Complete Understanding, and So On

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The same three fourfold lists already given in full — mindfulness, right effort, the bases of psychic power — are developed not only for direct knowledge of greed but for nine further ways of relating to it: understanding it completely, finishing it, giving it up, ending it, and so on through letting it go.

Nothing new, deliberately

Every piece of content this page represents has already appeared in full at AN 4.274–276. What changes across these twenty-seven discourses is only the verb governing the relationship between the practice and greed: abhiññāya, for direct knowledge, becomes in turn pariññāya, for complete understanding; parikkhayāya, for finishing; pahānāya, for giving up; khayāya, for ending; vayāya, for vanishing; virāgāya, for fading away; nirodhāya, for cessation; cāgāya, for giving away; and paṭinissaggāya, for letting go.

Nine words for one movement

These nine verbs are not nine different achievements. They are nine names for substantially the same process — a defilement's grip loosening and finally releasing — approached from nine slightly different angles: as an object of understanding, as a process running to completion, as something actively relinquished, as a quantity diminishing to nothing, as a color fading, as an activity quieted, as a possession released, as a burden set down. The tradition’s willingness to name the same liberation nine ways, rather than settling on one term and repeating it, is itself worth noticing: no single word was judged adequate to carry the whole sense of what letting go of greed involves.

How twenty-seven discourses become one page

Three lists times nine verbs is twenty-seven combinations, each technically its own numbered discourse in the traditional count — AN 4.277 through AN 4.303. The bilara-data source this site draws from, and Sujato’s translation of it, compress the entire run into a single continuous line using the peyyāla convention this chapter is named for, on the assumption that a reader who has followed AN 4.274–276 can supply the full expansion for every remaining combination without needing each one spelled out.

A closing colophon of its own

The source text marks this block’s end with its own ordinal, Tiṁsatimaṁ, ‘the thirtieth’ — counting the three individually written discourses at AN 4.274–276 together with these twenty-seven as thirty total applications of the ‘for greed, four things should be developed’ frame. A far larger block follows immediately: the identical apparatus, run across sixteen further defilements beyond greed.

Key terms