Perils (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Rebirth, aging, sickness, and death are perils.

The word bhaya

Bhaya is danger, fear, peril — the first of the three words AN 3.1 used to open the Threes, where the claim was that all of them come from the foolish.

The first noble truth names the same four items and calls them dukkha: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering. That is a statement about their character.

Calling them perils is a statement about their relation to a person. A peril is something one is exposed to, and the word carries the possibility of avoiding it — which is presumably why the collection has this list as well as the other.

So the difference between the two framings is not doctrinal. It is a difference in what the listener is being asked to do: recognize a character, or notice an exposure.

Why rebirth is first

Jāti, birth or rebirth, heads the list, and it is the one item a modern reader is most likely to hear as odd. Aging, sickness, and death are perils on any view; birth is normally what one is glad of.

In this framework birth is the peril because it is the condition of the other three. Nothing that is not born ages, sickens, or dies, and the collection is consistent that the way out is not through better births but through no more of them — AN 4.1 said the leash to existence is ended and there will be no more future lives.

That ordering also makes the list a causal sequence rather than four separate hazards. Birth produces the conditions under which the other three become inevitable, which is why it is named first and why it is named at all.

A four-line discourse in the middle of a chapter

This and AN 4.120 are the chapter’s last two discourses and both are four lines. The Kesivagga has run through a conversation with a horse trainer, three animal similes, a decision grid, two short practical discourses, and the pilgrimage instruction, and it closes with two bare lists.

As with AN 4.71 and AN 4.74, the function is retrieval. A pair of headings with four items each, at the end of a chapter, is how a reciter indexes.

It is worth being straightforward that there is little here to teach beyond the list itself and the choice of the word. A guide that manufactured more would be padding.

The pair with AN 4.120

The next discourse gives four perils of a completely different kind: fire, water, kings, and bandits. The two together are worth reading as a pair.

This list is what nobody escapes. The next is what may or may not happen to a particular person in a particular life, and each item on it can be guarded against — AN 4.61 listed defending oneself against fire, flood, rulers, and bandits as the second fitting use of wealth.

So the two discourses set the avoidable beside the unavoidable, under the same heading, without comment. That juxtaposition is the most interesting thing about either of them, and it is available only to a reader who takes them together.

Using it

The list is a standard object of reflection and the tradition has used it that way continuously. The five recollections — I am liable to age, to sickness, to death, to separation from what is dear, and I am the owner of my deeds — are the fuller form, and AN 5.57 gives them.

What this discourse contributes to that practice is the word. Reflecting on aging as dukkha asks a person to see its character; reflecting on it as bhaya asks them to notice that they are standing in front of it.

AN 4.113 said that people are moved when mortality gets close enough. This discourse is one of the ways the collection tries to shorten that distance without waiting for the event.

Key terms