With the Stream

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four positions relative to the current: carried, swimming, standing, and across — and the swimming is described as painful.

The image, and what the stream is

The current is craving, made explicit in the first stanza: those who go with the stream are sunk in craving. Going with it costs nothing and requires nothing, which is what makes it a current rather than a road.

That is the first thing the image gets right. The unawakened life is not described as a wrong turning taken deliberately but as the direction one moves in when no effort is applied. The person who indulges in sensual pleasures and does bad deeds is not portrayed as having chosen the stream. They are simply in it.

The one who weeps

They live the full and pure spiritual life in pain and sadness, weeping, with tearful faces. Sujato’s rendering is faithful; the Pāli (sahāpi dukkhena sahāpi domanassena assumukho rudamāno) is as stark as it sounds.

This deserves to be taken at face value before anything is done to soften it. The discourse is not describing a failed practitioner or a wrong method. This is the second of four ascending positions — the person who has stopped indulging and is doing the work — and their condition is grief. The going against is genuinely against.

Three things are worth saying about it. First, it is a statement about a phase, not about the path as a whole: the third and fourth positions are not described this way. Second, it names a real experience that people in the middle of renunciation report and often believe they are wrong to feel. And third, the collection does contain the opposite emphasis — AN 4.2 has just closed with ‘happiness is found through happiness’, three discourses earlier.

Holding both is the honest position. The Aṅguttara is a compilation and does not harmonize itself. A teacher who quotes only the pleasant line is misrepresenting the collection; so is one who quotes only this one.

Steadfast, and the fetters

The third individual is ṭhitatta, ‘steadfast’ or literally ‘one whose self is standing’. The definition is technical: with the ending of the five lower fetters they are reborn spontaneously, extinguished there, not liable to return from that world.

This is the non-returner (anāgāmī), described without the label. Reborn spontaneously means in the Pure Abodes, without parents; not liable to return means never again to this level of existence. The image is exact — the person has come out of the water and is standing, but is not yet on the far bank.

The far shore, and who counts as a brahmin

The fourth is described in three ways at once: crossed over, gone to the far shore, standing on solid ground — and called a brahmin. The definition given is the arahant’s: undefiled freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom, realized in this very life by one’s own insight, with the ending of defilements.

The word choice is deliberate and polemical. In its own social setting brahmin named a birth. The discourse applies it to an attainment and defines the attainment precisely, which is the Buddhist redefinition of the term carried out in a single line. The final stanza reinforces it: the one called ‘gone beyond’ is the sage who has comprehended all things high and low.

Reading the four as a sequence

The scheme maps onto the standard stages without naming them: the ordinary person, the one in training, the non-returner, the arahant. What the stream image adds is a sense of the effort curve.

Position one is effortless and going the wrong way. Position two is maximal effort against maximal resistance, and hurts. Position three is standing — the resistance has stopped, but the journey has not ended. Position four is arrival. Most descriptions of the path grade by attainment; this one grades by what it costs, and only this one makes clear that the cost is not evenly distributed.

Key terms