The Danger of Waves

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four things reliably end a monastic life, and the discourse describes each of them as a scene ending in the same words: they resign the training and return to a lesser life.

How the simile is built

The frame takes four seconds. Someone going into the water should anticipate four dangers — pāṭikaṅkhitabbāni, things to be expected rather than things that might happen. Then the same four names are transferred whole to the person who has gone forth.

What follows is not an allegory to be decoded. Each danger gets a narrative — a specific man, a specific provocation, a specific thought in the first person — and then a single flat line telling you what the water-word stands for. The scene carries the weight; the gloss is only an index entry.

Notice also who the subject is throughout: a kulaputta, a son of a good family, who has gone forth out of faith. The discourse is not describing people who never meant it. It is describing the failure of people who did.

Waves: being taught by children

The first scene is entirely social. The man has gone forth with the full formula of motivation — swamped by rebirth, old age, and death, hoping to make an end of suffering — and then his companions begin instructing him: how to go out and come back, how to look ahead and to the side, how to draw in and stretch out his limbs, how to carry his robes and bowl.

His thought is quoted exactly: formerly, as laypeople, we advised and instructed others. And now these mendicants — who you’d think were our children or grandchildren — imagine they can advise and instruct us!

The observation is precise, and it is about seniority rather than about the rules. Monastic seniority runs from ordination, not from age, so a man who arrives at fifty is junior to everyone who arrived at twenty. What is being described is that inversion landing on someone who was used to being the one who spoke.

The gloss is kodhūpāyāsa, anger and distress. It is worth noting that the scene reads more like injured pride than like anger, and the text labels the outcome rather than the root.

Gharials and whirlpools: food, and money

The second scene is about eating. The instruction concerns what may be consumed and when, and the complaint again arrives in the man’s own voice: as laypeople we ate what we wanted, when we wanted, and these faithful householders give us delicious fresh and cooked foods at the wrong time of day. But these guys imagine they can gag our mouths! The gloss is odarikatta, belly-ness, gluttony.

The specific irritation is worth spelling out for a class: the food is there, it is given willingly, and the only thing preventing him from eating it is a rule about the hour. That is a harder discipline than simple scarcity, and the discourse knows it.

The third scene changes register. The mendicant goes for alms without guarding body, speech, and mind, without establishing mindfulness, and without restraining the sense faculties — the failure is stated before anything is seen. Then he sees a householder enjoying himself, and reasons: my family is wealthy, I could both enjoy my wealth and make merit, so why not go back?

That reasoning is the subtlest thing in the discourse, because it is not obviously wrong. AN 4.61 says almost exactly this — that wealth properly used makes the giver happy and produces merit. The discourse does not answer the argument. It shows where the argument came from, which was an unguarded alms round, and lets the reader draw the conclusion. The gloss is kāmaguṇa, the five kinds of sensual stimulation.

Sharks: what the fourth gloss says

The fourth scene is four lines long, the shortest of the four. The mendicant goes on alms round in the same unguarded way, sees a woman lightly dressed, lust infects his mind, and he disrobes. Then: ‘Danger of sharks’ is a term for ladies.

The Pāli is mātugāma, womankind, the general term for women as a class. The line should be quoted as it stands rather than softened, because softening it hides what is actually odd about it.

Here is the oddity. The first three glosses name states in the person: anger and distress, gluttony, sensual stimulation. All three sit inside the man being described. The fourth breaks the pattern and names other people — and it does so immediately after a scene in which the discourse has already told us the mechanism is internal, since the failure of sense restraint is stated before the woman appears at all. The text supplies its own better answer and then labels the danger with the wrong noun.

It should also be said that the discourse is addressed to men who have gone forth, and no counterpart naming men as a danger to nuns is given here. That asymmetry is not hidden in the text and it should not be hidden in the teaching of it.

This is not the collection’s only voice on the subject, and the Fours contain flatly different material — AN 4.55 has a husband and wife matched as equals in faith, ethics, generosity, and wisdom, and addressed as such by the Buddha in person. Both passages are in the same book. Neither cancels the other, and a reader is not obliged to harmonize them.

What the four are for

Every one of the four ends identically: they resign the training and return to a lesser life. The discourse is about attrition — not about failure in meditation, but about the ordinary reasons people leave.

Read as a piece of observation it is shrewd. Status, appetite, money, and sex, in that order, and each caught at the moment of self-justification rather than at the moment of leaving. Every scene turns on a sentence the man says to himself, and in three of the four that sentence begins formerly, as laypeople…

The thing being lost, in each case, is not the practice but the willingness to be a beginner. That is the reading worth carrying out of this discourse, and it does not depend on accepting the fourth gloss.

Key terms