Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Practice can be painful or pleasant, and insight from it can be slow or swift, giving four combinations.
The two axes
Dukkhā and sukhā, painful and pleasant, describe the practice itself — what it feels like to do it. Dandhābhiññā and khippābhiññā, slow direct knowledge and swift direct knowledge, describe what the practice produces and how quickly.
Crossed, they give four: painful and slow, painful and swift, pleasant and slow, pleasant and swift. The order in which the discourse lists them is the order every discourse in this chapter will use, and it is worth memorizing because nothing in the text explains it.
Nothing here says what makes a practice painful or pleasant, or what determines speed. The next discourse, AN 4.162, exists to answer exactly that, and this one should be read as its table of contents.
Why the bare version comes first
This chapter repeats a pattern seen twice already in the Fours: a title-card discourse followed by an expanded one, as with AN 4.146 and AN 4.147 on the four times. Here the convention is named directly in the two Pāli titles — Saṅkhitta, in brief, and Vitthāra, in detail.
Reading the bare version first is not merely a formality. It gives a reader the complete shape of the classification before any content is attached to it, so that the definitions in AN 4.162 land as filling in a known frame rather than as four unconnected paragraphs.
It is also, on its own, a usable checklist. Before reading further: is this practice hard or easy to sit through, and is the mind picking things up quickly or slowly? Two questions, four possible answers, and the rest of the chapter is commentary on them.
A classification with no ranking attached
As given here, the four are simply named. Nothing in this discourse says one is better than another, and a reader coming to the Fours for the first time might reasonably guess that pleasant and swift is obviously best and painful and slow obviously worst.
That guess turns out to be right, but only because a later discourse in this same chapter says so explicitly. AN 4.161 itself commits to nothing, which is worth noting because the ranking, once it does arrive, is more precise than the guess — and the two accounts of what the four disciples actually used complicate it further still.
Where the chapter goes
Paṭipadāvagga runs to ten discourses and covers more ground than its opening suggests. AN 4.162 and AN 4.163 define the four in two different ways — by inborn temperament and by meditation practiced. AN 4.164 and AN 4.165 use the same four names for an entirely unrelated classification about patience. AN 4.166 ranks the original four. AN 4.167 and AN 4.168 have Sāriputta and Mahāmoggallāna ask each other which one they used. AN 4.169 reworks the material from AN 4.163 into a different four-way split.
That is an unusual amount of internal cross-reference for a chapter of the Fours, and it rewards being read in order rather than dipped into.
For now, the four names are all that is needed: painful and slow, painful and swift, pleasant and slow, pleasant and swift.
Key terms
The text
Four ways of practice
§1“Mendicants, there are four ways of practice. What four? Painful practice with slow insight, painful practice with swift insight, pleasant practice with slow insight, and pleasant practice with swift insight. These are the four ways of practice.”
Self-check quiz
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