Essentials

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Of everything in the spiritual life, four things are the heartwood.

Sāra

The word means the core, the pith, the substance — and specifically the heartwood of a tree, the dense inner wood that is what a timber-seeker is after.

Behind it stands one of the canon’s best-developed images. A man who needs heartwood goes into the forest, finds a great tree, and comes back with the twigs and leaves, or the outer bark, or the inner bark, or the softwood, believing he has what he went for. The point in the long versions is that reputation, ethical attainment, concentration, and even knowledge and vision can each be mistaken for the goal by someone who stops there.

That image makes the word a warning as much as a compliment. To call something sāra is to say the rest of the tree is not it, and the tradition uses the word most often precisely when someone has settled for bark.

AN 4.150 uses it without any of that. Four words, no simile, no cautionary tale. The warning is in the vocabulary and the discourse trusts it to be heard.

The four, and where they came from

Sīla, samādhi, paññā, vimutti. Ethics, immersion, wisdom, freedom.

These are exactly the four of AN 4.1, the discourse that opens the entire nipāta, where they are called noble ethics, noble immersion, noble wisdom, and noble freedom, and where the Buddha says that both he and his listeners transmigrated for a very long time because these four were not understood.

They are also the three of AN 4.136 and AN 4.137, plus one. Those two discourses graded people by how far they had filled out ethics, immersion, and wisdom, and stopped there. Freedom is what this list adds, and it is the term that turns a training into a result.

So the same four terms have now appeared in the Fours as what was not understood, as a ladder with the last rung removed, and here as heartwood. The collection is not repeating itself carelessly; it is using one set in three different jobs.

Why freedom is fourth and not first

The order is the standard one and it is worth defending explicitly, because the modern instinct is to treat freedom as the topic and the other three as means.

The list does not do that. All four are called heartwood, equally. Ethics is not the bark on the way to the freedom at the center; it is part of what a person went into the forest for.

That is a real claim and it fits what the collection does elsewhere. AN 4.121 was willing to accept fear of punishment as a working motive for good conduct without grading it as second-rate; AN 4.135 measured conduct without attaching a destination to it. Ethics is treated in this collection as valuable in itself and not only instrumentally.

The heartwood image supports the same reading. Heartwood is not one point inside a tree. It is the whole of the dense inner column, top to bottom.

A chapter closed

The Ābhāvagga ends here, and it is worth looking back at what it contained: five identical discourses on wisdom as the best light, two on the four times, two on speech, and this.

Nothing joins them but the number four. That has been true of every chapter in the Fours so far, and it will remain true, and it is the honest description of how this collection is built.

But the closing discourse does something the chapter’s arrangement did not require. It ends a chapter that spent half its length insisting that wisdom is the best light by putting wisdom back into a set of four with three companions — and by adding the one term, freedom, that none of the light discourses mentioned.

Whether that placement is deliberate cannot be established from the text, and this reading guide does not claim it. What can be said is that a reader who has just heard paññā named foremost five times running hears it differently in AN 4.150, where it is one of four and not the last of them.

What comes next

The Indriyavagga, the chapter of faculties, opens the Fours’ sixteenth chapter with faith, energy, mindfulness, and immersion as the four faculties, and works through powers, strengths, and what a mendicant relies on.

After the bareness of this chapter and the last, that is a return to material with more in it — though the Fours will not stop filing, abridging, and cross-indexing until the very end.

For a reader working through the collection in order, AN 4.150 is a good place to stop for a week. The four it names are the whole of what everything else in the nipāta is about.

Key terms