Perils (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Fire, flood, rulers, and robbers are perils.

The list and where else it appears

Aggi, udaka, rājā, cora. The same four appear at AN 4.61 as what a noble disciple defends himself against with legitimately earned wealth — there with unloved heirs added as a fifth.

They are the standard catalogue of ways a household loses what it has, and each is specific to the period’s conditions: thatch and timber towns, monsoon rivers, confiscation by rulers, and roads without policing.

That the same four are elsewhere something to insure against tells us how the list was understood. These are not metaphors for anything. They are the things that took people’s houses.

Kings among the hazards

The third item deserves a note. Rājā, king, is listed between flood and bandits as a way of losing one’s property, and the collection does this without comment anywhere it appears.

The reference is to confiscation, arbitrary taxation, and fine — the ordinary exercise of royal power over subjects’ goods. AN 4.70 described what happens to a country under an unprincipled king; this puts kings in a list with fire and robbery.

It is worth noticing that a collection frequently patronized by kings preserved that classification. Nothing softens it and nothing explains it away, and the item sits in the same list in the Fours and in the passage on the fitting use of wealth.

Read against AN 4.119

AN 4.119 gave rebirth, old age, sickness, and death. This gives fire, water, kings, and bandits. Both are called bhaya, and the discourses are adjacent and identical in form.

The differences are complete. The first list is universal, internal, and unavoidable; everyone meets all four. The second is contingent, external, and avoidable; a person may meet none of them, and AN 4.61 says what to do about them.

The collection sets them side by side and says nothing. That silence is the most interesting feature of either discourse, and two readings are available.

The first is that the juxtaposition is deflationary about the second list: these things that people spend their lives guarding against are called by the same name as the four that cannot be guarded against at all, and the comparison is not flattering to the effort.

The second is that it is dignifying about the first: the four that everyone meets are being placed in the same category as concrete disasters, which is a way of saying that aging is not an abstraction. Both readings are available and the text supports neither over the other.

What the pair does not say

It does not say that guarding against fire and theft is foolish. AN 4.61 explicitly names defending oneself against these four as one of the four fitting uses of legitimately earned wealth, and that discourse is not in tension with this one.

It also does not rank the two lists. Neither discourse says which perils are worse, and the second is not presented as a lesser version of the first.

A teacher using the pair should probably let the juxtaposition do its own work. Stating the two lists in succession and stopping is what the collection does, and the effect on a listener is more reliable than any gloss.

Closing the chapter

The Kesivagga ends here. It began with a horse trainer being shown that a word he uses professionally names something worse than what he does with it, ran through three animal similes about training, turned to decision, diligence, and guarding, sent the faithful to four places, and finishes with eight words in two lists.

It is the most varied chapter of the Fours so far and its unity is the loosest. What several of its discourses share is a concern with what moves a person — the goad, the inspiring places, the perils — and a reader could take AN 4.113, AN 4.118, and these two as a small sequence on that subject.

That grouping is not the chapter’s own. It is what a reader can make of a chapter that does not make much of itself.

Key terms