Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The three trainings are urgent and their result cannot be scheduled.
What is added to AN 3.83
Nine discourses earlier the farmer had three primary duties and the mendicant had three. Here the same two lists appear with one word changed — the duties are accāyika, urgent — and one paragraph added to each side.
The added paragraph is the point. That farmer has no special power or ability — iddhi vā ānubhāvo vā, no psychic power and no authority — to say let the crops germinate today, flower tomorrow, ripen the day after.
And the parallel: that mendicant has no special power or ability to say let my mind be freed from defilements by not grasping today! Or tomorrow! Or the day after!
Reading the two discourses together shows how this collection works. AN 3.83 said the tasks; AN 3.92 says the tasks are urgent and the result is not. Neither statement alone is the teaching.
Urgent and unschedulable at once
The two halves are in tension and the tension is deliberate. If the result cannot be hurried, why is the work urgent?
The farming answer is exact and a class will supply it themselves: the tasks are urgent because the result is not under control. A farmer who could command the harvest would not need to plough at any particular time. It is precisely because germination comes when it comes that the ploughing must be done now, in this season, before the window closes.
Applied to practice, that disposes of two errors at once. The first is the striving that sets a deadline for awakening and treats the delay as failure; the discourse says flatly that nobody has the power to set that deadline. The second is the passivity that concludes from this that timing does not matter; the same discourse calls the duties urgent.
A person holding both is in the position of a farmer in the sowing season: unable to hurry the crop and unable to postpone the work.
The word for what the mendicant lacks
Iddhi is the word this collection uses for psychic power — the multiplying of the body, the walking on water, the flying, which AN 3.60 ranked last of three demonstrations and which AN 3.80 has the Buddha exercising.
So the discourse is not saying that supernormal power does not exist in this tradition. It is saying that it does not extend here. A person may have iddhi and still be unable to command their own liberation, which is a limitation stated in the vocabulary of the thing being limited.
That is a sharper way of making the point than a general remark about patience would have been, and it is aimed at a specific temptation. Somebody with meditative attainment has real capacities and might reasonably expect one of them to work on this.
What actually happens
“But there comes a time — as that mendicant trains in the higher ethics, the higher mind, and the higher wisdom — that their mind is freed from defilements by not grasping.”
Hoti so, bhikkhave, samayo — there comes a time. The same construction used of the crops, which germinate, flower, and ripen as the seasons change.
The freedom is described as arriving rather than as being achieved, and the training is described as continuing throughout. Neither is presented as causing the other in the way a lever causes a movement; the relation is the one between cultivation and a season, which everyone in the audience understood and which no modern reader has an equally good image for.
This is also the clearest short statement in the Threes of why the collection keeps returning to farming. The relation between effort and result in this teaching is agricultural rather than mechanical, and there is no other everyday process with the same shape.
Using it
Teach it to anybody who is discouraged by not having got anywhere, and teach it alongside AN 3.83 so that the urgency is not lost. The discourse is precise: the work is urgent, the result is not yours to time, and the second fact is the reason for the first.
The transferable form is a question. Is this a thing I can schedule, or a thing I can only prepare for? Most worthwhile results are the second kind, and most anxiety about them comes from treating them as the first.
Key terms
The text
The farmer
§1“Mendicants, a farmer has three urgent duties. What three? A farmer swiftly makes sure the field is well ploughed and tilled. Next they swiftly plant seeds in season. When the time is right, they swiftly irrigate or drain the field. These are the three urgent duties of a farmer. That farmer has no special power or ability to say: ‘Let the crops germinate today! Let them flower tomorrow! Let them ripen the day after!’ But there comes a time when that farmer’s crops germinate, flower, and ripen as the seasons change.
The mendicant
§2In the same way, a mendicant has three urgent duties. What three? Undertaking the training in the higher ethics, the higher mind, and the higher wisdom. These are the three urgent duties of a mendicant. That mendicant has no special power or ability to say: ‘Let my mind be freed from defilements by not grasping today! Or tomorrow! Or the day after!’ But there comes a time—as that mendicant trains in the higher ethics, the higher mind, and the higher wisdom—that their mind is freed from defilements by not grasping.
§3So you should train like this: ‘We will have keen enthusiasm for undertaking the training in the higher ethics, the higher mind, and the higher wisdom.’ That’s how you should train.”
Self-check quiz
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