Incredible Things About the Wheel-Turning Monarch

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

What is said of a wheel-turning monarch before the four estates is said of Ānanda before the four assemblies, in the same words.

The two sets of four

The monarch’s four are khattiya, brāhmaṇa, gahapati, samaṇa — aristocrats, brahmins, householders, and ascetics. These are the estates of the wider society: the ruling class, the priestly class, the settled householders who own and trade, and the renunciants outside the whole arrangement.

Ānanda’s four are the assemblies of the community: monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen. Not a map of society but a map of the tradition, and one that cuts across society’s divisions entirely.

Set the two lists beside each other and the comparison is doing something more than flattery. The monarch is a figure whose reach is complete within his world, and the discourse assigns Ānanda a reach that is complete within a different world — one whose four divisions are ordained and lay, male and female, rather than born.

That is worth spelling out, because the comparison is easy to hear as merely complimentary. What it actually says is that the community has its own map, and that the same completeness can be claimed within it.

A discourse that contains another

The second half of AN 4.130 is AN 4.129, entire and unaltered. Not a summary, not a reference — the text itself, all four assemblies, the same three clauses.

This is worth stopping on rather than passing over, because it shows plainly how the collection was assembled. A unit of material about Ānanda existed. It could stand alone as a discourse, and it does, at AN 4.129. It could also be embedded as the second term of a simile, and it is, at AN 4.130. The compilers recorded both uses and numbered them separately.

The result is that the Fours contain the same paragraph twice in succession, and the second time it arrives with a comparison attached. A modern editor would cross-reference and cut. A reciting tradition does not, because the two are different recitation units with different functions.

It is also the reason a reader should not treat adjacency in the Aṅguttara as evidence of a single occasion. AN 4.129 and AN 4.130 are not a conversation continued; they are two filings of overlapping material.

Which way the comparison runs

The order matters. The monarch comes first and Ānanda second, and the connective is evamevaṁ kho, ‘in the same way’. In the standard grammar of a simile, the first term is the familiar one and the second is what is being explained.

So the discourse is not praising the monarch. He is the illustration. Everyone in the audience knows what a wheel-turning monarch is and what it would be like to be in a room with one, and that knowledge is being spent to say something about a monk.

The wheel-turning monarch is in any case a figure rather than a person — the righteous universal king of the tradition’s political imagination, who conquers without violence and rules by principle. The Fours have met him before, in AN 4.130’s neighborhood at AN 4.70, where an unprincipled king makes the whole country unprincipled down to the weather.

The comparison therefore borrows a figure the collection elsewhere treats critically, and uses only the one feature it needs: that when he speaks, every part of the population wants to hear him.

What is praised, and what is not

Neither half of this discourse mentions the content of anything said. The monarch uplifts by being seen and by speaking; so does Ānanda. What is being described is presence and effect, twice.

Nor is anything said about power in the monarch’s case, or about attainment in Ānanda’s. A discourse about a universal emperor that never mentions his rule, placed beside one about a leading disciple that never mentions his practice, and joined by in the same way.

The single quality isolated is the capacity to hold every kind of listener. That is why this can close a chapter whose earlier discourses were about fear, disrobing, rebirth, and the difference between a noble disciple and an ordinary person. It is the only one of the chapter’s subjects that concerns the community as a body rather than the individual in it.

The chapter as a whole

Bhayavagga is named for its first discourse and holds four unrelated blocks: the four fears (AN 4.121), the four dangers that end a monastic life (AN 4.122), the four-cell grid on absorption, the immeasurables, relishing, and contemplation (AN 4.123–126), and the four marvels (AN 4.127–130).

Nothing joins them but the number four, and that is the honest description of how this part of the collection is organized. The Aṅguttara is an index, and a chapter of it is a drawer rather than an argument.

What follows is the Puggalavagga, the chapter of persons, which spends ten discourses sorting people into fours — by fetter, by conduct, by what they are worth associating with. The Fours are about to become a catalogue of human types.

Key terms