the four right efforts but a different list that happens to share two members.

What the three have in common is that each is a place where nothing external forces the issue. Nobody can tell whether you are preventing an unarisen state; nobody can tell whether you are enduring or merely suffering. The list is about the situations in which effort is invisible.

Enduring pain as a practice

The third situation is described at length and without softening: sharp, severe, acute, unpleasant, disagreeable, life-threatening. Six adjectives, and the last is not rhetorical — this is the formula the canon uses for the pain of a fatal illness.

Calling that a place for ātappa makes a claim that deserves to be handled carefully in a class, because it can be misheard in two directions.

It is not a claim that pain should be sought, and the canon is explicit elsewhere that self-inflicted suffering achieves nothing; the Buddha’s own austerities are reported as a failed experiment. Nor is it a claim that a practitioner does not feel pain. AN 3.35 has the Buddha saying only that the fever born of greed is gone, not that the north wind is warm.

What it claims is that there is something to do in that situation, and that the something is of the same kind as the effort involved in the other two. Somebody in severe illness is not outside practice and is not waiting for practice to resume. That is a genuinely consoling proposition and it costs nothing in honesty to state, which is more than can be said for most things said to people in pain.

The title at the end

The second half restates the three of a person and then names them: a mendicant who is keen, alert, and mindful so as to rightly make an end of suffering.

The last clause is the one that sets the scale. This is not endurance for its own sake, nor keenness as a temperament. The three situations are being described as the working conditions of somebody heading for the end of suffering, which is why enduring a fatal illness can sit in a list with cultivating skillful qualities: both are things that person is doing on the way.

Using it

The discourse is four lines and it is the one to have ready when somebody in a class is ill or caring for someone who is. It does not promise that practice removes pain and it does not ask for cheerfulness. It says that the situation is one of the three places keenness belongs.

It is also a useful corrective to an unspoken assumption that practice happens in good conditions. Two of the three situations here are ordinary; the third is the worst condition a body can be in, and it is on the list.

Key terms