Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Gain, honor, and popularity destroyed Devadatta, the way fruit destroys the plant that bore it.
The setting and what it dates
Devadatta was the Buddha’s cousin, a senior monk of real attainment, who eventually attempted to take over the Saṅgha, made three attempts on the Buddha’s life, and left with a body of followers. The canon treats the episode at length in the Vinaya.
Acirapakkante devadatte — not long after Devadatta had left. This discourse is placed immediately after the schism and is spoken on Vulture’s Peak, the mountain from which, in the Vinaya account, Devadatta rolled a stone at him.
That placement matters for how the discourse reads. It is not a general warning illustrated by an example. It is what was said about a specific person, recently, by someone who had known him for a long time.
The named cause
Lābhasakkārasiloka — possessions, honor, and popularity. The compound recurs throughout the canon as the standing danger to a religious life, and AN 4.25 named it among the things the spiritual life is not lived for.
What is claimed here is not that Devadatta wanted these things and therefore fell. It is that they came to him — udapādi, arose — for his ruin. The grammar makes the gain the agent.
That is worth pressing on, because it is a genuinely uncomfortable claim. Devadatta was successful. He had a royal patron in Ajātasattu, a following, and a reputation. The discourse says that receiving these was what destroyed him, and it does not add a condition about how he received them.
AN 4.43 and 4.44, in the previous chapter, gave the mechanism: someone who values possessions and honor above the teaching does not grow in it. This discourse is that diagnosis applied to a named case.
The four similes
A banana plant, a bamboo, a reed — all of which bear fruit to their own ruin — and a mule, which becomes pregnant to its own ruin.
The three plants share a real botanical fact: bamboos and many reeds are monocarpic, flowering once and then dying, and a banana stem dies after fruiting. The simile is not poetic invention; it names something the audience could see in a field.
The mule is different and harsher. A mule is sterile, and a pregnancy in one was understood to be fatal to the animal. Where the plants die from doing what they are for, the mule dies from doing something it should not be able to do at all.
That escalation across the four is the point of having four. Success can kill you because it is the natural end of your growth, or because it is something you were never built to carry. The verse keeps both: honor destroys a reprobate, as pregnancy destroys a mule.
‘A reprobate’
The verse’s word for the person destroyed is kāpurisa — a bad or contemptible man, the opposite of the sappurisa, the true person, who runs through this collection.
That qualification is doing work and it should not be skipped. The verse does not say honor destroys everyone. It says honor destroys a kāpurisa, which leaves open the case of someone who receives it and is not destroyed.
So the discourse is not a blanket claim that success is fatal to a religious life. It is a claim that success is fatal to a certain kind of person, and that the kind is not always visible until the success arrives. That is the more useful reading and it is the one the verse supports.
Teaching it
The obvious difficulty is that the discourse is about a person the tradition treats as its great villain, and villain narratives are not usually good material for self-examination. The useful move is to hold on to what the discourse does not say.
It does not say Devadatta was always going to do this. It does not say he lacked attainment — the canon credits him with psychic powers. It does not say his followers were fools. It names one thing that came to him and destroyed him, and that thing is available to anyone who is any good at what they do.
Read that way the discourse is not about a villain. It is about what happens to a capable person who succeeds, and it is placed in a chapter otherwise concerned with lay prosperity, immediately after a discourse on the four kinds of person one might be.
Key terms
The text
Not long after Devadatta had left
§1At one time the Buddha was staying near Rājagaha, on the Vulture’s Peak Mountain, not long after Devadatta had left. There the Buddha spoke to the mendicants about Devadatta: “Possessions, honor, and popularity came to Devadatta for his own ruin and downfall.
The similes
§2It’s like a banana plant, or a bamboo, or a reed, all of which bear fruit to their own ruin and downfall … It’s like a mule, which becomes pregnant to its own ruin and downfall. In the same way, possessions, honor, and popularity came to Devadatta for his own ruin and downfall.
The verse
§3The banana plant is destroyed by its own fruit, as are the bamboo and the reed. Honor destroys a reprobate, as pregnancy destroys a mule.”
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