Training (3rd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Aim at the whole thing; and if you do not reach it, here is everything else you will have reached instead, in order.

One case, nine outcomes

AN 3.86 and AN 3.87 sorted mendicants by which trainings they had fulfilled and gave each sort its result. This discourse describes only the fully trained mendicant and attaches every outcome to that one person.

The device is the repeated clause no ce tathattāya paṭivijjhati — if they do not penetrate so far. Freedom in this very life; if not that, extinguished between one life and the next; if not that, upon landing; without extra effort; with extra effort; heading upstream to Akaniṭṭha; once-returner; one-seeder; family-to-family; seven-times-at-most.

Nine descents, and the bottom of the list is still a stream-enterer — somebody assured and destined for awakening. There is no tenth step where the practice fails.

Why the direction matters

The same information in the other two discourses reads as a classification: here are four kinds of practitioner and what each achieves. Read downward it becomes something else entirely, which is a statement about one practitioner and what happens if they fall short.

That difference is not decorative. A classification invites a reader to locate themselves in it, which the previous discourse warned is not possible. A descent invites them to aim at the top and be told what the shortfalls are, which is usable.

It also reframes the whole typology. Read this way, the varieties of stream-enterer and non-returner are not different destinations for different people. They are the successive positions a single person passes through or stops at, and the discourse names them so that stopping short is described rather than feared.

The reversal of the closing formula

AN 3.86 and AN 3.87 both end: if you practice partially you succeed partially. If you practice fully you succeed fully. This one reverses the order of the two clauses: if you practice fully you succeed fully. If you practice partially you succeed partially.

That is the kind of detail a reader skims and it matches the discourse exactly. The other two build upward from partial practice; this one starts from full practice and descends. Even the closing formula runs the same direction as the body.

Whether the compilers did that deliberately or the recitation tradition adjusted it is not something the text settles. The correspondence is exact either way, and it is worth showing a class as evidence of how carefully this material was arranged.

What is not on the list

The three discourses together enumerate eight or nine attainments and none of them is failure. The lowest outcome named is the seven-times-at-most stream-enterer, and the canon describes that person as not liable to be reborn in the underworld, assured, destined for awakening.

That is because all three discourses are describing somebody who has fulfilled at least the training in ethics. Nothing here is said about a practitioner who has not, and it would be a serious misreading to conclude that the canon guarantees an outcome to anybody who tries.

The scope should be stated plainly when teaching this: the discourse is about people inside the training, and its generosity is a description of what the training does once entered, not a promise made to everyone.

Using it

This is the version of the three to teach if only one is taught. It carries the same content and the descent makes the point that the classification cannot: aim at the whole thing, and the shortfalls are named in advance.

The transferable structure is the phrase if they don’t penetrate so far. It is a way of setting a high aim without making everything below it a failure, and it is unusual. Most systems that set a high standard either pretend the shortfalls do not exist or treat them as defeat; this one lists nine of them and names each as an achievement.

Key terms