Extra Effort

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same meditations and the same faculties that made practice painful or pleasant in AN 4.163 now determine whether a person is fully extinguished in this life or at death, and whether extra effort was needed.

The new axes

Diṭṭheva dhamme, in this very life, against kāyassa bhedā, when the body breaks up: whether the final result arrives before or after death.

Sasaṅkhāra, with extra effort, against asaṅkhāra, without it: whether reaching that result required additional exertion beyond the practice itself.

Crossed, they give four individuals: extinguished in this life with effort, extinguished at death with effort, extinguished in this life without effort, extinguished at death without effort. This is a different cross from anything else in the chapter — not painful/pleasant and slow/swift, but when and how.

The same parts, differently wired

Each of the four is defined using material word for word from AN 4.163. The first and second individuals meditate observing the body’s ugliness, food’s repulsiveness, dissatisfaction with the whole world, impermanence, and their own death, and rely on the five powers of a trainee — faith, conscience, prudence, energy, and wisdom. The third and fourth practice the four absorptions and rely on the same five powers.

So the painful/pleasant distinction from AN 4.163 has not disappeared; it has simply stopped being the variable this discourse reports on. The foulness meditations and the absorptions are both present, attached now to whether extra effort was needed rather than to how the practice felt.

What decides the outcome within each pair is, once again, the five faculties: strong, and the result comes in this very life; weak, and it comes only when the body breaks up. That is the third appearance of exactly this mechanism in this chapter, after AN 4.162 and AN 4.163 both used faculty strength to decide slow versus swift.

What ‘extra effort’ adds

The genuinely new element is sasaṅkhāra versus asaṅkhāra, and the discourse does not define the term beyond using it. What can be observed from the pattern is that it correlates with which of the two practices is undertaken: the foulness meditations are paired with extra effort in both of their appearances, and the absorptions are paired with its absence in both of theirs.

That correlation is worth stating carefully, because the discourse itself states it only by repetition, not by argument. If it holds, it adds something to the reading of AN 4.163 that discourse could not supply on its own: the painful path is also the effortful one, and the pleasant path is also the one that, once undertaken, proceeds without needing to be forced.

This reading guide offers that as an inference from the pattern rather than as a claim the text makes outright, in keeping with how the rest of the chapter has handled the relationships between its various four-item sets.

Borrowed vocabulary, a different job

Sasaṅkhāraparinibbāyī and asaṅkhāraparinibbāyī are, in their most familiar use, two of the five standard kinds of non-returner — the person who does not come back to this world and is extinguished with or without extra effort after rebirth in a pure abode. AN 4.131, earlier in the Fours, named two other members of that same five-fold set: the one extinguished between one life and the next, and the one heading upstream to the highest pure abode.

AN 4.169 borrows the same two terms but applies them more broadly, to being fully extinguished at all — including in this very life, which is arahantship, not non-returnership. The vocabulary of one classification is doing a different job here than it does in its more technical home.

A reader who has come through AN 4.131 already knows both halves of this vocabulary separately: the fixed five-part scheme there, and now a four-part recombination here that borrows two of its terms for a wider use. Neither discourse comments on the other, and neither needs to.

Closing the chapter

AN 4.169 is the last discourse of the Paṭipadāvagga, and it closes by doing exactly what a reader who has followed the chapter in order should now expect: taking material already given a job in an earlier discourse and giving it a second, different job.

Across ten discourses this chapter has used the same handful of components — the five faculties, the foulness meditations, the four absorptions, the powers of a trainee, the painful/pleasant and slow/swift labels — in at least four distinct combinations, plus an entirely separate four-item set about patience sharing only a name with the rest.

That is worth naming as the chapter’s real subject, more than any single doctrine within it. The Paṭipadāvagga is a demonstration of how a small set of building blocks generates a large amount of classification, and AN 4.169 is where the demonstration is clearest.

What follows is the Sappurisavagga in the next chapter of the collection, a fresh set of ten discourses on the qualities of a true person.

Key terms