Very Far Apart

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The distance between good and bad teaching is greater than any physical distance, and what makes it so is reliability rather than doctrine.

The three physical distances

The firmament and the earth; the near and far shore of the ocean; where the sun rises and where it sets. These are the three greatest spans available to the imagination of the audience, and they are chosen with care.

Each is a different kind of distance. Sky to earth is vertical and unbridgeable by walking. Shore to shore is horizontal and crossable, but only by a voyage. Sunrise to sunset is the whole width of the visible world and also a distance in time.

Having established three incommensurable maxima, the discourse says the fourth exceeds all of them. That is a rhetorical structure rather than an argument, and it works because the three examples do not share a scale — there is no unit in which vertical, horizontal, and temporal distance can be compared, so the fourth term is not being measured against a number.

The fourth

Dhammo sataṁ and dhammo asataṁ — the teaching, or the way, of the good and of the bad. Sant is the present participle of ‘to be’ used to mean the good, the true, the real; asant is its negation.

Dhamma here is broader than doctrine. It covers the way such people are, what they hold, and what they teach, and the discourse does not separate these. That breadth matters for the second verse, which locates the distance in behavior rather than in belief.

Why the distance is so great

The second verse gives the reason, and it is not the one a reader expects. Not that the wicked teach falsehood, or lead people to hell, or contradict the truths. Rather: The company of the virtuous is reliable; as long as it remains, it stays the same. But the company of the wicked is fickle.

The Pāli behind ‘reliable’ and ‘fickle’ contrasts what holds steady with what does not. The distinguishing mark of good teaching, on this account, is that it is the same tomorrow — and of bad teaching, that it changes.

That is a striking criterion and it is worth pressing on. It is not a claim about truth-content; it is a claim about durability under time and pressure. A teaching that has to be revised when circumstances change, or that says one thing to one audience and another to the next, is by this measure on the far side of the largest distance in the world.

It also connects to a theme running through the chapter and the one before it. AN 4.28 praised four traditions for being uncorrupted, as they have been since the beginning; AN 4.29 and 4.30 said the same of the four footprints. This verse gives the underlying principle: what is good keeps.

‘Company’ and the ambiguity in it

Sujato renders the subject as the company of the virtuous and the company of the wicked, which keeps a useful ambiguity in the Pāli: the word can mean the association of such people among themselves, or the experience of associating with them.

Both readings work and they reinforce each other. Good people are consistent with one another and consistent to be around; bad people are neither. The verse is as much about what it is like to depend on someone as about what they believe.

This is the chapter’s quietest practical teaching. AN 4.31 named relying on true persons as one of the four wheels a life runs on. This discourse supplies the test for identifying them, and the test is not what they say but whether it stays the same.

Using it

As a short teaching this works best read backwards: give the second verse first, then the list of distances. Stated as a criterion — look for what holds steady — it is immediately usable. Stated as a hierarchy of distances it can sound merely emphatic.

The reversal also protects against the obvious misreading, which is to hear the discourse as saying that good and bad people are irreconcilably separated as kinds. Nothing in it says that. What it says is that the two ways of proceeding do not converge, which is a claim about the ways rather than about the people.

Key terms