A Disciple of the Ājīvakas

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

You can answer “who is right?” without saying “we are.”

Who is asking

The Ājīvakas were a major renunciate movement of the period, led by Makkhali Gosāla, and the canon treats them as serious rivals rather than as cranks — AN 3.61 in this same collection sets out and refutes the doctrine of one of their positions at length.

So this is not a neutral inquirer. It is a householder who supports another school, asking a member of this one to rank them. The question has a trap in it whichever way it is answered: claim superiority and you are a sectarian; decline and you have nothing to teach.

The three counter-questions

Ānanda’s move is to convert each of the three questions from who to what.

Is the teaching of those who teach for giving up greed, hate, and delusion well explained or not? The householder says it is. Are those who practice for giving up greed, hate, and delusion practicing well? He says they are. Have those who have given up greed, hate, and delusion — cut off at the root, made like a palm stump — done well in the world? He says they have.

Then Ānanda simply reads the three answers back to him. That is the whole discourse. No conclusion is drawn and no application is made.

The construction is worth noticing. Each counter-question is stated in terms of a criterion rather than a group, and the criterion is one the householder can evaluate himself. Anybody who teaches for the giving up of the three roots is covered; the question of which school does so is left entirely open, and Ānanda never closes it.

What the householder says

The praise he offers is the finest description of good teaching in the collection and should be quoted rather than summarized:

There’s no acclaiming your own teaching or disrespecting someone else’s, just teaching what’s relevant in that context. The goal is spoken of, but the self is not involved.

Four things are named. No self-promotion. No disparagement of others. Relevance to the situation. And — the last clause — the matter is discussed without the speaker’s own position entering into it. Attho ca vutto attā ca anupanīto: the goal was stated and the self was not brought in.

Only then does he apply the criteria himself: you, sir, teach Dhamma for giving up greed, hate, and delusion; your teaching is well explained. He draws the conclusion Ānanda declined to draw, and he draws it about Ānanda personally, including the third one — you’ve given up greed, hate, and delusion; you in the world have done well.

That is a considerable claim to make about somebody, and Ānanda does not accept or deny it. The discourse ends with the householder going for refuge.

Why the method works

It is worth being precise about what Ānanda has and has not achieved, because the discourse is often praised in vague terms.

He has not avoided the question. All three of the man’s questions are answered, and the answers are the ones his own tradition would give. What he has avoided is answering them by naming a group, and the effect is that the householder ends up applying the criteria for himself — including to Ānanda, which is where the sectarian claim would have gone if it had been made at the start.

This is the same technique as AN 3.66, where Nandaka lets two young men reach the conclusion, and AN 3.60, where Saṅgārava ranks the three demonstrations himself. The Threes clearly regard it as the standard method, and it is worth pointing out that all three instances involve somebody who might reasonably have suspected the speaker of special pleading.

Using it

For anyone teaching in a mixed or non-Buddhist setting, this is the model discourse and the householder’s four criteria are the checklist. Am I promoting my own thing? Am I disparaging somebody else’s? Is this relevant here? Is my own position doing work in the argument that the subject matter should be doing?

The last is the hardest and the most useful. A great deal of religious and educational speech consists of a correct point with the speaker’s standing quietly attached to it, and the phrase the goal is spoken of, but the self is not involved is a precise name for what that speech lacks.

Key terms