The Donkey

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Belonging to the group is not the same as doing the work, and the difference shows in three ways at once.

Three tests, all failed

The simile is unusually precise about how the donkey is caught out: it does not look like a cow, does not sound like a cow, and does not leave a footprint like a cow. Appearance, voice, and track.

The application does not spell out three matching tests for the monk, but the correspondence is not hard to see and is worth letting a class find. What the monk lacks is named as a single thing — the same enthusiasm for the three trainings that the other mendicants have — and the three trainings are themselves ethics, mind, and wisdom, which is roughly conduct, inner state, and understanding.

The footprint is the sharpest of the three. Appearance can be arranged and a voice can be attempted; a track is what is left behind by actually moving, and it cannot be produced by intention.

What the donkey is not accused of

The donkey is not accused of pretending, deceiving, or infiltrating. It is not described as a wolf among sheep, which would be a different simile and a different complaint.

It says I can moo too, and the discourse’s judgment is that it cannot. The failure is one of capacity and effort rather than of honesty, and the donkey’s claim is presented as sincere and mistaken.

That distinction matters for how the discourse should be taught. It is not about hypocrites in a monastery; it is about somebody who genuinely thinks that being in the line is the thing, and who is at least partly right — nothing in the discourse says the donkey should leave.

It is worth being honest, though, that the simile is not kind. Comparing a fellow monastic to a donkey braying is a piece of mockery, and the canon is capable of gentleness on this subject when it wants to be — AN 3.84, two discourses later, treats a monk who cannot keep up with great tenderness. The Threes contain both, and a teacher should present both rather than only the one that suits the audience.

The word for enthusiasm

What the monk lacks is chanda, the same keen enthusiasm AN 3.81 asked for. Not attainment, not knowledge, not seniority — appetite.

That is a merciful standard in one respect and a demanding one in another. It is merciful because the donkey is not being asked to be a cow: the failure is not that the monk has not reached anything but that they do not want to. And it is demanding because appetite is the one thing that cannot be simulated over time. A person can attend, recite, and keep rules without it, and this discourse says that produces a donkey.

The pairing with AN 3.42 is exact and worth making. There, the first two grounds on which a person of faith is recognized are that they like to see ethical people and like to hear the teaching. Here, the absence of that liking is what makes the monk a donkey. The canon is consistent: it treats what somebody wants as more diagnostic than what they do.

Using it

This is a discourse to use on oneself rather than on anybody else, and that should be said when teaching it. A simile this sharp is immediately useful for identifying somebody in the room, and that use is available to any group and has nothing to recommend it.

The version that works in a classroom is the question the simile puts: is there a track? Not whether a person looks the part or says the right things, but whether anything has actually moved. Applied to a student, to a teacher, or to a practice, that is a hard and fair question.

Key terms