Seclusion

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Seclusion means separation from unethical conduct, from wrong view, and from defilements — not from comfort.

The catalog, and whose practices these are

The list is long and specific. Robes: sunn hemp, mixed hemp, corpse-wrapping cloth, rags, lodh bark, antelope hide whole or in strips, kusa grass, bark, wood-chips, human hair, horse-tail hair, owls’ wings. Food: herbs, millet, wild rice, poor rice, water lettuce, rice bran, the scum from boiling rice, sesame flour, grass, cow dung, forest roots and fruits, fallen fruit. Lodging: wilderness, tree root, charnel ground, forest, open air, a heap of straw, a threshing-hut.

This is not invented. The same catalog appears at MN 12 in the Buddha’s own first-person account of the austerities he practiced before awakening — he wore these things, ate these things, and slept in these places. The list is autobiography as much as ethnography.

That matters for how the criticism should be read. The discourse is not describing practices its author had heard about; it is describing practices its author had done and abandoned, which is a considerably stronger position from which to say they are not seclusion.

It is also worth saying that nothing here calls these practices wicked or their practitioners insincere. Somebody eating rice-scum in a charnel ground is doing something difficult. The claim is that difficulty is not the same as seclusion.

What replaces them

Three, and they are compressed almost to the point of being missable:

A mendicant is ethical, giving up unethical conduct, being secluded from it. They have right view, giving up wrong view, being secluded from it. They’ve ended defilements, giving up defilements, being secluded from them.

The construction is identical in all three: the quality is possessed, the opposite is given up, and the seclusion consists in the separation. Paviveka here has been converted from a spatial word to a relational one — not being apart from people or goods, but being apart from a condition.

The three are also a sequence, and it is the familiar one: ethics, view, and the ending of defilements, which maps onto the three trainings the previous chapter spent eleven discourses on.

The substitution has the same shape as the one in AN 3.74, where the Jain nijjarā was kept and refilled, and AN 3.58, where the brahmin tevijja was. The chapter before this one is about the three trainings; this discourse quietly says that they are what seclusion is.

The rice

The simile is a list of eleven operations and it is worth reading slowly, because the point is the number: cut, gathered, transported, made into heaps, threshed, straw removed, winnowed, brought over, pounded, husks removed.

Each adverb is the same — swiftly — and the result is that the crop reaches the peak and the pith, being pure and consolidated in the core.

What the eleven steps describe is the removal of everything that is not grain. The straw goes, the chaff goes, the husk goes, and what is left is small and dense. So the simile for the three seclusions is not a process of acquiring anything; it is subtraction carried out until only the edible part remains.

That is a precise image for what the three replacements do, and it explains why the discourse does not need to argue against the catalog. The ascetic practices add hardships. The three seclusions remove things.

Using it

This discourse is the best short answer in the collection to the assumption that Buddhist practice is a form of austerity. The austerities are listed in full, credited to serious practitioners, and then replaced by three items that have nothing to do with material conditions.

For a class, the useful exercise is to read the catalog aloud and ask what the three replacements have in common with it. The answer is nothing, and the surprise is the point: after a paragraph about owls’ wings and cow dung, the discourse says seclusion is not lying and not holding a wrong view.

Key terms