Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The correction that worked for the absorptions works identically for the immeasurables, in the same words.
The grid completed
Four discourses, two variables. AN 4.123 and AN 4.125 relish; AN 4.124 and AN 4.126 contemplate. AN 4.123 and AN 4.124 use the absorptions; AN 4.125 and AN 4.126 use the immeasurables. Every cell is filled.
What the completed grid establishes is that the operative variable is the second one. Moving across the practices changes nothing about the outcome. Moving between relishing and contemplating changes the outcome in both columns, in exactly the same way.
The compiler could have said this in one sentence and did not. What was chosen instead was to say the same thing four times with the alternatives filled in, so that the conclusion is not asserted but left standing after everything else has been held constant. That is an argument by arrangement, and it is one of the things the Aṅguttara’s numbered format is good at.
The same eleven, on a different object
The contemplation is word for word what AN 4.124 gave: the phenomena there, sorted into the five aggregates, seen as impermanent, as suffering, as diseased, as a boil, as a dart, as gloom, as an affliction, as alien, as breaking apart, as empty, as not-self.
The object, though, has changed, and this is where the discourse asks something harder than its counterpart did. In AN 4.124 the thing to be seen as a boil was a state of meditative refinement. Here it is boundless love.
That is worth putting to a class directly, because the instinctive objection is a good one. If love is to be seen as a dart, is the discourse recommending coldness? It is not, and the text is careful about where the contemplation is aimed: not at love as a way of treating beings, but at the phenomena there, the form and feeling and perception occurring in the meditator while the state lasts. What is impermanent is the meditator’s experience, not the value of goodwill.
The practical form of that distinction is familiar enough. A person can act with complete kindness and be entirely unattached to how kind they felt while doing it. The discourse is describing the second half of that sentence.
What abridgment costs
AN 4.126 is the most heavily compressed of the four. Love is written out; compassion gets two words; rejoicing gets one; equanimity is restored to full length because it is the last, and the closing formula has to be attached to something.
By this point in the chapter the reciter has been through the same material four times, and the written text records only what changes. A modern reader meeting the text cold sees ellipses and assumes damage; what is actually recorded is an efficient index to something already known by heart.
It is a good moment to say plainly what these four discourses show about how the collection stores material. Nothing here was composed independently. AN 4.124 is AN 4.123 with a clause swapped, AN 4.125 is AN 4.123 with a list swapped, and AN 4.126 is both swaps at once. Read as literature this looks thin. Read as a memory system it is extremely economical, and the doctrinal point emerges from the arrangement rather than from any sentence in it.
Where the pure abodes leave the practitioner
As in AN 4.124, the destination is the pure abodes and the closing note is asādhāraṇā puthujjanehi, not shared with ordinary people. The technical fact behind it is that these realms belong to non-returners, and a non-returner does not come back to this world.
So the difference between the two columns of the grid is not a difference of degree. One column produces an enormously long divine life followed, for the ordinary person, by a fall; the other produces a rebirth from which there is no fall at all. The five-hundred-eon figure in AN 4.125 was doing the work of making that contrast felt — a very large number is still a number.
For a reader who does not hold the cosmology the same contrast is available without it. One way of practicing produces states that end, however long they last. The other produces a change in how states are held, which does not.
Teaching the set
These four are best taught together in one sitting, with the grid drawn on a board, and AN 4.126 read last and slowly. Alone it is four sentences and looks like nothing.
The question to leave a class with is the one the chapter is built to raise: name a genuinely good thing in your practice that you enjoy having. That is the thing this set of discourses is about, and the answer it gives is not to stop having it.
After this the chapter changes subject entirely. AN 4.127 begins a run of four discourses on what is acchariya abbhuta, incredible and amazing — about a Buddha, about Ānanda, and about a wheel-turning monarch.
Key terms
The text
Love, contemplated
§1“Mendicants, these four individuals are found in the world. What four? Firstly, an individual meditates spreading a heart full of love to one direction, and to the second, and to the third, and to the fourth. In the same way above, below, across, everywhere, all around, they spread a heart full of love to the whole world—abundant, expansive, limitless, free of enmity and ill will. They contemplate the phenomena there—included in form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness—as impermanent, as suffering, as diseased, as a boil, as a dart, as gloom, as an affliction, as alien, as breaking apart, as empty, as not-self. When their body breaks up, after death, they’re reborn in the company of the gods of the pure abodes. This rebirth is distinct from that of ordinary people.
Compassion, rejoicing, equanimity
§2Furthermore, an individual meditates spreading a heart full of compassion … rejoicing … equanimity to one direction, and to the second, and to the third, and to the fourth. In the same way above, below, across, everywhere, all around, they spread a heart full of equanimity to the whole world—abundant, expansive, limitless, free of enmity and ill will. They contemplate the phenomena there—included in form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness—as impermanent, as suffering, as diseased, as a boil, as a dart, as gloom, as an affliction, as alien, as breaking apart, as empty, as not-self. When their body breaks up, after death, they’re reborn in the company of the gods of the pure abodes. This rebirth is distinct from that of ordinary people. These are the four individuals found in the world.”
Self-check quiz
Ten questions. Click an answer to see immediate feedback. No score is recorded — this is for your own checking.