Ugly

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Painful practice is the five meditations that confront what is unwanted; pleasant practice is the four absorptions; both rely on the same five supports, and speed still depends on the five faculties.

What makes practice painful here

Five items, given as a set: observing the ugliness of the body, perceiving the repulsiveness of food, perceiving dissatisfaction with the whole world, observing the impermanence of all conditions, and having well established the perception of one’s own death.

Every one of these takes something a person instinctively protects — the body, food, the world’s appeal, permanence, one’s own continuation — and turns attention toward the unwanted side of it. That is a coherent definition of painful practice, and a much more specific one than AN 4.162 gave.

It is worth being direct about what this asks of a person. These are not neutral objects of contemplation; they are chosen because they are difficult, and the discourse does not soften that by calling the resulting discomfort anything other than what it is.

What makes practice pleasant here

The four absorptions, given in the standard formula: the first with rapture and bliss born of seclusion, the second with rapture and bliss born of immersion and internal clarity, the third with equanimous bliss, the fourth beyond pleasure and pain with pure equanimity and mindfulness.

This is the identical formula used throughout the Fours — at AN 4.123, for instance, where the same four absorptions were enjoyed and led to a long but temporary divine rebirth. Nothing in that earlier discourse is contradicted here; AN 4.163 is simply using the same four states for a different purpose, as a description of a pleasant way of practicing rather than as an attainment to be relished or contemplated.

The contrast with the painful path is stark by design. One path works by confronting what is unwanted; the other works through states that are, by the formula’s own words, rapturous and blissful. Both are said to lead toward the same ending.

Two lists of five, not one

Both paths are said to rely on these five powers of a trainee: faith, hiri, ottappa, energy, and wisdom. Then, separately, both paths are said to have the five faculties — faith, energy, mindfulness, immersion, wisdom — manifest weakly or strongly.

These are two different sets of five sharing three terms and differing in the other two. The sekhabala, the powers of a trainee, replace mindfulness and immersion with hiri and ottappa — conscience and prudence, usually translated as moral shame and moral dread: the reluctance to do wrong because it is shameful, and the reluctance to do wrong because of its consequences.

This is worth flagging as a genuine textual point rather than smoothing over. The Indriyavagga, two chapters back, gave four different lists all called bala, powers, and this is a fifth list under the same name, distinct from all of them. The collection does not appear troubled by having several technical sets sharing a label; a reader should not be troubled either, but should notice it.

What the two lists divide between them is support and speed. The powers of a trainee are relied on — upanissāya, leaned on — as a foundation for doing the practice at all. The five faculties, weak or strong, then determine how quickly that practice, once undertaken, reaches its result. One list is about what a person is standing on; the other is about how fast they move.

Reading this discourse against AN 4.162

The two discourses cannot simply be layered on top of each other. AN 4.162 said painful and pleasant come from inborn temperament; AN 4.163 says they come from which of two specific practices a mendicant undertakes. A person is not, on the face of it, assigned to the foulness meditations or to the absorptions by their natural level of greed, hate, and delusion.

This reading guide does not attempt to reconcile the two into a single mechanism. What can be said is that both discourses keep the same shape: two variables, one deciding painful-or-pleasant and the other deciding slow-or-swift, with the same five faculties doing the second job in both cases.

It is also worth noticing that AN 4.163’s version gives a practitioner something to do that AN 4.162’s does not. Temperament is not chosen; a meditation is.

Where this material goes next

AN 4.169, the chapter’s final discourse, will take this exact material — the five asubha-type meditations, the four absorptions, the powers of a trainee, the five faculties — and recombine it into a different four-way classification, sorted not by painful-pleasant and slow-swift but by extinguished in this life or at death, with or without extra effort.

That is the clearest case in this chapter of the same building blocks being used twice for different purposes, and a reader who remembers this page will find AN 4.169 far more legible than one meeting the material cold.

Key terms