Aspiration

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Each of the four assemblies is given a named standard to aspire to, drawn from its own ranks rather than from outside it.

Four assemblies, eight names

The structure could not be plainer: monk, nun, layman, laywoman, each given exactly two names, in the same formula — a faithful member of that assembly would rightly aspire, ‘may I be like …’, and the Buddha confirms the pair as tulā and pamāṇa, a scale and a measure, for that assembly’s disciples.

This is the same fourfold division of the community used throughout the Fours — at AN 4.129, where four assemblies are equally uplifted by Ānanda, and at AN 4.159, where a nun and Ānanda are the discourse’s only figures. Here the division organizes not an audience but a set of role models, one matched pair per assembly.

Who is named

Sāriputta and Moggallāna are already familiar from this chapter’s neighbor discourses and from AN 4.167 and AN 4.168 two chapters back, where each reported the practice that freed his own mind. Naming them as the standard for monks confirms what those discourses already showed in action.

Khemā and Uppalavaṇṇā are named the standard for nuns. The tradition elsewhere records each as foremost among nuns in her own respect — Khemā in wisdom, paired with Sāriputta’s standing among monks, and Uppalavaṇṇā in psychic power, paired with Moggallāna’s. The two pairs are matched to each other by more than proximity in this list.

Citta and Hatthaka of Āḷavī are named for laymen. Both are householders remembered elsewhere in the canon for exceptional generosity and skill in explaining the teaching to others while remaining lay.

Khujjuttarā and Veḷukaṇṭakī, Nanda’s mother, are named for laywomen. This reading guide gives the names as the text gives them and does not extend their identities beyond what this discourse states; Nanda’s mother is named by her relationship to a son, in the ordinary convention of the period, and Khujjuttarā by her own name alone.

Why a standard, not an instruction

The discourse does not tell any of the four assemblies what to do. It does not describe qualities to cultivate or practices to take up. It supplies a name, or rather two names, and calls that a scale.

That is a different kind of teaching device from most of what this chapter and the ones before it have offered. Where AN 4.136 graded a ladder of ethics, immersion, and wisdom in the abstract, this discourse points at people who have already climbed it and says: this is what it looks like, done.

The word tulā, a balance or scale, is precise. A scale is not a destination; it is an instrument for checking where something else stands. Naming Sāriputta and Moggallāna as a tulā for monks does not say every monk should become identical to either of them. It gives a fixed point against which a monk can locate himself.

What this means for the pairing itself

It is worth noticing that every one of the four standards is a pair, not a single figure. No assembly is given one ideal to imitate; each is given two, and in every case the tradition elsewhere distinguishes the two by different foremost qualities — wisdom and psychic power for the first two pairs, generosity and eloquence for the third, and analogous distinctions for the fourth.

That plurality matters. A single named ideal risks narrowing what excellence within an assembly can look like to one shape. Two names, differing from each other, keep the standard from collapsing into a single template even while remaining concrete enough to aspire to by name rather than by abstract description.

Where it sits

Sixth of the chapter’s ten, and a pause between two dense philosophical exchanges — the Koṭṭhita and Upavāṇa discourses before it, and the elements teaching to Rāhula that follows.

Nothing formally connects this discourse to its neighbors beyond the chapter’s loose organization by the number four. What it adds to the chapter is a reminder that the tradition’s highest standards were, for this community, not abstractions but people whose names could be spoken.

Key terms