Times (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Keep the four times in rotation and they will fill something much larger than any of them.

What is added to AN 4.146

Two things. First a claim: sammā bhāviyamānā sammā anuparivattiyamānā anupubbena āsavānaṁ khayaṁ pāpenti — rightly developed, rightly kept turning, they gradually bring about the ending of the defilements.

The second word in that phrase is the interesting one. Anuparivattati is to revolve, to keep going round, and it is not the ordinary verb for practicing something. It suggests a rotation among the four rather than progress through them — you come back round to listening after discernment, and round again.

Second, anupubbena, gradually, by stages, step by step. The result is not promised suddenly or in proportion to any single session. It is promised as an accumulation.

That pair of words is doing more work than the simile is, and it is easy to miss because the simile is memorable and they are not.

The rain, and where it goes

The image is worth reading slowly, because it is built as a chain and every link is named: rain on a mountain top; the water flowing downhill; hollows, crevices, and creeks; then pools; then lakes; then streams; then rivers; then the ocean.

Six stages between the rain and the sea, and at each stage the same thing happens — something fills up and then, being full, fills the next thing.

The mechanism the simile encodes is that nothing is transferred until something is complete. A half-full hollow feeds nothing. This is a picture of thresholds, and it is an unusually exact one for a tradition often content with a general image of growth.

The other thing the simile supplies is scale. Rain on a mountain and the ocean are wildly different quantities, and the discourse insists on every intermediate step rather than jumping from the first to the last. Whoever built this image wanted the distance felt.

What the simile does not say

It does not say how long. Anupubbena covers any duration.

It does not say the rain is effortful or that anything is being forced. Water runs downhill; the simile is of something proceeding by its own nature once it has fallen.

That is a mild and easily missed claim. The four times are the rain. What happens after them — the filling, the overflowing, the arriving — is not described as another thing to be done.

And it does not say the practitioner sees any of it. The hollows and pools do not know they are on the way to the ocean. A reader looking for reassurance that progress is detectable will not find it here, and the simile arguably says the opposite.

The claim about defilements

Āsava, defilement or influx, is the term whose ending is the canon’s standard description of arahantship: āsavānaṁ khayā, with the ending of defilements.

So this discourse, five lines long, attaches the highest result in the system to four ordinary occasions: listening, discussing, and two kinds of solitary work. There is no mention of absorption, of the factors of awakening, of the path, or of anything technical.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to read this discourse as a note about study habits. It is not. It is a claim that the ordinary rhythm of a practicing life, kept in rotation, is sufficient.

Whether that claim is complete on its own is a separate question, and the collection elsewhere fills in a great deal that is missing here. But the claim as stated is not hedged, and a reading guide should not hedge it either.

Teaching it

The pair AN 4.146 and AN 4.147 make an unusually self-contained teaching for a class: four activities, a rotation, and one image.

The most useful question to put after it is about the rotation rather than the items. Which of the four has not come round for a while? Most people can answer that immediately, and the answer is usually either discussion or the last one.

After this the chapter turns to speech, with four kinds of bad verbal conduct in AN 4.148 and their four opposites in AN 4.149, and then closes with the heartwood.

Key terms