Contentment

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

There is a version of each necessity that costs nobody anything and can be had anywhere, and being content with that version removes a whole category of trouble.

The four

These are the four nissaya, the resorts or supports, recited to every candidate at ordination in the Theravāda tradition to this day. They are the floor of the monastic life: the least a mendicant can be given and still live.

The fourth is the one that startles modern readers. Pūtimutta, rancid or fermented urine, was a real medicine of the period, generally understood as cattle urine used as a preservative and treatment. It is on the list because it was free and universally available, which is the criterion the whole list is built on.

Easy to find, and blameless

Two adjectives, and they are doing different work. Sulabha, easy to find, is about supply: these things can be obtained anywhere, at any season, without a patron. Anavajja, blameless, is about acquisition: getting them injures nobody and requires nothing improper.

That second one is the point most easily missed. The recommendation is not that discomfort is meritorious. It is that a person whose needs are at this level cannot be compromised by the process of meeting them — no hinting, no flattery, no dependence on anyone who might then have a claim.

Read directly after AN 4.26, which listed hinting for gifts and flattering patrons among the faults that disqualify a person, the arrangement is transparent. AN 4.26 named the corruption; AN 4.27 names the condition that makes it unnecessary.

What contentment is being praised

Santuṭṭhi is contentment or satisfaction — being pleased with what is there. The discourse says that being content with trifles easy to find is one of the factors of the ascetic life, sāmaññaṅga.

The qualifier ‘one of’ is honest and worth keeping. Contentment is a component, not the whole; the discourse does not claim that a person satisfied with little has thereby done the work. The verses say the same thing in the other direction — these qualities are integral to the ascetic life, and they are mastered by one who trains.

The negative payoff

The first verse states the benefit entirely negatively: you do not get upset about lodgings, robes, food, and drink, and you are not obstructed anywhere (na ca kattha ci vighāto).

This is characteristic and worth noticing as a pattern. The gain from contentment is not described as a positive pleasure but as the absence of a friction. A large amount of any life is spent managing the gap between what is wanted and what is available; close the gap by lowering the requirement and the management stops.

‘Not obstructed anywhere’ also carries a practical meaning for a wandering life. A mendicant whose requirements can be met in any village is free to go to any village. Contentment here is not only an inner state; it is what makes movement possible.

How not to teach it

The obvious misuse of this discourse is to preach contentment to people who lack things — which turns a description of voluntary simplicity into an instruction to the poor to want less. Nothing in the text supports that, and the setting rules it out: these are the requisites of people who have deliberately given up property.

The transferable claim is narrower and sound. For anything you have chosen to pursue, there is a level of provision below which you cannot be leveraged. Finding that level and being genuinely content at it is a form of freedom, and it is the form this discourse is describing.

Key terms