Speed

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four qualities make a horse worth a king’s stable and a mendicant worth a donor’s gift.

The four

Ajjava, integrity or straightness — literally uprightness, and of a horse it means not shying, balking, or going crooked. Java, speed. Khanti, patience or endurance. Soracca, gentleness or good temper.

Of the four, only java is peculiar to horses. The other three are among the collection’s standard virtues, and khanti in particular is one of its highest — the Dhammapada calls it the supreme austerity.

So the transfer is not as strained as it might look. Three of the four terms already belong to both registers, and the discourse is largely borrowing one word.

What speed means for a mendicant

The discourse does not say, and AN 4.114, three discourses later, does: a mendicant ‘goes fast’ by going swiftly in the direction they have never gone before in all this long time — the stilling of activities, the letting go of attachments, the ending of craving, extinguishment.

That is the chapter’s own gloss and it is worth importing here. Speed is not quickness of understanding or of practice; it is direction. The fast horse goes where the trainer sends it without hesitation, and the fast mendicant goes toward the one destination that has never been reached.

Read that way the four factors are not a list of good qualities but a description of a trained animal: straight, quick to the target, able to endure, and manageable. Every one of them is about being usable.

‘Worthy of a king’ and ‘field of merit’

The two conclusions are parallel and the parallel is the discourse’s argument. A horse with these four is worthy of a king, fit to serve a king, a factor of kingship. A mendicant with these four is worthy of offerings, hospitality, religious donation, veneration, and is the supreme field of merit for the world.

Both formulas are about being worth what is spent on you. A king’s horse consumes resources and is justified by service; a mendicant consumes robes, food, lodging, and medicine and is justified by being a field in which a gift grows.

That is a blunter account of the monastic economy than the collection usually gives, and it is worth registering. AN 4.51 said the donor’s merit is limitless when the recipient enters a limitless immersion; this says the recipient has to be worth keeping.

The chapter’s animals

The Kesivagga runs on trained animals: a horse trainer in AN 4.111, thoroughbreds here and in AN 4.113, a royal elephant in AN 4.114.

Four consecutive discourses about animals that are valuable because they have been trained, and in every case the point of comparison is the same — a mendicant is a trained creature whose value is in what the training produced.

It is not a flattering register and the collection uses it without embarrassment. The counterweight elsewhere is the language of lotuses and gold; here it is stables and battle.

Why no definitions

This discourse gives four words twice and stops. AN 4.113 will elaborate the thoroughbred image at length, and AN 4.114 will define each of a different four factors for the elephant.

So this is the bare statement of a theme the chapter then develops, in the same relation as AN 4.92 to AN 4.93 and 4.94.

A reader should take it as an opening rather than as a teaching in itself. Its useful contribution is the parallel between royal service and the field of merit, which the longer discourses assume without restating.

Key terms