Trees

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A person’s character and the character of the people around them are independent, and there are four combinations.

Softwood and hardwood

Pheggu is sapwood or softwood — the pale outer wood that is weak and rots. Sāra is heartwood, the dense inner wood, and it is one of the canon’s most-used words: sāra also means essence, substance, the pith of a thing.

That double meaning is why the simile works better than the timber alone would suggest. A hardwood tree is one with substance in it, in exactly the sense the collection uses when it asks whether a teaching or a person has any sāra.

AN 4.103’s pot was hollow or full; this is the same contrast with a word that carries the metaphor built in.

What trees add

A titan is surrounded by whoever is around it. A tree stands in a stand, and the stand grew where it grew.

That adds the element of place. A hardwood tree surrounded by softwoods is not there by choice and cannot move, and the same is true of the softwood among hardwoods. The arrangement is a fact about the forest rather than about the trees in it.

That is a gentler reading of the mixed cells than the titan version supports, and it is worth being explicit that the discourse does not draw it. As with the mango in AN 4.105, the extra implication belongs to the image, and a reader should take it as an illumination rather than as a claim.

What the image does clearly supply is that a person’s company is often not chosen. AN 4.31 listed relying on true persons as one of the four wheels of a prosperous life; this simile is a reminder that the wheel is not always available to be arranged.

The mixed cells

A softwood surrounded by hardwoods: unethical, with ethical followers. A hardwood surrounded by softwoods: ethical, with unethical followers.

AN 4.91’s guide noted that the first is the more uncomfortable, since the quality of a following is not evidence about the person at its centre.

The tree simile sharpens this. A stand of good timber around one rotten trunk does not make the rotten one sound, and nobody looking at a forest would think it did. The inference from surroundings to substance is one nobody makes about trees and everybody makes about people.

Why two similes for one grid

AN 4.91 and AN 4.109 give the same pair of variables with different images, and they are eighteen discourses apart in the collection but in adjacent chapters.

The difference between them is the difference between a moral image and a natural one. Titans and gods are evaluative from the start — the labels carry the judgment. Softwood and hardwood are descriptive; a tree is not blamed for its wood.

Having both lets the same grid be used in two registers. The titan version is for saying that someone is bad and their people are good. The tree version is for observing the same arrangement without the accusation, which is often the more useful thing to be able to do.

The chapter’s last pair

AN 4.110, the vipers, closes the Valāhakavagga with a pair of variables that appears nowhere else in it: how often anger arises against how long it lasts.

That leaves the chapter with four content-pairs across nine similes and one empty slot. Three of the pairs concern how a person is perceived or placed; the last concerns something entirely internal.

It is the least unified chapter of the Fours so far, and its unity is entirely formal: ten discourses, one grid, nine similes drawn from ordinary observation of weather, vessels, water, fruit, and animals.

Key terms