A Royal Elephant

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four capacities of a war elephant, each with an exact counterpart in a trained practitioner.

Listening

The elephant pays attention, applies the mind, concentrates wholeheartedly, and actively listens to whatever task the trainer sets, whether or not it has done it before.

The mendicant does the same when the teaching and training is being taught. Four verbs on both sides, identical.

The qualifier about novelty is dropped in the human version and it is worth noticing, because it is the sharpest thing in the elephant’s definition. An animal that attends only to familiar commands is not fully trained; the test is whether it attends to an instruction it has never received.

Applied to a listener, that would mean attending to a teaching one has not heard before with the same quality of attention one gives to a familiar one, which is harder than it sounds and is not what most people do.

Destroying

The elephant destroys elephants with riders, horses with riders, chariots with charioteers, and foot soldiers — the four divisions of an ancient army.

The mendicant destroys sensual, malicious, and cruel thoughts, and any bad unskillful quality that has arisen, with the four verbs of AN 4.11: gives them up, gets rid of them, eliminates them, obliterates them.

The transfer is violent and the collection makes it without hesitation. It is worth being straightforward that the language of the path in this register is martial, and that the same collection which teaches loving-kindness to snakes describes a mendicant as a war elephant breaking a battle line.

The reconciling observation is about the object. What is destroyed is a thought, and no discourse in the collection turns this vocabulary on a person. The martial language is reserved for the internal enemy throughout.

Enduring

The elephant endures spears, swords, arrows, axes, and the noise of drums, kettledrums, horns, and cymbals. Weapons and din.

The mendicant endures cold, heat, hunger, thirst; flies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, and reptiles; rude and unwelcome criticism; and physical pain that is sharp, severe, acute, and life-threatening.

That is one of the canon’s standard lists and it is worth reading slowly. Three of its four clauses are ordinary discomfort — weather, insects, hunger — and only the last is extreme. Criticism sits in the middle of the list between mosquitoes and mortal illness, which is a placement worth thinking about.

Going fast

The elephant goes swiftly wherever the trainer sends it, whether or not it has been there before. The mendicant swiftly goes in the direction they have never gone before in all this long time; that is, the stilling of all activities, the letting go of all attachments, the ending of craving, fading away, cessation, extinguishment.

This is the chapter’s best sentence and it does two things at once.

First, it defines speed as direction, which AN 4.112 left unexplained. Second, the novelty qualifier that was dropped from ‘listening’ returns here and does the whole work: the destination is the one place a being has never been in the entire course of transmigration.

Six terms are given for it — stilling, letting go, ending, fading away, cessation, extinguishment — and every one is a negation. The place nobody has ever been is described exclusively by what stops there, which is the collection’s consistent practice with this subject.

The chapter’s animals, completed

AN 4.111 gave a trainer, AN 4.112 and 4.113 gave horses, and this gives the elephant. After it the Kesivagga leaves animals entirely and turns to four things pleasant or unpleasant to do, diligence, guarding the mind, the four pilgrimage places, and two lists of perils.

Of the four animal discourses this is the most complete and the only one that defines its terms on both sides. A reader with time for one of them should take this one; a reader with time for two should add AN 4.113, which is better as a piece of observation.

What all four share is the assumption that a practitioner is something trained rather than something naturally occurring, and that the value of the training is in what it makes the creature able to do.

Key terms