Dhamma Speakers

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four kinds of Dhamma speaker are described, and all four end up being called Dhamma speakers.

The grid

The two variables are quantity and coherence. Appa, little, against bahu, much; and sahita, connected or coherent, against asahita, its negation. Sujato renders the second pair ‘on topic’ and ‘off topic’.

That gives four speakers, and the order is the natural one: little and off, little and on, much and off, much and on.

Note that this is the same coherence axis AN 4.132 used seven discourses earlier, crossed there with fluency and here with quantity. The chapter is running the same variable through two different grids without remarking on it.

The third clause

Each case has a part the summaries usually drop. After describing the speaker, the discourse describes the assembly: for the two off-topic speakers, their assembly can’t tell what’s on topic and what’s off topic; for the two on-topic speakers, it can.

The correlation is exact and it is unexplained. One would expect a speaker’s quality and an audience’s discernment to vary independently — that is what this whole chapter usually insists on — and here they are locked together.

There are two readings and the discourse supports neither over the other. Either the assembly is described as it is because a speaker who is off topic in front of a discerning assembly would not last, or the pairing is a way of saying that audiences and speakers select each other. The second is the sharper reading; the first is the safer one.

What can be said for certain is that the discourse chose to make the audience part of the classification. Nothing else in the Puggalavagga does that. Every other grid sorts an individual on their own qualities; this one sorts a speaker together with the room they are standing in.

The refrain

Evarūpo dhammakathiko evarūpāya parisāya dhammakathikotveva saṅkhaṁ gacchati. Such a Dhamma speaker, before such an assembly, comes to be reckoned simply as a Dhamma speaker.

Saṅkhaṁ gacchati is the idiom for being counted as something, entered under a heading, given a designation. And the sentence is identical in all four cases — including the first, where the speaker says little and none of it to the point.

The line is deadpan and its point is unmistakable once it is heard. The title travels with the role, not with the quality. A man who talks nonsense briefly to an audience that cannot tell is, in the world’s accounting, a Dhamma speaker; so is the man in the fourth case.

It is a warning about designations rather than about speakers. The word dhammakathika tells you what someone does and nothing about how well, and the discourse spends four repetitions making sure the reader cannot mistake the one for the other.

That is worth stating plainly because the collection could easily have said something harsher and did not. Nobody in this discourse is condemned, disqualified, or told to stop. The observation is left as an observation.

What is not being measured

Three absences are worth naming.

Nothing is said about whether the assembly benefits. The discourse tracks what they can distinguish, not what they gain, and those are different questions.

Nothing is said about the speaker’s attainment, ethics, or sincerity. A person can be entirely coherent about the Dhamma without any claim being made here about what they have realized.

And nothing is said about which case is best, though for once the arrangement makes it obvious. The fourth speaker says much, stays on topic, and faces an assembly that can tell the difference. It is the only case in which all three clauses are favorable, and the discourse still does not comment.

Reading it with AN 4.132 and AN 4.140

Three discourses on speaking in one chapter, and each one adds a variable the others leave out. AN 4.132: is the speech connected to its matter, and does it come freely. AN 4.139: how much of it is there, and can the room tell. AN 4.140: does the speaker run out of matter, or of ways to put it.

Taken together they cover content, delivery, quantity, audience, and endurance, and they never once mention what a listener should feel.

That is a distinctive emphasis and it is worth pointing out to anyone who teaches. The Fours assess public speech by whether it is about something and whether it can be sustained, and by nothing else at all.

Key terms