Mangoes (2nd)

Reading guide

The situation in one sentence

The collection has a slot here and nothing to put in it.

What a ghost sutta is

A discourse that exists in the numbering and the index apparatus of a collection but has no surviving text. The number is counted, the title is listed, and the content is gone or was never there.

These occur in the Pāli canon in small numbers and they arise in more than one way. A discourse may have been lost between the fixing of the count and the manuscripts we have. A title may have entered the summary verses by error and then required a slot. Or a discourse may have been abbreviated so heavily by a copyist that nothing survived the abbreviation.

In this case the third is the most likely. The title is Dutiyaamba, Mangoes (2nd), and AN 4.105 is Mangoes. A second mango discourse would have been the same simile with a different pair of variables — exactly what AN 4.102 is to AN 4.101.

That is a reconstruction and it should be labelled as one. What can be said with confidence is only that the slot exists and the text does not.

Why the number is kept

It would be tidier to renumber, and nobody has. The reason is that the numbering is not an editorial convenience but a feature of the transmission.

The Aṅguttara is organized in chapters of ten, and its summary verses — the uddāna that close each chapter — list the titles in order as a memory check. A reciter who reached the end of a chapter and counted nine had made a mistake.

So the count is load-bearing. Removing AN 4.106 would shorten the Clouds chapter to nine and put every subsequent number out by one, which would break the correspondence with every citation, commentary, and parallel that has ever been made.

The empty slot is the smaller cost, and the tradition has consistently paid it.

What this shows about the collection

Two things, and both are useful for reading the rest of the Aṅguttara.

First, the structure is older and more stable than the contents. The chapter of ten is a fixed frame, and this chapter has demonstrated as much throughout — nine similes poured into one grid, and here a tenth slot with nothing in it at all.

Second, the transmitters were conservative in a specific way. Faced with a gap they preserved the gap rather than filling it. Nobody composed a second mango discourse to occupy the space, though it would have been easy and the pattern of the chapter would have told them exactly what to write.

That restraint is worth knowing about when reading a collection that is often accused of expansion. The people who transmitted it evidently distinguished between arranging what they had and manufacturing what they did not.

How this page is written

There is no text to guide, no terms to gloss from the discourse, and no content to quiz. Everything on this page is about the situation rather than about a teaching, and that is stated here so that a reader does not go looking for what is not present.

The alternative — omitting AN 4.106 from this series — was considered and rejected. A reader working through the Fours in order would find the numbering jump and have no way to know why, and the project’s aim is to present the collection as it is.

The key terms below are therefore terms about transmission, and the quiz is about what a ghost sutta is and what its preservation indicates.

Where the chapter goes next

AN 4.107, the mice, returns to the pair of variables AN 4.102 used: memorizing the ninefold teaching against understanding the four truths.

So the deportment group ends at AN 4.105 and the empty slot sits between the two content-pairs, which is at least a tidy place for a gap.

The chapter then finishes with oxen, trees, and vipers — a person against their followers twice, and anger measured two ways.

Key terms