Topics of Discussion

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

You can tell whether somebody can be talked with by watching how they handle a question, and the point of talking at all is freedom.

Three topics

The opening is almost too brief to notice: three topics of discussion — the past, the future, and the present. That is how it was; that is how it will be; this is how it is at present.

Nothing is done with this and no topic is forbidden. Given that the canon elsewhere discourages speculation about past and future, it is worth noticing that here they are simply listed. What the discourse is interested in is not the subject matter but the conduct.

Four kinds of question

This is the passage that matters most. A question may need to be answered categorically; or it may need analysis; or it may need a counter-question; or it may need to be set aside. Someone who fails to match the kind of answer to the kind of question is not competent to hold a discussion.

The four are worth teaching with examples, because each corresponds to a familiar failure. Is killing unskillful? takes a categorical answer, and hedging it is a failure. Is desire bad? takes analysis — which desire, for what? — and answering yes or no is a failure. Is this practice better than that one? often takes a counter-question, and AN 3.21 shows the Buddha doing exactly that. And some questions take no answer at all: the canon’s standard examples are whether the world is eternal and what becomes of a perfected one after death.

The scheme is old, standard, and was carried into the later literature; a class that has met the Chinese Buddhist logical treatises will recognize it. What makes it useful outside Buddhism is that it locates a real skill: knowing what kind of question you have been asked, before answering it.

Four more tests, and what they catch

The second test is consistency: whether the person is steady about what their position is and what it isn’t; about what they propose; about speaking from what they know; and about the appropriate procedure. Somebody whose position moves while you are arguing with it cannot be argued with.

The third names three behaviors: dodging the issue, distracting the discussion with irrelevant points, and displaying annoyance, hate, and bitterness. This is the same three-part formula AN 3.64 used for how a challenger fails, which suggests it was a standing description rather than an observation made once.

The fourth is the most pointed, and it is about how somebody treats an opponent who is losing: whether they intimidate, crush, mock, or seize on trivial mistakes. Notice that all four of those are things a person does when they are winning. The discourse is saying that a person who behaves that way is not competent to hold a discussion — not that they are unpleasant, but that discussion with them is not possible.

That is a strong and specific claim, and it is worth putting to a class directly: on this account, the ability to win an argument badly is itself a disqualification.

What discussion is for

Then the discourse turns. Someone who actively listens has what is required; someone who does not, does not. And what such a person does is: directly know one thing, completely understand one thing, give up one thing, and realize one thing — and then they experience complete freedom.

“This is the purpose of discussion, consultation, sitting close, and listening well, that is, the liberation of the mind by not grasping.”

That sentence rewrites everything before it. The four tests were not etiquette, and not a technique for winning. They were the conditions under which conversation can do the one thing it is for.

The four verbs — directly know, completely understand, give up, realize — are the canon’s standard four operations, applied elsewhere to the four noble truths. Compressing them to one thing each is unusual and the discourse does not say what the one thing is.

The verses, for anyone who teaches

The verses divide people who converse with hostility from those who do not, and the description of the first group is uncomfortably recognizable: too sure of themselves, arrogant, ignoble, attacking virtues, they look for flaws in each other. They rejoice together when their opponent speaks poorly and makes a mistake.

The last clause is the sharp one. It is not describing an argument between enemies; it is describing people who are enjoying it together — the shared pleasure of watching somebody fail. Anyone who has been in a common room recognizes this.

The positive description is a list of small disciplines rather than a virtue: know when the time is right; speak from what you rightly know; agree with what was well spoken, without criticizing what was poorly said; do not persist in finding faults or seize on trivial mistakes; do not intimidate or crush; do not speak suggestively.

Good people consult for the sake of knowledge and clarity — and the final line, knowing this, an intelligent person would consult without arrogance, is the whole discourse compressed. It is a good thing to have on a wall.

Key terms