Continued Existence (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

What gets planted can be described as consciousness or as intention and aim, and the canon declines to choose.

The substitution

Cetanā is intention or volition — the same word the canon uses when it defines a deed as intention. Patthanā is aspiration, aim, a wish directed at something.

So where the first discourse named the knowing faculty as the seed, this one names the wanting-and-aiming faculty. Both are said to be shrouded by ignorance and fettered by craving, and both are said to be established in a lower, middle, or higher realm.

Notice that the image itself does not change. Deeds are still the field and craving is still the moisture in both discourses; the seed line is stated identically. Only the sentence about what is established differs, which narrows the question considerably: the discourses are not offering two theories of rebirth but two descriptions of the same component.

Why the pairing is careful rather than careless

It would be easy to treat this as a scribal variant, and worth resisting. The Aṅguttara does this deliberately and often — AN 3.37 and AN 3.38 differ by a clause and the difference is the lesson; AN 3.43 and AN 3.44 differ at both ends around a fixed core.

Here the pattern is a substitution at the point of maximum load. The whole answer turns on what is established in the realm, and the collection provides two answers without ranking them.

The most defensible reading is that no single faculty is the thing that continues. Describe it as consciousness and you have named the aspect that knows; describe it as intention and aim and you have named the aspect that leans forward. Both descriptions pick out the same continuing process, and insisting on one would turn a process into an entity — which is precisely the move this tradition spends its energy preventing.

That reading is not stated by either discourse and should be offered as a reading.

What this rules out

Both discourses rule out the same thing, and it is worth naming for a class that has been taught not-self as a slogan.

Neither says that nothing continues. Something is established in a realm, and the whole point of the field-seed-moisture image is continuity: a seed becomes a plant and the plant is not the seed but is not unrelated to it either.

What is ruled out is that the thing continuing is a possession or a passenger. It is consciousness, or it is intention and aim — both of which are activities rather than things, and both of which are described as conditioned by ignorance and craving rather than as standing on their own.

The practical consequence follows directly from the image and is the same in both versions: remove the moisture and nothing grows, whatever the seed is called.

For the later tradition

The Yogācāra account discussed under AN 3.76 has to reckon with both discourses, and it is worth noticing that its solution is to make room for both: the store consciousness is described as carrying seeds that are deposited by intention and that ripen as experience, which is a synthesis rather than a choice between them.

Whether that synthesis is warranted by these two short discourses is a fair question. What can be said is that the pair creates the problem the synthesis answers, and that a reader who has met AN 3.76 and AN 3.77 together will find the later literature less arbitrary than it looks from outside.

Using it

Read the two discourses aloud back to back and ask a class to find the difference. It takes about a minute and produces the right question without any framing.

Then the discussion: does it matter whether we say that consciousness continues or that intention and aim continue? Most classes will start by saying it does not, and change their minds when asked which of the two they think they are.

Key terms