A Trainee

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A trainee is somebody who trains, and the training is the three.

An answer that is a tautology, deliberately

Sikkhatīti kho, bhikkhu, tasmā sekhoti vuccati — they train, therefore they are called a trainee. The Pāli makes the connection audible in a way English cannot: sikkhati and sekha are the same root.

This kind of answer is common in the canon and it is easy to mistake for evasion. It is not. The questioner has heard a technical term used as a category — they speak of the one called a trainee — and is being told that the word is not a rank, a certificate, or a stage that somebody is placed in. It describes an activity.

The difference matters practically. Asked whether they are a trainee, a person on the first reading has to check their attainments against a list. On this reading they have to check whether they are training.

The tradition does also use sekha technically — AN 3.73 divides the three trainings between trainee and adept, and elsewhere a trainee is specifically somebody from stream-entry up. Both uses are real, and this discourse is not denying the technical one. It is answering a question about the word with the plainest thing the word means.

What the verses add

The verses compress the whole path into four lines and they take some unpacking.

As a trainee trains, following the straight road, first they know about ending; enlightenment follows in the same lifetime. The order is the surprising part: knowledge of ending comes first, and full enlightenment follows. The canon distinguishes the knowledge that the defilements are ending from the subsequent knowledge that they have ended, and the verse is marking that sequence.

Then the knowledge comes, such a one, freed through enlightenment, with the end of the fetters of continued existence: my freedom is unshakable. The second knowledge is reflexive — it is knowing that one is free, which the canon consistently treats as a separate event from being free.

Anantarā, in the same lifetime or immediately following, is the word carrying the promise. The trainee is not being told that the training tends in a good direction over many lives; the verse says the second thing follows the first without an interval.

Why this discourse sits where it does

The chapter has given the three trainings as duties, as a donkey’s failure, as a farmer’s tasks, and as a rescue for somebody drowning in rules. This discourse gives the name of the person doing them.

The three discourses that follow, AN 3.86 to AN 3.88, take the same three trainings and correlate them with the stages of attainment, which is the technical treatment. So the chapter moves from what the training is, through who does it, to how far it gets a person — and this short discourse is the hinge.

It is also the discourse that names the word the Buddha used about Ānanda behind his back in AN 3.78: Ānanda is a trainee, but it’s not easy to find his equal in wisdom. Read after this one, that sentence says something more precise than it first appears: Ānanda is still doing the three, and among those still doing them he has few equals.

Using it

The usable content is the definition, and it transfers to any discipline. A student is somebody who studies; a practitioner is somebody who practices. That sounds trivial until it is applied, at which point it disqualifies a great many people who hold the title on other grounds.

For a class that has met the technical vocabulary of stream-enterer, once-returner, and non-returner, this discourse is worth using as a corrective. The canon has a detailed typology of attainment and it also has this: the word for a person on the path names what they are doing, not where they have got to.

Key terms