With Potaliya the Wanderer

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Withholding both praise and criticism is not equanimity but a failure to know the time.

The four individuals

One criticizes those deserving criticism, at the right time, truthfully and correctly, but does not praise those deserving praise. One praises but does not criticize. One does neither. One does both.

The qualifiers are attached throughout and they matter: at the right time, truthfully and correctly. Nobody in this grid is being inaccurate or ill-timed. The variable is only which of the two they do.

That is a refinement on AN 4.3 and AN 4.83, where the fault was praising and criticizing without examining. Here everyone has examined. The question is what they do with the result.

The question

Of these four individuals, who do you believe to be the finest? The Buddha puts the question to Potaliya rather than answering it.

That is unusual and it is worth registering. AN 4.42 named answering with a counter-question as one of the four proper ways to handle a question; here the same technique is used to open a conversation rather than to respond to one.

The effect is that Potaliya has to commit to a position before hearing the Buddha’s, which is what makes the exchange a real one. He is not being told; he is being asked, and then corrected.

Potaliya’s answer, and why it is not foolish

He picks the one who neither praises nor criticizes, because equanimity is best — upekkhā hi seṭṭhā.

That is a serious position and it deserves to be treated as one. Equanimity is the fourth of the immeasurables and the crown of the list; the canon praises it constantly. A wanderer who names it as the highest thing is not making an obvious mistake.

What he has done is apply a genuine principle to the wrong case. Equanimity in the canonical sense is a quality of mind that does not tilt toward like and dislike. Declining to say anything about anybody is a behavior, and the two are not the same — a person can be perfectly balanced internally and still say what needs saying.

That is a mistake made regularly and not only by wanderers. Silence gets read as equanimity, and non-involvement as non-attachment.

The correction

Understanding of time and context is the best — kālaññutā hi seṭṭhā. Not that equanimity is not good, and not that praise and criticism are obligatory. That knowing when is the thing.

The reply is exactly parallel to Potaliya’s in form: X hi seṭṭhā, X is best. One word is substituted and the whole position changes.

Kālaññutā is knowing the time or the occasion, and it appears in the canon as one of the qualities of a person worth listening to. What it names is not a rule but a capacity — the ability to tell when a thing should be said, which cannot be reduced to a policy in either direction.

So the fourth individual is best not because they say more but because they are governed by the occasion rather than by a standing preference. Both of the middle two have a policy — one always criticizes, one always praises — and so does Potaliya’s candidate, whose policy is silence.

The conversion

Potaliya immediately repeats the Buddha’s answer back as his own, in the same words, and then goes for refuge with the standard formula: as if righting the overturned, revealing the hidden, pointing out the path to the lost, or lighting a lamp in the dark.

The speed is characteristic of these encounters and a modern reader may find it implausible. What can be said is that the canon uses this formula as a marker of a conversation having concluded successfully rather than as a report of an inner process, and that Potaliya changes his answer before he takes refuge, not after.

The order matters. He is persuaded of a point, and the refuge follows from the persuasion. That is the sequence the collection consistently presents, and it is consistent with AN 3.65 and AN 4.25 on not accepting a teaching by authority.

This closes the Asuravagga, and it closes the first hundred discourses of the Fours.

Key terms