Equality (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

A couple who want to remain together across lives should match in four things: faith, ethics, generosity, and wisdom.

What AN 4.55 supplies

The preceding discourse, already published on this site, gives the occasion. The Buddha goes for alms to the house of Nakula’s father in the land of the Bhaggas, and the householder and his wife each say the same thing: since they were married young, neither can recall betraying the other even in thought, and they want to see each other in this life and the next.

The answer given there is the sentence that constitutes this discourse. Everything else in AN 4.56 — the couple, the request, the verses about speaking pleasantly and living at ease — is abbreviated away.

So this page is not a substitute for AN 4.55 and does not try to be. What it can do is look at the instruction on its own, which the abbreviation makes possible.

Four things to match

Saddhā, sīla, cāga, paññā — faith, ethics, generosity, wisdom. The set appears throughout the collection as a description of a well-formed lay life, and it is worth knowing independently of this context.

Faith is orientation; ethics is conduct; generosity is what one does with what one has; wisdom is understanding. Between them they cover what a person believes, how they behave, how they hold their property, and what they see — which is close to an exhaustive description of the things two people sharing a household could differ about in ways that matter.

Note that affection is not on the list, and neither is compatibility of temperament. Nakula’s parents already had those; what they were told to attend to was something else.

‘Equals’

Samasaddhā samasīlā samacāgā samapaññā — of equal faith, equal ethics, equal generosity, equal wisdom. The word is sama, same or equal, prefixed to each item.

The claim is about matching, not about level. The discourse does not say the couple must be highly developed in these four; it says they must be alike in them. That is a different and more interesting instruction, and it is consistent with the four-cell grid of AN 4.53 and 4.54, where the two problem cases were precisely the mismatched ones.

Read together the three discourses make a coherent claim about shared life: what causes trouble is difference in these four, and what makes a marriage work as a spiritual arrangement is not that both partners are good but that they are the same.

‘See each other in the next life’

The stated goal is aññamaññaṁ passitukāmā, wanting to see one another — in this life and in the life to come. The mechanism assumed is that beings of similar faith, ethics, generosity, and wisdom are reborn in similar destinations.

It is worth being clear that this is what the discourse says and that it is a claim about rebirth, not a metaphor. A reader who does not hold that framework can still take the instruction — matching in these four is good advice for a shared life on any view — but should not be told that the discourse means something other than what it says.

It is also, in its way, a tender text. The request that prompted it was not for liberation or for merit but to stay together, and the answer takes the request seriously and answers it in its own terms.

Why the abbreviated version was kept

The same three reasons that applied to AN 4.46 apply here: provenance is already established by AN 4.55, so what this adds is audience and a slot in the chapter of ten.

There is one further point specific to this pair. AN 4.55 is a discourse to two named people about their own marriage. AN 4.56 is the same instruction addressed to mendicants with no couple in view, which converts it from advice into a general principle. The collection has kept both the case and the rule, and it is the rule that this discourse is.

Key terms