Radiance

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same teaching as AN 4.141, filed under a second word.

What the five words do

Ābhā: from ā-bhā, to shine toward. Light coming from something in the direction of an observer — a glow, a sheen, brightness as a property of a surface or a source.

Pabhā: pa-bhā, to shine forth. The prefix is one of issuing outward and beginning, so pabhā leans toward radiance, light going out from a thing.

Āloka: from the root for seeing, not for shining. It is light in the sense of what makes seeing possible — daylight, illumination, the opposite of a dark room.

Obhāsa: ava-bhās, to shine down or upon. Illumination falling on something; the word used for a light that appears somewhere.

Pajjota: from a root meaning to blaze. Unlike the other four this is a noun for a thing — a lamp, a torch, whatever is burning.

How much of that survives translation

Very little, and the honest thing is to say so. English has brightness, radiance, light, shining, and lamp, and Sujato distributes them one to a discourse in that order, which preserves the fact that five different words were used without claiming to reproduce the shades between them.

Other translators distribute them differently, and any reader comparing versions will find the same five discourses wearing different English words. Nothing turns on which assignment is used, because nothing in the discourses depends on the distinction.

This is worth stating clearly for students who assume that a different word must mean a different thing. Sometimes it does. Here, five words are being used to catch one teaching in five nets.

Why a tradition builds synonym-series

A recited collection has no index at the back. The way a teaching is found is by remembering the number it belongs to and the word it starts from, and a teaching filed under a single word is only findable by someone who reaches for that word.

So the compilers file it five times. Anyone who thinks of the teaching as being about āloka finds it under āloka; anyone who thinks of it as being about pajjota finds it there.

The cost is that a written text looks padded. The benefit is that nothing is lost, and in a system where loss is permanent that trade is obviously worth making.

The Aṅguttara does this on a much larger scale further on. The Fours themselves end in two abridged blocks, AN 4.277–303 and AN 4.304–783, in which whole sets of practices are crossed with whole sets of defilements to produce hundreds of nominal discourses. This chapter is the same mechanism at a size a reader can see all at once.

What is not being said

The series does not claim that wisdom is a kind of illumination in any literal sense. No mechanism is offered, no experience is described, and no meditative phenomenon is mentioned.

That restraint matters because the vocabulary invites the opposite. Light is the most over-used metaphor available to a religion, and this chapter has five discourses in a row that could be read as endorsing every claim ever made about inner illumination.

What they actually say is that among things that give light, wisdom gives the most. It is a comparison, not a report.

The one discourse in the series where this needs watching is the next but one, AN 4.144, because obhāsa is the word the canon uses for light that meditators actually see.

Where it sits

Second of the five, and second of the chapter’s ten. Three more filings follow, and then the chapter changes subject entirely: two discourses on the four times, two on speech, and one on the heartwood.

Half of the chapter of brightness is about brightness. The other half is about when to practice, how to speak, and what the whole thing is for.

That is the ordinary condition of an Aṅguttara chapter, and by this point in the Fours a reader should expect it rather than look for a unifying theme that is not there.

Key terms