Times (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

There are four kinds of occasion the practice is made of, and each has its time.

The four, and their order

Kālena dhammassavanaṁ: a time for hearing the teaching. Kālena dhammasākacchā: a time for discussing it. Kālena sammasanā and kālena vipassanā: the two names Sujato renders serenity and discernment.

The first two are social and the second two are not. Hearing requires someone speaking; discussion requires someone answering; the last two are done by a person on their own.

The order is a movement inward, and it is the same movement the tradition describes elsewhere as hearing, reflecting, and cultivating. What this list adds to that three-fold shape is the second item: discussion is given its own slot, distinct from listening and from private reflection.

That distinction is not decorative. A person can hear a great deal and never once have to say it back to somebody who will push on it, and the discourse treats those as different activities with different times.

The word behind ‘serenity’

A translation decision here is worth knowing about. The Pāli third item is sammasanā, not samatha.

Samatha is the standard word for serenity, and it is the one usually paired with vipassanā. Sammasanā is a different word, from a verb meaning to touch or handle all over, and so to go over something, explore it, comprehend it. In commentarial usage sammasana-ñāṇa is a stage of insight rather than of calm.

Sujato renders the pair serenity and discernment, which gives the reader the familiar dyad. Other translators render sammasanā as exploration or comprehension, which keeps the word’s own sense and makes the last two items two kinds of investigation rather than a calm-and-insight pair.

This reading guide does not adjudicate between them. It notes that the choice is real, that a reader comparing translations will meet it, and that the shape of the discourse is the same either way: two occasions with others, two alone.

Why a list of times

The framing word is kāla, time or occasion, and it is doing something the list would not do without it. The discourse is not saying there are four practices. It is saying there are four times.

That is a claim about allocation. Each of the four is right on its own occasion and not on the others, which means a person can fail at this not by doing the wrong thing but by doing a right thing at the wrong moment.

The failure modes are easy to name and everyone will recognize at least one. Reading when it is time to sit. Sitting when the confusion is one a conversation would clear up in five minutes. Discussing endlessly and never testing anything alone.

The collection is unusually practical here, and unusually silent about how anyone is supposed to tell which time it is. No criterion is given. What the next discourse adds instead is a reason to keep all four in rotation.

The bare version and the developed one

AN 4.146 gives the list. AN 4.147 gives the same list with a claim attached — rightly developed and reiterated, these four gradually lead to the ending of defilements — and a simile of rain filling a mountain.

The pairing is this collection’s most familiar device, met already at AN 4.123 and AN 4.124, at AN 4.125 and AN 4.126, at AN 4.136 and AN 4.137. Bare statement first, then the same statement with what it is for.

The practical instruction is the one that has come up repeatedly: do not read one of a pair alone. AN 4.146 read by itself is a list with nothing attached. Read with its neighbor it is the first half of a description of how a practice gets somewhere.

Where it sits

Sixth of the chapter’s ten, and the point at which the five filings on light give way to something else entirely.

There is no connection between the four lights and the four times except that both are sets of four and both are in this chapter. That is the honest account, and it is the account this collection asks a reader to accept about most of its chapters.

AN 4.147 completes the pair, and then the chapter turns to speech.

Key terms