Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Patient practice can mean not retaliating against provocation, or it can mean enduring what the body and circumstances impose — and the collection gives both.
What changed and what did not
Impatient practice in AN 4.164 was defined by inability to endure a list of physical and social hardships that this discourse now assigns to patient practice. The labels have effectively swapped which content they carry between the two discourses, even though both discourses keep calling the fourth item samā, calming, and the third damā, taming, unchanged.
What is actually happening is simpler than a swap: AN 4.164 defined impatient and patient practice around provocation from another person, and this discourse redefines the same pair around endurance of circumstance. Taming and calming practice, which concern the senses and arisen thoughts rather than other people or hardship, needed no change and are repeated verbatim.
So two of the four are fixed across the pair and two are given a second, unrelated content. That is worth stating precisely, because it clarifies that the redefinition is confined to exactly the terms whose subject matter changed.
The endurance formula
Cannot endure cold, heat, hunger, and thirst. Cannot endure the touch of flies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, and reptiles. Cannot endure rude and unwelcome criticism. And cannot put up with physical pain — sharp, severe, acute, unpleasant, disagreeable, and life-threatening. Patient practice inverts every clause.
This exact formula closed AN 4.157, where it was the second half of the training instruction given after a diagnosis of monastic ambition. There it followed a description of a mendicant redirecting energy into status and gain; here it stands alone as one of four ways of practicing.
Reading the two together clarifies what the formula is for. In AN 4.157 it was the antidote to wanting to look impressive: the remedy for craving status was the capacity to put up with things that are not impressive at all. Here, detached from that context, it is simply named as a way of practicing in its own right.
What patience does not require
It is worth being exact about the formula’s scope. It does not ask a person to seek out cold, hunger, or pain, and it does not call suffering valuable in itself. It describes what happens when weather, insects, hostility, or the body impose something — conditions a person did not choose — and asks only that they be put up with rather than resisted or escaped.
The final item, life-threatening pain, is the most serious thing named anywhere in this cluster of discourses, and the text does not pull back from it. The same word closed the training instruction in AN 4.157, and this reading guide noted there that nothing softens it. The same is true here.
Two ways of failing, one word
Between the two discourses, akkhamā, impatient, names two distinct failures: retaliating when provoked by another person, and being unable to bear what conditions impose. The word covers both without distinguishing them, which is a real feature of how the Pāli works and not something either discourse comments on.
A teacher can use the pairing to widen a student’s idea of what patience covers. Many people manage the first kind of patience — not snapping back — while having very little of the second, and the reverse is just as common: someone who can sit through discomfort for hours but cannot let an insult pass unanswered.
The two discourses, read together, refuse to let either kind stand for the whole of the virtue.
Where it sits
Fifth of the chapter’s ten, and the last of the four discourses spent defining the two unrelated sets that share the name paṭipadā.
AN 4.166 returns to the painful/pleasant, slow/swift classification of the first three discourses and ranks it — a return this discourse’s neighbor makes without any comment on the patience material in between.
That is one more piece of evidence that the two sets of four are genuinely separate threads sharing a chapter rather than a single developing argument.
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 cannot endure cold, heat, hunger, and thirst. They cannot endure the touch of flies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, and reptiles. They cannot endure rude and unwelcome criticism. And they cannot put up with physical pain—sharp, severe, acute, unpleasant, disagreeable, and life-threatening. This is called the impatient practice.
Patient practice
§3And what’s the patient practice? It’s when someone endures cold, heat, hunger, and thirst. They endure the touch of flies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, and reptiles. They endure rude and unwelcome criticism. And they put up with physical pain—sharp, severe, acute, unpleasant, disagreeable, and life-threatening. 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. … 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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