A Wanderer

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Greed does not only make you worse; it makes you unable to see what is actually in your interest.

Who is asking this time

A paribbājaka, a wanderer — a member of the broad class of non-brahmanical renunciates who moved around northern India debating and teaching. Wanderers appear constantly in the canon as questioners, and they are usually treated as professional colleagues rather than as outsiders.

This one is also called a brahmin, which places him in both categories: born into the priestly class and having left the householder path. The discourse is therefore the same question from a more technically equipped questioner, which may be why the answer is longer.

Three consequences instead of one

AN 3.53 gave one: the greedy person intends harm and experiences mental pain, and when greed goes, neither happens. This discourse keeps that and adds two.

The second is action: a greedy person does bad things by way of body, speech, and mind. AN 3.53 stopped at intention; here the intention gets out into the three doors.

The third is the interesting one: a greedy person doesn’t truly understand what’s for their own good, the good of another, or the good of both. When greed has been given up, they truly understand.

So the sequence runs: greed distorts what you want, then what you do, then what you can see. The last is a cognitive claim, not a moral one, and it is the reason this discourse is worth reading after AN 3.53 rather than instead of it.

The claim about judgment

Attattham, one’s own good; parattham, another’s good; ubhayattham, the good of both. The greedy person does not understand any of the three as they really are.

Read carefully this is a strong and testable proposition. It does not say that greed makes you selfish, which would be trivial. It says greed makes you bad at knowing your own interest — that a person overcome by wanting will misidentify what would actually be good for them.

That claim does real work in the rest of the teaching. It explains why the canon so rarely argues against greed on moral grounds and so often argues against it on grounds of accuracy, and it is the reason the three roots are called roots of the unskillful rather than of the wicked. Akusala is closer to incompetent than to evil.

It also gives a lesson its most useful question. Ask a class to remember a decision they made while badly wanting something, and whether it turned out to have been in their own interest. The discourse is claiming that the failure was structural rather than bad luck.

Why the canon keeps the shorter version too

A reader may reasonably ask why both discourses exist when this one contains the other. Two answers are worth giving.

The first is practical: the collection is organized for retrieval and for recitation, and a short form and a long form are both useful. AN 3.53 is the version to give someone in two minutes; this is the version for someone who will sit through six.

The second is that they are addressed to different people, and the canon records the occasion rather than only the content. A householder brahmin got the short answer and a professional renunciate got the analytical one. Whether that reflects an editorial pattern or a real difference in what was said, the collection preserves the correspondence between questioner and answer, and it is worth noticing how often the match is apt.

Using it

Teach AN 3.53 first and this second, and put the whole weight on the third consequence. The first two are agreeable and unsurprising; a class will nod at them and learn nothing.

The third is the claim that can change how somebody makes a decision, and it is the one that connects this small discourse to the rest of the teaching: if wanting distorts sight, then reducing wanting is not primarily a moral improvement but an epistemic one.

Key terms