Mangoes

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Looking ready and being ready are two processes, and neither waits for the other.

What a mango adds

Skin color is the obvious index of ripeness and it is famously unreliable. A mango can colour while the flesh is still hard, and can stay green while the flesh has gone soft and sweet.

That is a different situation from the pot and the lake. Both of those had a fixed inside and an outside that concealed or misreported it. Here the inside is changing, the outside is changing, and the two changes are not synchronized.

The consequence is that the mismatch is temporary in a way the others are not. An unripe mango that looks ripe will become ripe; a ripe one that looks unripe was unripe not long ago. Time resolves both mixed cells, which is not true of a covered pot.

Reading the mixed cells with time in view

Unripe but seems ripe: a person of impressive carriage who does not understand the four truths. On the mango reading, that person is not a fraud — they are early. The carriage has arrived and the understanding has not yet.

Ripe but seems unripe: understanding without the carriage. On the same reading, the outside will catch up.

That is a gentler picture than either of the previous two similes gives, and it is worth saying that the discourse does not state it. Nothing in the text says the mismatch resolves. What the text supplies is the simile, and the simile carries the implication whether or not the compilers intended it.

A careful reader should hold that lightly. The claim the discourse makes is the same as AN 4.103’s and AN 4.104’s: appearance is not an index. The extra suggestion belongs to the image.

The practice of ripening mangoes

One piece of period knowledge sharpens the simile considerably. Mangoes were and are picked unripe and ripened off the tree, often packed in straw, and the process is unreliable — some fruit colours without softening, some softens without colouring.

So the audience for this simile was not thinking of fruit on a branch. They were thinking of a basket of mangoes in which each one has to be judged individually, by people who did that judging regularly and got it wrong regularly.

That is a good picture of assessing a community of practitioners, which is what the chapter is about.

Closing the group of three

Pots, lakes, mangoes. Three similes, one pair of variables, three accounts of why the outside does not report the inside: it is covered, it is misread, it is on a different schedule.

The Aṅguttara rarely gives three similes for one claim, and when it does the similes are usually doing different work rather than reinforcing. That is the case here, and a reader who takes only one of the three gets one third of what the group offers.

AN 4.106, the next number in the chapter, has no text at all — it is a ghost sutta, and its page explains what that means. After it the chapter changes its pair of variables and does not return to deportment.

Against the rest of the collection

The three discourses together are a sustained argument against a particular way of evaluating people, and it is worth setting them beside the places where the collection evaluates people confidently.

AN 4.73 gave four tests for a true person, all of them about speech and all of them checkable. AN 4.3 required examination before praise or criticism. AN 4.65 endorsed judging by principle. None of those depends on how someone carries themselves.

So the collection is consistent. It asks for assessment and it is specific about what to assess — conduct, speech, consistency over time — and this chapter is the negative half of the same instruction, given three times because the mistake it names is so easy to make.

Key terms