Jains

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

There are three ways of wearing away old deeds and they are ethics, absorption, and liberation — not austerity.

The doctrine as reported, and how accurate it is

This report deserves to be trusted more than the one in AN 3.70, and it is worth saying so, because the two discourses describe the same religion.

Four claims are made. That the Jain leader — Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta, the figure known to Jains as Mahāvīra — claims constant omniscience, while walking, standing, sleeping, and waking. That old deeds are eliminated by fervent mortification, tapas. That new deeds are prevented, breaking the bridge. And that with the ending of deeds comes the ending of suffering, of feeling, and of all suffering worn away.

All four correspond to positions Jains actually held. Nirjarā, the wearing away of accumulated karma through austerity, is a central Jain doctrine and not a Buddhist caricature of one; the claim of Mahāvīra’s kevala-jñāna, omniscient knowledge, is a Jain claim; and the strategy of stopping the inflow of new karma while burning off the old is exactly the Jain path. Unlike the hundred-league passage in AN 3.70, this is a fair summary.

That matters for how the reply reads. Ānanda is not knocking down a straw figure. He is answering a coherent rival program whose goal — the ending of suffering by the ending of deeds — his own tradition largely shares.

Keeping the word

The reply does not reject the term. Three kinds of purification by wearing away have been rightly explained by the Blessed One — the same nijjarā the Jains use, taken over.

This is the move the Brāhmaṇavagga made with tevijja and with brāhmaṇa, and it is worth showing a class that it is a policy rather than a coincidence. The vocabulary of the rival is retained and its content is replaced, which keeps the conversation possible and concedes nothing.

The purposes given are the standard list: to purify beings, to get past sorrow and crying, to make an end of pain and sadness, to discover the system, and to realize extinguishment. That formula belongs to the discourse on mindfulness meditation and its appearance here signals what kind of claim is being made.

Three ways of wearing away

Each of the three is a level of the training, and each is followed by the identical sentence: they don’t perform any new deeds, and old deeds are eliminated by experiencing their results little by little.

First, ethics: restrained in the monastic code, seeing danger in the slightest fault. Second, immersion: the four absorptions. Third, liberation: the undefiled freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom, realized in this very life.

The substitution is precise. The Jain method for stopping new deeds is mortification; here it is ethical restraint. The Jain method for eliminating old deeds is burning them off by austerity; here they are eliminated by experiencing their results little by little — that is, by letting them ripen and be felt rather than by attacking them.

That second half is the substantive disagreement and it is easy to miss. Both traditions agree that old deeds must be exhausted. They disagree about whether anything can be done to speed it up. On this account nothing can: the results come as they come, and what the practitioner controls is only whether new ones are added.

Each level also carries the tag apparent in the present life, immediately effective, inviting inspection — the formula of AN 3.53. Against a doctrine of long-term karmic accounting, the reply insists that its own version can be checked now.

The two visitors

The closing exchange is short and human. Paṇḍitakumāra asks Abhaya whether there is anything in what Ānanda said that he would disagree with, and Abhaya replies: how could I not agree with what was said so well? If anyone didn’t agree with him, their head would explode!

The head-splitting is a stock canonical hyperbole rather than a threat, and it usually appears when somebody refuses a reasonable question. Here it is used enthusiastically and in the wrong direction, which is part of the charm.

Neither Licchavi goes for refuge, and the discourse does not record a conversion. They came with a report and a question, got an answer, and agreed with it in front of each other.

Using it

Teach this beside AN 3.70 and use the pair to make a point about reading polemic. The same canon describes the same religion twice: once with a claim its adherents would not recognize, and once with a summary they largely would. A student who has seen both will read the next report of a rival doctrine more carefully.

The doctrinal content is also useful on its own. The question of whether accumulated consequences can be worked off faster by effort is not confined to ancient India, and this discourse’s answer — that they are exhausted by being experienced, and that the only leverage is over what is added — is a clear position that can be argued with.

Key terms