Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Four efforts — to prevent, to abandon, to arouse, and to maintain — each defined by the same act of generating enthusiasm and striving.
The same names, a different set
AN 4.14, fifty-five discourses earlier, gave saṁvara, pahāna, bhāvanā, anurakkhaṇā and defined them as sense restraint, dropping bad thoughts, developing the awakening factors, and guarding a meditation subject.
This discourse gives the identical four names and defines them by the arisen/unarisen, skillful/unskillful grid: preventing bad qualities from arising, giving up those that have arisen, arousing skillful ones, and maintaining those that have arisen so that they increase and mature.
This second set is the sammappadhāna, the four right efforts of the eightfold path and the thirty-seven aids to awakening. It is the standard one, and it is what a reader who has met ‘four right efforts’ elsewhere will have met.
The two sets are not variants of each other. AN 4.14 organizes by activity; this organizes by a logical partition. That the collection uses the same four labels for both is a fact about its vocabulary rather than a doctrinal claim, and a reader who assumes one set when the other is meant will misread whichever discourse they are in.
The formula
Chandaṁ janeti vāyamati vīriyaṁ ārabhati cittaṁ paggaṇhāti padahati — generates enthusiasm, tries, makes an effort, exerts the mind, and strives. Five verbs, identical in all four definitions.
The first is the one worth teaching. Chanda is desire, wish, enthusiasm — and it is generated deliberately, as the first move. The tradition distinguishes it sharply from taṇhā, craving: chanda is the wish to do, and it is a component of right effort rather than an obstacle to it.
That distinction resolves a question students raise constantly — whether wanting awakening is itself a problem. The formula answers by making the generating of enthusiasm the first of five steps in every one of the four efforts.
The remaining four verbs are effectively synonymous and their function is cumulative. The formula is not a sequence of techniques; it is a single act described five times, which is how this literature indicates intensity.
The fourth effort
The definition of the fourth is longer than the other three: striving so that skillful qualities that have arisen remain, are not lost, but increase, mature, and are fulfilled by development.
Five verbs again, and they describe a trajectory: not losing, then increasing, then maturing, then completion. What is being asked for is not maintenance in the sense of holding steady but continuation of growth.
That is worth noticing against the ordinary English word ‘maintain’. The effort named here is not conservation. A skillful quality that has arisen and stayed the same has not satisfied this definition.
Why the grid is complete
Two variables — arisen or not, skillful or not — produce four cells, and the four efforts fill all of them. Unarisen bad: prevent. Arisen bad: abandon. Unarisen good: arouse. Arisen good: maintain and develop.
The completeness is the point. There is no state of affairs in which none of the four applies, which means the set functions as a description of what effort is rather than as a list of occasions for it.
It also means the four are not sequential and not ranked. At any moment all four are available, and which one is operating is determined by what is currently present.
The verse, and a shared line
The verse is identical to AN 4.14’s: Restraint and giving up, development and preservation: these are the four efforts taught by the Kinsman of the Sun. Any mendicant who keenly applies these may attain the ending of suffering.
Word for word the same four lines closing two discourses with different content. That is the clearest possible demonstration of the point this page has been making: the labels are shared, the summary verse is shared, and the definitions are not.
A reciter would have one verse for both. A reader working from the page should keep the definitions apart, and the simplest way is by the fourth item: corpse contemplations belong to AN 4.14, and growth of arisen skillful qualities belongs here.
Key terms
The text
The effort to restrain
§1“Mendicants, there are these four efforts. What four? The efforts to restrain, to give up, to develop, and to preserve. And what, mendicants, is the effort to restrain? It’s when you generate enthusiasm, try, make an effort, exert the mind, and strive so that bad, unskillful qualities don’t arise. This is called the effort to restrain.
The effort to give up
§2And what, mendicants, is the effort to give up? It’s when you generate enthusiasm, try, make an effort, exert the mind, and strive so that bad, unskillful qualities are given up. This is called the effort to give up.
The effort to develop
§3And what, mendicants, is the effort to develop? It’s when you generate enthusiasm, try, make an effort, exert the mind, and strive so that skillful qualities arise. This is called the effort to develop.
The effort to preserve
§4And what, mendicants, is the effort to preserve? It’s when you generate enthusiasm, try, make an effort, exert the mind, and strive so that skillful qualities that have arisen remain, are not lost, but increase, mature, and are fulfilled by development. This is called the effort to preserve. These are the four efforts.
The verse
§5Restraint and giving up, development and preservation: these are the four efforts taught by the Kinsman of the Sun. Any mendicant who keenly applies these may attain the ending of suffering.”
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