At Kāḷaka’s Monastery

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Complete knowledge of everything experienced is compatible with taking up no position about it at all — including no position about there being someone who knows.

The four-cornered denial

Before the main argument the discourse clears three alternatives. To say ‘I do not know’ would be a lie. To say ‘I both know and do not know’ would be just the same. To say ‘I neither know nor do not know’ would be a fault.

This is the catuṣkoṭi, the four-cornered logic familiar from Indian debate: affirm, deny, both, neither. The discourse works through the last three and rules them out, leaving the first, which it has already asserted.

The move is worth naming because the same structure is more often used in Buddhist texts to reject all four corners. Here it does the opposite: it defends a plain positive claim by eliminating the evasions. Whatever else the Realized One is, he is not being coy about whether he knows.

The formula, four times

Then the central passage, run through sight, hearing, thought, and knowledge. Taking sight: he sees what is to be seen; he does not conceive the seen; does not conceive the unseen; does not conceive what is to be seen; does not conceive a seer.

Maññati, ‘conceives’, is a technical term of the first importance in this literature. It means to imagine, to suppose, to construct a notion about something — and specifically to construct it in relation to a self. The discourse is not saying he has no thoughts about what he sees. It is saying he builds nothing on the seeing.

The first three negations remove the object in its three tenses: what has been seen, what has not been, what will be. The fourth removes the subject. A reader who tracks only the first three will hear a discourse about not clinging to experiences; the fourth makes it a discourse about there being no experiencer to do the clinging.

‘Unaffected’

Tādī, translated here as ‘the unaffected one’, is one of the canon’s highest terms — literally ‘such’, the one who is thus, unchanged by circumstance. It is from the same tathā family as tathāgata in AN 4.23, and the two discourses are quietly linked by it.

The discourse says: since a Realized One is unaffected in the midst of things that ought to be seen, heard, thought, and known, he is the unaffected one. And then: I say that there is no better or finer poise than this.

That superlative is the discourse’s claim about value, and it should be read against AN 4.16 on subtlety, where the criterion was also that nothing better or finer is seen or aimed at. The same phrase marks the endpoint in both.

The dart

The closing verse gives the image the discourse is remembered for. Others get attached and think it is the truth, limited by their preconceptions; the Realized Ones have seen this dart to which people cling — the dart being the saying ‘I know, I see, that’s how it is’.

The object of criticism is precisely stated and it is not knowledge. It is the position taken up on the basis of knowledge: the assertion of one’s own seeing as final. That is the dart, and the discourse has just spent four paragraphs describing someone who knows everything and does not throw it.

For teaching, this is the discourse to reach for when a student worries that Buddhist epistemology is either a claim to omniscience or a refusal to claim anything. It is neither, and it says so at length.

Against AN 4.23

The two discourses are adjacent and cover the same ground in opposite registers. AN 4.23 acclaims: supreme lion, no rival, turning the divine wheel. AN 4.24 analyzes: four corners, four negations, a technical term for construing, and a warning about certainty.

That the compilers put them side by side is worth pointing out. A reader who takes only the first will have a devotional picture with nothing in it to think with; a reader who takes only the second will miss that the tradition also sings. The chapter offers both and does not rank them.

Key terms