Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
There are four ways of responding to what comes at a person: retaliation, restraint under provocation, restraint of the senses, and the refusal to tolerate a bad thought once it has arisen.
A reused word, a new list
It is worth being direct about what has happened structurally. AN 4.161 through AN 4.163 all used paṭipadā for one classification, cross-bred on painful/pleasant and slow/swift. This discourse opens with the identical formula — there are four ways of practice — and then gives four items that have no relation to that cross at all.
A reader moving straight through the chapter will feel the seam. It is real, and it is not a mistake in translation or transmission; paṭipadā simply means ‘way of practice’ broadly enough to head more than one list, and the compilers filed both under the same chapter because both are sets of four bearing that name.
This is the same lesson the Indriyavagga taught with its four different lists of bala. A recurring head-word is not a promise that the content recurs with it.
Impatient and patient practice
The first pair is the simplest and the most immediately usable. Impatient practice: someone abuses, annoys, or argues with you, and you abuse, annoy, or argue right back. Patient practice: the same provocation, met without retaliation.
No third option is given. The discourse does not describe walking away, or reporting the person, or any strategy beyond matching or not matching what comes. That narrowness is the point: the test is specifically about symmetry of response, not about the full range of things a person might do when provoked.
Taming practice
The third item is sense restraint, given in the collection’s standard form: at each of the six sense doors, not getting caught up in the features and details — the general impression and the fine points that, left unguarded, let covetousness and displeasure overwhelm the mind.
Dama, taming, is an unusual word to attach to this. It is the vocabulary of breaking in an animal, and applying it to the management of one’s own eyes and ears casts sense restraint as a discipline exercised on oneself rather than a passive carefulness.
The formula is given in full for the eye and then abbreviated through ear, nose, tongue, and body before being given in full again for the mind, which is treated as a sixth sense door on equal footing with the other five — the standard position of this collection and one worth stating plainly to readers unfamiliar with it.
Calming practice
The fourth item is the abandonment of thought once it has arisen: not tolerating a sensual, malicious, or cruel thought, but giving it up, getting rid of it, calming it, eliminating it, obliterating it.
This is the identical trio of thoughts named in AN 4.11 and AN 4.138 — the walking mendicant who tolerates them and is called lazy, and the two axes of bodily and mental seclusion. Three discourses in the Fours now converge on the same three thoughts as the working definition of what an inward practice has to deal with.
The chain of five verbs — give up, get rid of, calm, eliminate, obliterate — is worth reading as an escalation rather than as five synonyms. Sujato’s translation preserves the piling-up; a teacher can slow down on this line and ask what, if anything, is different between merely giving something up and obliterating it.
How the four relate to each other
Unlike the painful/pleasant cross, this set of four is not built as two independent axes. It reads more like an ascent: impatient practice is a straightforward failure; patient practice withholds retaliation but says nothing about prevention; taming practice acts before contact becomes a problem; calming practice acts on what has already arisen internally, regardless of any external provocation at all.
That reading is offered as a reading, not as something the discourse states. What the text itself provides is four defined terms and no explicit relationship between them.
The next discourse, AN 4.165, keeps three of the four items completely unchanged and replaces only the definition of patient practice, which is the clearest way to see which parts of this set the collection treats as fixed and which as variable.
Key terms
The text
Four ways of practice
§1“Mendicants, there are four ways of practice. What four? Impatient practice, patient practice, taming practice, and calming practice.
Impatient practice
§2And what’s the impatient practice? It’s when someone abuses, annoys, or argues with you, and you abuse, annoy, or argue right back at them. This is called the impatient practice.
Patient practice
§3And what’s the patient practice? It’s when someone abuses, annoys, or argues with you, and you don’t abuse, annoy, or argue back at them. This is called the patient practice.
Taming practice
§4And what’s the taming practice? When a mendicant sees a sight with their eyes, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of sight were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of sight, and achieving restraint over it. When they hear a sound with their ears … When they smell an odor with their nose … When they taste a flavor with their tongue … When they feel a touch with their body … When they know an idea with their mind, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of mind were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of mind, and achieving restraint over it. This is called the taming practice.
Calming practice
§5And what’s the calming practice? It’s when a mendicant doesn’t tolerate a sensual, malicious, or cruel thought. They don’t tolerate any bad, unskillful qualities that have arisen, but give them up, get rid of them, calm them, eliminate them, and obliterate them. This is called the calming practice. These are the four ways of practice.”
Self-check quiz
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