Brightness

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Of everything that gives light, wisdom gives the most.

Three lights and a fourth

The three physical items are not chosen at random and they are not in order of brightness. Moon, sun, fire — if the ordering were by magnitude the sun would come first.

What the order does follow is nearness. The moon is the most distant and the faintest; the sun is nearer to a person’s day and stronger; fire is the light in the room, the only one of the three a human being makes and controls. The list walks inward.

All three share something the fourth does not. The moon sets, the sun sets, and fire goes out. A light that has to be waited for, or fed, is a light that fails, and the discourse names three of them before naming a fourth that is not on the same footing.

The claim is not that wisdom is like the sun only more so. It is that the three familiar lights make a category, and that the interesting member of the category is the one that is not physical at all.

Etadaggaṁ

The final line uses a fixed formula: etadaggaṁ… yadidaṁ paññābhā, this is the foremost of them, namely the brightness of wisdom.

Etadaggaṁ is the same construction that names the foremost disciple in each category in the Ones — foremost of those with great wisdom, foremost of those who have heard much. It is the collection’s standard way of ranking a set it has just listed.

Here it does the whole argumentative work of the discourse, and it does it without argument. Nothing explains why wisdom should be brightest, and nothing is needed once the three failing lights have been put beside it.

What the next four discourses are

AN 4.142 to AN 4.145 say exactly this, with pabhā, āloka, obhāsa, and pajjota in place of ābhā. The four items are the same, the superlative is the same, the length is the same.

This is a peyyāla, a repetition-series, and it is worth naming for what it is rather than treating as five teachings. The teaching is one. What varies is the head-word it is filed under.

That is a retrieval mechanism. In a collection carried by recitation, a teaching is found by the word it is filed under, and a teaching filed under only one of five near-synonyms is a teaching that will be missed by anyone searching with the other four. Repeating it five times is not padding; it is indexing.

The chapter takes its name from the first of the five, which is why ten discourses about light, times, speech, and essentials are collectively called the chapter of brightness.

Reading the series honestly

There is a temptation to find five different meanings in the five words, and it should be resisted at least at first. The Pāli terms are near-synonyms; the Buddha is not reported as distinguishing them; and the discourses give no hint that anything has changed between one and the next.

What can be done, and what the following four pages do, is use each occurrence as an occasion — because each of the five words has a life elsewhere in the canon that the others do not. Āloka is the last term of the awakening formula. Obhāsa is the word for the light that appears at a Buddha’s conception and for the light a meditator sees. Pajjota is a lamp, an object rather than a quality.

That is a legitimate way to teach a peyyāla and it should be labelled as what it is: the series is one teaching, and the differences being drawn out are differences in the words’ other careers, not in this discourse’s meaning.

Using it

Short as it is, the discourse gives a teacher a complete image and one line. Three lights that fail, and a fourth that is being compared to them.

The most useful question to put beside it is the one the discourse does not ask: what kind of dark is being lit? The moon and the sun and the fire all address the same darkness, which is the absence of light on things. Wisdom is placed in that list without any statement that its darkness is a different darkness.

The Fours have already said what wisdom is for, in their very first discourse. AN 4.1 names noble ethics, immersion, wisdom, and freedom as the four that were not understood for a very long time, by the speaker along with everyone else. This chapter closes, at AN 4.150, by calling those same four the heartwood.

Key terms