Fetters

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four individuals are distinguished by which of three groups of fetters they have abandoned.

The three groups

Orambhāgiyāni saṁyojanāni, the lower fetters, is the familiar term: the five that bind to the sensual realm, and abandoning them is what makes a non-returner.

The other two are not familiar, and it is worth saying so rather than glossing over it. Upapattipaṭilābhiyāni, fetters for the obtaining of rebirth, and bhavapaṭilābhiyāni, fetters for the obtaining of continued existence, appear only in a small number of places in the canon and are not defined here or anywhere nearby.

What can be read off the discourse itself is only their ordering. They are shed after the lower fetters, and the second is shed last, at arahantship. So they occupy the ground the standard scheme gives to the five higher fetters, cut differently: not by which defilements remain, but by what those defilements still get you — a rebirth, and then any continued existence at all.

This reading guide does not assert a resolution of the terms. The honest position is that the discourse uses a vocabulary the collection does not explain, and that the reader can see the structure without being able to fill in the definitions.

The four names, and the one that is missing

The four are given in the second half. A once-returner has given up none of the three. One heading upstream, going to the Akaniṭṭha realm has given up the lower fetters only. One extinguished between one life and the next has given up the first two groups. A perfected one has given up all three.

The stream-enterer is absent. AN 4.88, in this same collection and under the same English title, sorts the four ascetics from stream-enterer through arahant and includes him. Here the list starts one stage later, and no reason is offered.

The once-returner is the other difficulty. He is said to have given up none of the three groups, and yet by the standard account a once-returner has already ended the first three of the five lower fetters. The discourse treats the group as a block: not fully given up counts as not given up.

That is a defensible way to read it, and it is worth stating as a reading rather than as the text’s own explanation. What the discourse actually supplies is a table with four rows and no commentary.

Two non-returners, and why these two

The middle two entries are not the general category of non-returner but two specific kinds of one, and the pair is chosen with care.

Antarāparinibbāyī, extinguished between one life and the next, is the quickest of the five kinds the tradition lists. Uddhaṁsoto akaniṭṭhagāmī, one heading upstream to the Akaniṭṭha realm, is the slowest — he rises through the pure abodes one after another until he reaches the highest.

By naming only the fastest and the slowest, the discourse turns a single stage of the path into two rows of the table, and the gap between them is what the second group of fetters is doing. The upstream-goer still obtains rebirths; the one extinguished in between does not.

Notice how little of this the discourse says out loud. It gives the names and expects them to be known, which tells you something about who the material was for.

What the discourse is doing

This is the opening of the Puggalavagga, the chapter of persons, and it sets the chapter’s method immediately: take a variable, cut it into four states, and name the kind of person who occupies each.

Ten discourses follow doing exactly that with eloquence, with learning, with livelihood, with blame, with the threefold training twice over, with seclusion, and with public speaking. Almost none of them contains anything but the classification itself.

That is the Aṅguttara at its barest, and it is worth naming for a class rather than apologizing for. A collection organized by number is a retrieval system, and a chapter like this is what the system looks like when nothing has been added to it — the categories preserved, the occasions and the arguments left off.

Teaching it

The usable content of this page is not the table. It is the fact that the table exists in a form that does not match the standard one, in a collection that elsewhere gives the standard one, without either being marked as the correction of the other.

That is a good corrective against reading the canon as a single finished system. The material is older than any of its systematizations, and AN 4.131 is a piece of it that the later tidying never quite absorbed.

For a reader who wants the standard scheme alongside this one, AN 4.88 gives the four noble persons under the four ascetic images, defined by fetters in the usual way, and the two pages can be read against each other in ten minutes.

Key terms