Food

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The rule, without occasion or elaboration: a giver of food gives four things.

The word that changed

AN 4.57 and 4.58 both said ariyasāvako, a noble disciple, gives food. This discourse says dāyako, a donor.

That is the only substantive difference and it is worth noticing. The two earlier discourses were addressed to people who were themselves noble disciples and described what such a person does. Stated as a general rule, the qualification drops away and the claim widens: anyone who gives food gives these four.

Whether that widening is deliberate or an artifact of abbreviation cannot be settled from the text. What can be said is that the mechanism supports the wider version. The four things are what food does to a body, and food does that regardless of the giver’s attainments.

The three stages

The sequence is now complete. AN 4.57: Suppavāsā serves a meal in her own house and is told what she has given, with a narrative setting and two verses. AN 4.58: Anāthapiṇḍika comes and is told the same, with the narrative reduced to one line and different verses adding conditions. AN 4.59: the bare statement, addressed to nobody in particular.

Twenty-six segments, then eighteen, then three. The collection has preserved a teaching at three degrees of abstraction and put them in descending order.

That ordering is itself informative. The Aṅguttara does not begin with the principle and illustrate it; it begins with the occasion and works outward. A reader who wants to know what a teaching is for is generally better served by the first version in a sequence than the last.

Why the bare form is useful

It would be easy to treat this discourse as the residue of the other two. It has a use of its own.

A statement with no person in it can be applied to any person. The moment Suppavāsā is in the frame, a reader can wonder whether the teaching depends on her being who she was — foremost among laywomen who give what is excellent, serving the Buddha himself, with her own hands, in her own house. Every one of those particulars is a reason to think the case is special.

AN 4.59 removes all of them. What is left is the mechanism, and the mechanism is what transfers.

What is abbreviated

Everything after the list of four. In the fuller versions this would be the reciprocal statement — giving long life, one has long life as a god or human, and so for the other three — and then the verses.

A reciter encountering this discourse would supply that expansion from AN 4.57. The written text preserves the head of the passage and marks the rest as understood, which is the same convention as AN 4.46, AN 4.54, and AN 4.56 in this chapter alone.

By this point in the Fours the convention is running at a high density, and it is worth recognizing what that indicates: the chapter was compiled by people who expected its discourses to be known as a set rather than read individually.

Closing the food sequence

One discourse remains in the chapter. AN 4.60 returns to Anāthapiṇḍika and gives the four requisites — robes, almsfood, lodgings, medicines — as the content of lay practice, which brings the chapter back to where AN 4.51 began.

The Puññābhisandavagga is the most coherent chapter of the Fours so far. It opens with the four requisites as occasions of merit, runs through the four factors of stream-entry, the four kinds of marriage, the four things a couple should match in, and the four gifts in food, and closes with the four requisites again as the definition of lay practice. It is a chapter for householders, arranged as one.

Key terms