Living with Divinity

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The titles a brahmin reserves for the highest beings belong to your mother and father.

Brahmā and what is being done with it

Sabrahmakāni tāni kulāni — those households are ‘with Brahmā’. Sujato renders Brahmā as ‘Divinity’ throughout his translation, which keeps the word functioning as a title rather than a name.

In the brahminical religion of the period Brahmā is the supreme being and the source of the cosmos, and the entire priestly caste takes its name and its authority from the relation. Saying that Brahmā is a term for your parents is not a compliment to parents. It is a claim about where the highest thing actually is.

The canon does this repeatedly with brahminical vocabulary — AN 4.5 called the arahant a brahmin, AN 4.22 redefined ‘senior’ against the elderly brahmins. This is the same operation performed on the word for God.

The four titles

Brahmā, divinity. Pubbācariya, first tutors — the teachers one had before any others. Pubbadeva, elder or former gods. Āhuneyya, worthy of offerings dedicated to the gods.

The four are not synonyms. The first is about supremacy; the second about priority in time; the third about the class of being one belongs to; the fourth about ritual entitlement — specifically, being a proper recipient of the āhuna, the oblation that would otherwise go to a deity.

The fourth is the sharpest in its own context. It says that what a household would offer to the gods is properly offered to the two people living in it.

The reason given

One sentence, and it is not religious: Parents are very helpful to their children, they raise them, nurture them, and show them the world.

Three things: bahukārā, very helpful; āpādakā posakā, raisers and nurturers; imassa lokassa dassetāro, showers of this world. The last is the one worth pausing on. Parents are the people who introduced you to the world — not metaphorically, but as the first interpreters of everything in it.

That is the whole argument. The titles are earned by having done something, which is consistent with how this collection assigns status generally: AN 4.22 gave seniority to conduct rather than age, and this gives divinity to those who did the work of raising someone.

What honoring looks like

The verses are concrete and slightly startling in their ordinariness: honor them with food and drink, clothes and bedding, by anointing and bathing, and by washing their feet.

The list is entirely physical care of a body. Nothing about obedience, deference, or reverence in the abstract — feeding, clothing, bedding, washing. It is a description of looking after someone who can no longer look after themselves.

Washing the feet is the detail to keep. In this culture it was the service offered to an honored guest on arrival, and it is also the most menial thing on the list. The verse puts the two together deliberately.

Reading it now

The discourse transfers directly and needs almost no adjustment, which is unusual for material of this age. What it asks for is care of aging parents, and what it offers in return is a redescription: the household in which that happens has the highest thing there is living in it.

The one honest note to add is that the discourse does not qualify the obligation. It says nothing about parents who harmed their children, and a teacher working with people whose family histories are difficult should not present the text as though it had addressed that. AN 4.4 named acting rightly toward parents as one of four grave categories; neither discourse considers the case where the parents were the ones acting wrongly.

What can be said is that the reason given here is specific — they raised you and showed you the world — and that a reason of that shape can be examined in a particular case, which a bare obligation could not.

Key terms