The Power of Wisdom

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Wisdom, energy, blamelessness, and inclusiveness are powers.

The two unexpected items

Anavajja is the word AN 4.135 used for the blameless end of its four-point scale of conduct: without fault. As a power it means conduct so clean that nothing can be laid against it.

Saṅgaha means gathering together, including, holding. It is the word behind the four saṅgahavatthu — the four ways of drawing people in, set out in the Fours at AN 4.32 as giving, kind speech, taking care of others, and treating people equally.

So this list of powers has one item about understanding, one about effort, one about how a person behaves, and one about what a person does for other people. That is a much wider spread than the faculties gave, and it is worth pausing on: two of the four are social.

The Fours do not develop the point here, and the fuller treatment of these four powers lives elsewhere in the Aṅguttara, where each is defined and the set is put to use. What this discourse preserves is the list.

Why blamelessness counts as a power

The definition of a power — a quality that cannot be overthrown by its opposite — explains the choice better than any account of blamelessness as a virtue does.

Someone whose conduct is genuinely clean has nothing that can be used against them. That is a source of stability, and the stability is practical rather than moral: it is the absence of anything to be afraid of.

The Fours have already described the mechanism from the other side. AN 4.121 made fear of one’s own reproach and fear of others’ reproach two of the four fears that stop a person doing harm. A person who has done no harm is not carrying either of those, and what is left is what this discourse calls a power.

It is a good corrective to the idea that ethics in this tradition is preliminary. Here it is listed as a strength alongside wisdom, in a set of four, with no suggestion that it is the lower half of anything.

Why inclusiveness counts as a power

This is the harder of the two, because saṅgaha looks like a social skill rather than a personal strength.

The reading that makes it a power is that a person who holds people together is not alone, and that a practitioner without a community is exposed in ways the collection takes seriously. AN 4.122 described four ways a monastic life ends, and the first of them was a failure of relationship with the people around him.

There is a second reading and it is worth mentioning: the four ways of drawing people in are things a person does, and doing them consistently requires generosity, restraint in speech, attention to others, and fairness. A quality that can only be exercised by exercising four others is not a soft item in a list of powers.

This reading guide does not claim the discourse intends either reading. It gives the word and no gloss, and the two readings are what the surrounding collection makes available.

The fixed second half

Anavajjabala and saṅgahabala are items three and four here, and they are items three and four again in AN 4.154 and AN 4.155. What rotates is the first pair.

AN 4.153: wisdom and energy. AN 4.154: mindfulness and immersion. AN 4.155: reflection and development.

That is a distinctive shape and not one this chapter has used before. It is neither a synonym-series nor a matched pair; it is a fixed base with a rotating head, and the effect is to say that whatever else a person has, conduct and community come with it.

Whether the compilers intended that reading or simply filed three variant lists together cannot be settled from the text. Both are possible, and the second is at least as likely, given what this collection does elsewhere.

Where it sits

Third of the chapter’s ten and the first of the three variant power-lists.

The two that follow complete the rotation. Then AN 4.156 leaves the subject entirely for the four incalculable stretches of an eon.

For a reader working through the chapter, AN 4.153 is the first discourse in it with anything unexpected in the content rather than in the arrangement.

Key terms