Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Mindfulness, immersion, blamelessness, and inclusiveness are powers.
The pair that changed
AN 4.153 led with wisdom and energy; this one leads with mindfulness and immersion.
The two pairs are not random. Wisdom and energy are the working pair of investigation — what a person understands and what they are prepared to put in. Mindfulness and immersion are the working pair of meditation, and they appear together in that role constantly.
Each pair is complete in its own domain, and each has been given the same two companions. So the arrangement says, twice, that a person can have either pair and still need conduct and community.
It also declines to combine them. There is no discourse here in which wisdom, energy, mindfulness, and immersion are the four powers — that combination belongs to the faculties two discourses back, minus wisdom, plus faith. The lists in this chapter are kept separate even where they could obviously be merged.
What mindfulness is doing in a list of powers
The definition of a power — unshakeable by its opposite — is easiest to see with this item. The opposite of mindfulness is not a state; it is simply not being there, and everyone has direct experience of losing it.
Mindfulness as a faculty is what keeps something in view. Mindfulness as a power is mindfulness that does not lapse when something more interesting arrives.
The Fours have described the failure precisely. AN 4.11 puts a mendicant in four postures with sensual, malicious, or cruel thoughts, and marks the difference not by whether the thought comes but by whether it is tolerated. AN 4.122 sent two of its four mendicants out for alms without establishing mindfulness, and the failure was stated before anything was seen.
In both cases the quality was present in the person and absent at the moment it mattered. That gap is what a power closes.
Reading three discourses as one arrangement
This is the middle of three, and the middle is where the pattern becomes visible. After AN 4.153 alone a reader has a list. After AN 4.154 they have a suspicion. After AN 4.155 they have a shape.
That sequencing is a real feature of how this collection teaches, and it is easy to lose. Read as three separate numbered items, these are three unremarkable lists. Read in order at one sitting, they are a single statement with two of its four terms held constant.
The same technique appeared in the chapter before, where five discourses held everything constant but one word. Here two of four items are held and two rotate, which is a weaker version of the same device.
What varies is what is being emphasized. What stays is what is being assumed.
The limits of that reading
It should be said clearly that this is a reading of an arrangement, not a doctrine stated anywhere in the three discourses.
None of them says that blamelessness and inclusiveness are more fundamental than the rotating pairs. None of them comments on the other two. The observation that the second half is fixed is an observation about how the material was filed.
There is a plainer explanation available and it deserves equal weight: three variant lists of four powers existed, all sharing two items, and the compilers put them together because they all began ‘there are these four powers’.
Both accounts fit the evidence. A reading guide can offer the richer one provided it does not pretend the text asserts it.
Where it sits
Fourth of the chapter’s ten, and the middle of the three rotating lists.
AN 4.155 completes the rotation with reflection and development, and is the last of the chapter’s five short discourses.
From AN 4.156 the chapter changes entirely, and everything after it is substantial.
Key terms
The text
Four powers
§1“Mendicants, there are these four powers. What four? The powers of mindfulness, immersion, blamelessness, and inclusiveness. These are the four powers.”
Self-check quiz
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