Fields

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The three trainings are the three things a mendicant does the way ploughing, sowing, and watering are the three things a farmer does.

What the farmer actually does

First, makes sure the field is well ploughed and tilled. Preparation, and it happens before anything is planted. Nothing grows from it directly and skipping it wastes everything that follows.

Second, plants seeds in season. Not merely plants: in season. The task has a window.

Third, when the time is right, they irrigate the field and then drain it. This is the one a city reader misses. Irrigation is not simply adding water; the field is flooded and then let out again, and both halves are the task. Too much water standing too long is as fatal as none.

So all three duties are timing-dependent and the third is a two-part operation with a judgment in the middle. Whoever composed the simile knew what a field required.

What the parallel implies without stating it

The discourse does not say which training corresponds to which task, and it is worth letting a class do the mapping and disagree about it.

The obvious reading is ethics as the ploughing — preparation that grows nothing by itself and without which nothing else takes; the higher mind as the sowing, done in season; and wisdom as the watering and draining, the part requiring judgment about when enough is enough.

That mapping is defensible and is not in the text. What the text does assert is the structure: three primary duties, in an order, each with its own timing, and none of them optional. The Pāli word is accāyika, urgent or primary — the tasks that cannot be deferred without losing the season.

And the simile makes one point that the bare list of three trainings cannot. A farmer does not do the three tasks and then wait for the crop as a reward. The crop is what the tasks are for and it comes on its own schedule; there is no fourth task called harvesting-by-effort. AN 3.85 and the discourses after it say the same thing about the trainee in plain language.

Why the collection keeps using farming

The Threes reach for agriculture repeatedly: sound seed in a prepared field with rain at AN 3.34, the burnt seed scattered in a stream, deeds as the field and consciousness as the seed at AN 3.76, the strangling creepers dug out at AN 3.69, and now the farmer’s three duties.

The audience is the reason. These discourses were given in a society where nearly everybody understood fields, and where the relation between work, timing, and a result that arrives on its own was the most familiar structure available.

It is worth telling a class in a modern city that they are at a disadvantage with these similes and that the disadvantage is worth repairing. A person who has never waited for something to grow has to be told that the waiting is not passivity and that the cultivation is not the cause of the growth.

Using it

Teach it immediately after AN 3.82, and let the pair do its work: the donkey is a figure with no track, and the farmer is a figure whose entire existence is timing. Between them the chapter has said that the three trainings are work, and that work has a shape.

For a class, the productive exercise is the mapping. Ask which training is the ploughing, which the sowing, and which the watering, and the disagreement will be more instructive than the answer. The one thing to insist on is the third task’s two halves, because irrigate and then drain is the only part of the simile that cannot be read as simply doing more.

Key terms