Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Effort has four jobs: guard the senses, drop what has arisen, build what is missing, and keep hold of what has been gained.
Not the four right efforts
This set is easy to confuse with the four right efforts (sammappadhāna) of AN 4.13 and the eightfold path, which are: prevent unarisen bad states, abandon arisen ones, arouse unarisen good states, maintain arisen ones.
The two sets overlap but are not the same, and the difference is instructive. The right efforts are organized by a two-by-two grid — arisen or not, good or bad. This set is organized by what the practitioner is actually doing: watching a door, dropping a thought, cultivating a faculty, holding a perception. It is a list of activities rather than a logical partition, which is why the fourth member does not correspond neatly to anything in the other list.
Reading them side by side is the fastest way to see how the same material gets organized twice for different purposes. The Aṅguttara does this constantly and rarely comments on it.
The effort to restrain
Saṁvarapadhāna, and the definition is the standard sense-restraint formula. On seeing a sight one does not get caught up in the features and details (nimitta and anubyañjana) — the overall impression and the particulars that follow it.
The reason given is precise: if the faculty were unrestrained, covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. Note the pair. Restraint is not aimed at pleasure alone but at both directions of reaction, wanting and aversion. It is a guard against being moved, not against enjoying.
All six senses are named, and the sixth is the mind. Ideas get the same treatment as sights, which is characteristic: in this analysis thinking is a sense modality, and there is no inner refuge from which the other five could be watched safely.
Giving up and developing
The effort to give up is AN 4.11 compressed into a paragraph: the three bad thoughts, not tolerated, and then the same for any arisen unskillful quality. The four verbs recur unchanged.
The effort to develop is the seven awakening factors — mindfulness, investigation of principles, energy, rapture, tranquility, immersion, equanimity — each with the standard tail: relying on seclusion, fading away, and cessation, ripening as letting go. That tail is doing work. It specifies what the factors are being developed toward, and without it the list could be read as a program of self-improvement.
The effort to preserve
Anurakkhaṇāpadhāna, from rakkhati, to guard. What is guarded is a fine basis of immersion (bhaddaka samādhinimitta) — a meditation subject that has proved fruitful — and the five given are all cemetery contemplations: skeleton, worm-infested corpse, livid corpse, split-open corpse, bloated corpse.
Two things are worth saying. First, on what ‘preserve’ means: once a practitioner has found a subject that produces immersion, the effort involved is not in finding another but in not losing this one. Meditators reliably drift toward novelty, and the discourse names holding still as a distinct kind of work.
Second, on the corpses. These practices are for a specific purpose — loosening attachment to the body and to sensuality — and the tradition itself records that they can be badly misapplied. They are not offered here as a beginner’s subject and this page does not recommend taking them up unsupervised. What the discourse establishes is the structural point: whatever your fruitful subject is, keeping it is one of the four efforts.
The Kinsman of the Sun
The closing verse attributes the four to ādiccabandhu, the Kinsman of the Sun — a title for the Buddha referring to the Ādicca or solar clan from which the Sakyans traced descent.
It is a small thing, but epithets of this kind are how verse sections date and place themselves. The prose calls him nothing at all; the verse reaches for a clan name. The two registers of this collection are visible even in a four-line summary.
Key terms
The text
The effort to restrain
§1“Mendicants, there are these four efforts. What four? The efforts to restrain, to give up, to develop, and to preserve. And what, mendicants, is the effort to restrain? When a mendicant sees a sight with their eyes, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of sight were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of sight, and achieving its restraint. When they hear a sound with their ears … When they smell an odor with their nose … When they taste a flavor with their tongue … When they feel a touch with their body … When they know an idea with their mind, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of mind were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of mind, and achieving its restraint. This is called the effort to restrain.
The effort to give up
§2And what, mendicants, is the effort to give up? It’s when a mendicant doesn’t tolerate a sensual, malicious, or cruel thought that’s arisen, but gives it up, gets rid of it, eliminates it, and obliterates it. They don’t tolerate any bad, unskillful qualities that have arisen, but give them up, get rid of them, eliminate them, and obliterate them. This is called the effort to give up.
The effort to develop
§3And what, mendicants, is the effort to develop? It’s when a mendicant develops the awakening factors of mindfulness, investigation of principles, energy, rapture, tranquility, immersion, and equanimity, which rely on seclusion, fading away, and cessation, and ripen as letting go. This is called the effort to develop.
The effort to preserve
§4And what, mendicants, is the effort to preserve? It’s when a mendicant preserves a meditation subject that’s a fine basis of immersion: the perception of a skeleton, a worm-infested corpse, a livid corpse, a split open corpse, or a bloated corpse. This is called the effort to preserve. These are the four efforts.
The verse
§5Restraint and giving up, development and preservation: these are the four efforts taught by the Kinsman of the Sun. Any mendicant who keenly applies these may attain the ending of suffering.”
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