Incredible Things About the Realized One (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

What is incredible about the appearance of a Buddha is that people will listen to a teaching aimed squarely at what they most enjoy.

The four contrasts

The structure never varies. A state is named; the population is said to delight in it three ways over; and then, when a Realized One teaches the opposite, they want to listen, they actively listen, and they try to understand.

The four states are ālaya, clinging or attachment; māna, conceit; anupasama, the absence of peace, rendered here as excitement; and avijjā, ignorance. The four teachings set against them are named by simply negating each word.

The triple verb for delighting is worth hearing in the Pāli, because the piling-up is the point: ālayārāmā ālayaratā ālayasammuditā — taking delight in it, attached to it, thoroughly pleased with it. And the triple verb for listening answers it in the same rhythm: sussūsati sotaṁ odahati aññā cittaṁ upaṭṭhapeti, wants to hear, lends an ear, sets the mind on understanding.

Three verbs against three verbs. The discourse is built as a balance, and what it weighs is a genuine attachment against a genuine willingness.

The line behind the first one

Ālayārāmā pajā is not a phrase invented for this discourse. It comes from the most famous hesitation in the tradition: after the awakening, the Buddha considers teaching and concludes that this population delights in clinging, and that a teaching of dependent origination and extinguishment will be hard for them to see. In that context the phrase is a reason not to teach.

AN 4.128 takes the identical observation and calls it a marvel. The population is exactly as described — nothing has been revised about how attached people are — and yet, when the teaching arrives, they listen.

That reversal is the whole discourse, and it is worth making explicit to a class, because without the background the first paragraph reads as a mild observation. With it, the discourse is answering the founding worry of the tradition in four lines: the worry was correct, and people listened anyway.

The reading does not require the two texts to have been composed together. It only requires the phrase to have been current, which it demonstrably was.

‘Swaddled in their shells’

The fourth contrast breaks the pattern of the other three. Where they said the population delights in something, the fourth says: this population is lost in ignorance, swaddled in their shells — avijjāgatā pajā aṇḍabhūtā pariyonaddhā, gone into ignorance, become an egg, enveloped.

Nobody delights in ignorance the way they delight in conceit, and the discourse changes its verb accordingly. What it substitutes is an image of enclosure: the egg, wrapped around, with the being inside unable to see out and unaware there is an out.

That is a more sympathetic account than the first three. Clinging, conceit, and excitement are things people choose and enjoy; ignorance is a condition they are in. And it is the fourth and climactic item, which places the discourse’s final emphasis on the one thing in the list that is nobody’s fault.

What the marvel is not

Three things this discourse conspicuously does not say.

It does not say people practice, or change, or attain anything. The marvel stops at listening — wanting to hear, lending an ear, applying the mind. Whatever follows is outside the frame.

It does not say the Buddha persuades, softens, or adapts the teaching to what the audience likes. The teaching named in each case is the exact negation of what they enjoy. The remarkable thing happens with the message at full strength.

And it does not credit the audience with any special quality. They are not called faithful or well-disposed or ripe. They are called people who love clinging. The marvel is located in the encounter rather than in either party.

Put together, this is a discourse about attention, and about a very specific kind of attention: the willingness to sit still for something that is not going to flatter you.

Teaching it

For a teacher this is one of the most usable discourses in the Fours, because its subject is the room the teaching is happening in. It says, in effect: notice that they came, and notice what they came to hear.

It also sets a standard that is not comfortable. If the marvel is that people listen to the negation of what they love, then a teaching adjusted until it no longer negates anything has given up the thing the discourse is amazed by.

The chapter closes with two more marvels of the same name and a much smaller scale: Ānanda in AN 4.129 and a wheel-turning monarch in AN 4.130, both marvelous for the effect they have on an assembly that has come to see them. The sequence runs from a light between the worlds, to a population listening, to one man in a room, and it is hard not to read the descent as intentional.

Key terms