Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The three trainings, with wisdom defined as the freedom it arrives at, and a final image for what that freedom is like.
The changed definition
Ethics and the higher mind are word for word as in AN 3.89. The higher wisdom becomes: a mendicant realizes the undefiled freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom in this very life, and lives having realized it with their own insight due to the ending of defilements.
That is the formula for arahantship, used here as the definition of a training. Strictly read, it makes the third training something one has rather than something one does, which is why the pair with AN 3.89 is necessary: there the training is the understanding that leads to it.
The collection is comfortable with this and a reader should be told why. Paññā in the canon is not a body of knowledge but a capacity, and the capacity is defined sometimes by its content and sometimes by its effect. Both definitions are given, four lines apart, and neither is marked as the correct one.
The verses on direction
“As before, so behind; as behind, so before. As below, so above; as above, so below. As by day, so by night; as by night, so by day.”
This is a standing formula in the canon, used most often of the practice of a mind made luminous, and it describes a state without distortion by orientation. Front and back, above and below, day and night are the same to it.
The line that follows makes the claim: having mastered every direction with limitless immersion. Appamāṇa samādhi — the immeasurable immersion, the same adjective used of the four immeasurables in AN 3.63.
It is worth resisting the urge to make this mystical. The formula is about consistency: a practice that holds in the dark as in the light, when one is watched as when one is not, is the point of it. AN 3.40 made the same claim in prose and without any imagery, when it said there is no privacy in the world.
Trainee, pure life, and Buddha
“They call them a ‘trainee on the path’, and ‘one living a pure life’. But a wise one who has gone to the end of the path they call a ‘Buddha’ in the world.”
Two titles for the one still going and one for the one who has arrived. The word buddha here is used generically for anybody awakened, which is its ordinary canonical sense before it became a proper name in later usage.
The verse is also the chapter’s answer to AN 3.85, which defined a trainee as somebody who trains. Here the same word appears with a destination attached: trainee on the path, and then the end of the path.
The lamp
“With the cessation of consciousness, freed by the ending of craving, the liberation of their heart is like a lamp going out.”
Two difficulties here and both should be named. The first is viññāṇassa nirodhena, with the cessation of consciousness. Read carelessly this sounds like annihilation, and it is worth putting beside AN 3.55, where extinguishment was defined as the ending of greed, hate, and delusion experienced, and beside AN 3.76, where consciousness is what gets established in a realm. What ceases is the consciousness that is planted and grows; the verse is about the ending of the process the seed image describes.
The second is the lamp. Pajjotasseva nibbānaṁ — the going out of a lamp is nibbāna, the same word. The image is the etymology made visible, and it is the plainest possible statement of what the term means: something that was burning stops.
A class will ask where the flame went, and the honest answer is that the canon treats that as the wrong question — MN 72 has the Buddha refuse it explicitly when asked in exactly those terms about a fire gone out. The verse gives an image and not a doctrine, and the image is chosen because a lamp going out is something everybody has watched and nobody asks about.
Using it
Teach the prose from AN 3.89 and the verses from here. The definitions belong together and the verses are the better ending.
The lamp is the line to leave a class with, and it should be given without interpretation. The whole tradition’s central term is being explained by pointing at an object in the room, and that gesture does more than a definition would.
Key terms
The text
Three trainings
§1“Mendicants, these are the three trainings. What three? The training in the higher ethics, the higher mind, and the higher wisdom.
§2And what is the training in the higher ethics? It’s when a mendicant is ethical, restrained in the monastic code, conducting themselves well and resorting for alms in suitable places. Seeing danger in the slightest fault, they keep the rules they’ve undertaken. This is called the training in the higher ethics.
§3And what is the training in the higher mind? It’s when a mendicant, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unskillful qualities, enters and remains in the first absorption … second absorption … third absorption … fourth absorption. This is called the training in the higher mind.
§4And what is the training in the higher wisdom? It’s when a mendicant realizes the undefiled freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom in this very life. And they live having realized it with their own insight due to the ending of defilements. This is called the training in the higher wisdom. These are the three trainings.
In verse
§5–6The higher ethics, the higher mind, and the higher wisdom should be practiced by those energetic, steadfast, and resolute, practicing absorption, mindful, with guarded senses. As before, so behind; as behind, so before. As below, so above; as above, so below.
§7–8As by day, so by night; as by night, so by day. Having mastered every direction with limitless immersion, they call them a ‘trainee on the path’, and ‘one living a pure life’. But a wise one who has gone to the end of the path they call a ‘Buddha’ in the world.
§9With the cessation of consciousness, freed by the ending of craving, the liberation of their heart is like a lamp going out.”
Self-check quiz
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