Lakes

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A surface gives a reading of the depth beneath it, and the reading is unreliable both ways.

Why the lake improves on the pot

A covered pot tells you nothing; you know you do not know. A lake tells you something — dark water reads as deep, clear water over a pale bottom reads as shallow — and the something can be false.

That is a different and more dangerous situation. With the pot, an honest observer knows they are ignorant. With the lake, they have an impression and no reason to distrust it.

The discourse’s phrasing captures this: shallow but appears deep, deep but appears shallow. The verb is about how it looks, and the mismatch is stated as a property of the lake rather than as an error by the observer.

What makes water look deep

The simile assumes something the audience knew and a modern reader may not. Standing water in this climate reads as deep when it is dark — turbid, shaded, or over a dark bed — and shallow when the bottom is visible.

Neither is a reliable index. Muddy shallow water is opaque; clear deep water over pale sand can be startlingly transparent. Anyone who has misjudged a river crossing knows the second case.

The mapping onto deportment is exact. Composure, carefulness, and self-possession read as depth. Their absence reads as its absence. Neither reading is an index of anything, and the discourse says so by giving all four cells.

The mixed cells again

Shallow but appears deep: impressive carriage, no understanding of the truths. Deep but appears shallow: no impressive carriage, understanding of the truths.

Between AN 4.103, this, and AN 4.105 the same two people are described three times. That repetition is worth noticing rather than skipping: the compilers thought these two figures worth three similes.

Both are hazards, and they are hazards to different parties. The first misleads other people; the second is misjudged by them. The discourse addresses observers in both cases, which is consistent with the chapter being a set of tools for assessment rather than for self-examination.

Depth as a metaphor for understanding

The choice of depth is not accidental. Gambhīra, deep, is one of the canon’s standard words for the teaching itself — the Dhamma is repeatedly called deep, hard to see, subtle.

So a person who understands the four truths is deep in the same sense that the teaching is deep, and the simile quietly claims that what is in such a person is the same kind of thing as what is in the Dhamma.

That is more than the pot simile could carry. A full pot is full of something unspecified; a deep lake is deep in the way the teaching is deep. The improvement is not just in the mechanism of concealment but in what is being concealed.

Reading the three together

Pots, lakes, mangoes: concealment, misreading, and timing. The third will add the element neither of the first two has, which is that ripeness changes.

Taken as a sequence the three build. A pot’s contents are static and hidden. A lake’s depth is static and misreported. A mango’s ripeness is a process, and the appearance and the reality are on different schedules.

Whether the compilers intended the progression, it is there, and reading the three in order is the best use of what would otherwise be three statements of one claim.

Key terms