Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Sāriputta reports being freed by the practice this chapter ranked highest, completing a pair that spans the whole graded range.
A discourse built to be read second
AN 4.168 has almost no content of its own. The visit is described in the same terms as AN 4.167 with the two names exchanged; the question is recited identically; only the answer differs.
That is not padding. It is the discourse’s entire method: repeat the frame exactly, change the one variable, and let the comparison do the work no commentary could do as cleanly. A reader who has just read AN 4.167 will feel the symmetry immediately; a reader who has not will find this page nearly unreadable on its own.
The Fours have used this device before, most visibly across AN 4.123 and AN 4.124, where a single clause changed and the reader was expected to notice. Here the changed element is not a clause but an entire biography’s worth of practice, compressed into one recited phrase.
The answer
Reverend Moggallāna… I relied on the pleasant practice with swift insight to free my mind from defilements by not grasping.
By AN 4.166’s exact grading, this is the one path called superior in both ways — because it was pleasant, and because it was swift. Where Mahāmoggallāna’s path was marked down on exactly one count, Sāriputta’s was marked up on both.
Nothing in the text treats this as a more impressive answer, or as evidence that Sāriputta had it easier in some sense that diminishes the attainment. The formula reporting it is identical to the one Mahāmoggallāna used, down to the last word.
Two answers, one destination
Set the two discourses beside each other and the point becomes unmistakable: the graded difference between the two paths made no difference to where either disciple arrived. Both report the same phrase, anupādāya āsavehi cittaṁ vimuttaṁ, and neither discourse suggests one arrival is more complete than the other.
This is worth stating as plainly as the texts allow, because it is easy to let AN 4.166’s vocabulary of superior and inferior slide into a claim about the people who use each path rather than about the paths themselves. The pair of discourses stands as a direct correction to that slide, without ever contradicting the ranking that makes the correction necessary.
A scale that grades four ways of practice and two disciples who used two different ones, at opposite ends of the scale, to reach the identical result: both things are true in this chapter, stated without any attempt to soften either one into the other.
What the pair does not settle
Neither discourse says why Sāriputta’s practice was pleasant where Mahāmoggallāna’s was painful, and neither invokes AN 4.162’s temperament or AN 4.163’s choice of meditation to explain it. The pair reports outcomes, not causes.
A reader who wants to know which of the earlier definitions applies to which disciple will not find an answer here, and this reading guide does not supply one. The two discourses are content to let the fact stand without a mechanism attached to it.
That restraint matches the rest of the chapter’s handling of these four terms: definitions are given freely, but the machinery connecting a person’s circumstances to which of the four applies to them is never fully closed.
Closing the sequence
AN 4.166 through AN 4.168 form the tightest three-discourse unit in this chapter: a ranking, then two mirrored reports that use the ranking’s own vocabulary to describe two real and unequal outcomes converging on one result.
What follows, AN 4.169, leaves this material behind and returns to the vocabulary of AN 4.163 — the foulness meditations, the absorptions, the powers of a trainee — recombined into a different four-way classification about arahantship reached in this life or at death, with or without extra effort.
Read as a whole, the chapter has now shown its two great disciples on opposite ends of a ranked scale and its central definitional material about to be reused a third time. Little in the Fours is as densely cross-referenced as this stretch of ten discourses.
Key terms
The text
Moggallāna asks
§1Then Venerable Mahāmoggallāna went up to Venerable Sāriputta, and exchanged greetings with him. When the greetings and polite conversation were over, Mahāmoggallāna sat down to one side, and said to Sāriputta: “Reverend Sāriputta, 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. Which one of these four ways of practice did you rely on to free your mind from defilements by not grasping?”
Sāriputta answers
§2“Reverend Moggallāna … I relied on the pleasant practice with swift insight to free my mind from defilements by not grasping.”
Self-check quiz
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