Withdrawn

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Withdrawal is the end of four movements: holding positions, searching, bodily agitation, and the assertion ‘I am’.

The ten questions

The first item is casting aside idiosyncratic interpretations of the truth, and the discourse lists them: the cosmos is eternal or not; finite or infinite; the soul and body are the same or different; after death a realized one exists, does not exist, both, or neither.

This is the standard list of the undeclared questions, which the canon returns to repeatedly and consistently refuses to settle. Note the form of the refusal here: the mendicant has cast out, cast aside, thrown out, discarded, let go of, given up, and relinquished them — seven verbs, all of putting down, and none of answering.

The Pāli for what is put down is paccekasacca, individual or private truths — the positions each school takes as its own. Sujato’s ‘idiosyncratic’ catches the sense that these are not shared findings but party badges. What is abandoned is the holding of a position, not the pursuit of knowledge.

The three searches

Esanā: the search for sensual pleasures, for continued existence, and for a spiritual path (brahmacariyesanā).

The third is the one that catches attention, and it should. The search for a spiritual path is on the list of things given up. This is not a rejection of practice; it is the observation that seeking is itself a mode of lack, and that a person who has arrived is no longer looking — including no longer looking for the thing they have.

It is worth pairing with AN 4.16 on subtlety, where the criterion was that the practitioner does not aim for anything finer. The same structure appears: the end of the path is marked by the cessation of a certain kind of seeking, not by an additional acquisition.

Stilling the physical process

The definition is technical and specific: the fourth absorption, entered with the giving up of pleasure and pain and the disappearance of former happiness and sadness, with pure equanimity and mindfulness.

The kāyasaṅkhāra, the physical process, is elsewhere identified with breathing, which in the fourth absorption is described as extremely subtle. The claim is not that the body has stopped but that the movement in it has quietened to the point of stillness.

Its inclusion tells us this is not a discourse about attitude. Three of the four items are dispositional; this one requires an attainment, and the discourse does not offer an alternative route to it.

The conceit ‘I am’

The fourth definition is the one the title actually names. A mendicant is withdrawn when they have given up the conceit ‘I am’ — asmimāna — cut it off at the root, made it like a palm stump, obliterated it so it cannot arise.

Asmimāna is not the view that there is a self, which is abandoned earlier on the path. It is the residual sense of being someone, which the tradition says survives the correction of the view and goes last. The palm-stump image — a palm cut at the crown cannot regrow — is the canon’s standard figure for an irreversible removal.

So patilīna, withdrawn, turns out to have no spatial content at all. One does not withdraw to anywhere. What is described is the absence of the thing that was positioned, searching, moving, and asserting.

The four as one movement

Read in order the four are progressively more interior: opinions held about the world, searching conducted in it, the movement of one’s own body, and finally the sense of being the one doing all of it.

That ordering is the discourse’s argument, made by arrangement rather than by statement. Each item is the engine of the one before. Positions are held because something is being sought; seeking is restless; restlessness is bodily; and the whole apparatus runs on there being someone it is for.

The verses confirm the reading by naming the last item as the decisive one: when they’re awakened by comprehending conceit, they’re called ‘withdrawn’.

Key terms