Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Four practices obscure a religious life the way weather obscures the sun: the radiance is not destroyed, it is prevented from reaching anyone.
What the simile establishes
The sun and moon do not stop shining when a cloud passes; they stop shining and glowing and radiating from the point of view of anyone below. Nothing has happened to the source.
Applied to a person, that is a claim worth noticing. The four corruptions are not said to destroy whatever the ascetic or brahmin has developed. They are said to prevent it reaching anyone. The failure is one of transmission rather than of substance.
Note also that all four obscurations are external to the sun and temporary. The simile does not carry the implication that a corrupted practitioner is finished, and the collection generally does not either. What it says is that while these things are present, nothing gets through.
The four obscurations
Stormclouds, fog, smoke, and an eclipse of Rāhu, lord of titans. Three are weather and one is a being.
Rāhu returns from AN 4.15, where he held the record for size of body. Here he is doing the thing he is actually known for in Indian cosmology: swallowing the sun or moon and producing an eclipse. Placing him last, after three natural causes, gives the list a small escalation — the first three happen, and the fourth is done by someone.
It is a nice touch that the discourse does not press this. The correspondence between the four obscurations and the four corruptions is not spelled out, and it would be overreading to assign each one a partner.
The four corruptions
Drinking beer and wine; having sex; accepting gold and currency; making a living the wrong way. Each is stated in the same form: there are some ascetics and brahmins who…, not refraining from…
The phrasing is worth attending to. The fault is not a single lapse but a settled practice — not refraining, appaṭivirata. What is described is a person who has stopped treating the thing as something to abstain from.
The four are also not addressed to Buddhist monastics specifically. The subject throughout is samaṇabrāhmaṇā, ascetics and brahmins — religious professionals of any school. The discourse is making a claim about what discredits anyone who has taken up a religious life, not about breaches of a particular code.
Gold and currency
The third item is the one that has had the longest institutional life. The rule against monastics accepting gold and money is among the most consequential in the Vinaya, and disagreement over it was a live issue at the second council and has remained one ever since.
It is worth being straightforward that practice varies widely today and that the discourse takes a clear position. It also does not argue for it. Like the other three, it is simply listed among the things that stop a religious life from shining, and the reason must be inferred from the pattern: each of the four involves the practitioner acquiring or consuming something that ties them back into the ordinary economy of wanting.
Wrong livelihood, the fourth, generalizes that. Micchājīva in this literature covers the ways a religious person can make a living dishonestly — fortune-telling, flattery, hinting, and the rest, several of which AN 4.26 named as the faults of the deceivers.
The verses, and how the chapter ends
The verses are harsher than the prose and their register is worth naming. Ascetics and brahmins so corrupted are impure, dirty creatures, shrouded in darkness, bondservants of craving, full of attachments, who swell the horrors of the charnel ground, taking up future lives.
That is condemnation rather than diagnosis, and it does not sit entirely comfortably with the simile that opens the discourse. A cloud passing over the sun is a temporary obstruction; a bondservant of craving swelling the charnel ground is a settled fate. The prose and the verses are pulling in different directions and the discourse does not reconcile them.
A teaching guide should say which one it is standing on. The simile is the discourse’s own framing, stated twice, and it is the more useful and the more accurate: these four are obstructions, they are present or absent, and while they are present nothing shines. The verses are the collection’s acclamatory-and-denunciatory voice, which it also has.
The Rohitassavagga closes here. It opened with four ways of developing immersion and four ways of answering a question, ran through the god who could not walk to the end of the world, and ends with the four things that stop a religious life being visible at all. Read as a whole it is the chapter of the Fours most concerned with what makes a practice work and what stops it — and its two best pages, AN 4.41 and AN 4.45, are worth returning to independently of the rest.
Key terms
The text
What obscures the sun and moon
§1“Mendicants, these four corruptions obscure the sun and moon, so they don’t shine and glow and radiate. What four? Stormclouds … Fog … Smoke … An eclipse of Rāhu, lord of titans … These are four corruptions that obscure the sun and moon, so they don’t shine and glow and radiate.
What corrupts ascetics and brahmins
§2In the same way, these four things corrupt ascetics and brahmins, so they don’t shine and glow and radiate. What four? There are some ascetics and brahmins who drink beer and wine, not refraining from drinking beer and wine. This is the first thing that corrupts ascetics and brahmins … There are some ascetics and brahmins who have sex, not refraining from sex. This is the second thing that corrupts ascetics and brahmins … There are some ascetics and brahmins who accept gold and currency, not refraining from receiving gold and currency. This is the third thing that corrupts ascetics and brahmins … There are some ascetics and brahmins who make a living the wrong way, not refraining from wrong livelihood. This is the fourth thing that corrupts ascetics and brahmins … These are four things that corrupt ascetics and brahmins, so they don’t shine and glow and radiate.
The verses
§3Some ascetics and brahmins are plagued by greed and hate; men shrouded by ignorance, enjoying things that seem pleasant. Drinking beer and wine, having sex, accepting currency and gold: they’re ignorant. Some ascetics and brahmins make a living the wrong way.
§4These corruptions were spoken of by the Buddha, Kinsman of the Sun. When corrupted by these, some ascetics and brahmins don’t shine or glow. Impure, dirty creatures, shrouded in darkness, bondservants of craving, full of attachments, swell the horrors of the charnel ground, taking up future lives.”
Self-check quiz
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