Best (1st)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The four of the training are each the best of their kind.

The list, and where it came from

Aggaṁ sīlaṁ, aggo samādhi, aggā paññā, aggā vimutti — best ethics, best immersion, best wisdom, best freedom. These are the four of AN 4.1, the discourse that opened the Fours.

There they were the four things not understood, on account of which the Buddha and his listeners had wandered so long. Here they are named as best, with no context and no argument.

A reader who has come through the chapter in order will have met these four several times: AN 4.1, AN 4.2 as the criterion for being inside the training, AN 4.21 as what the newly awakened Buddha searched for someone more accomplished in. This discourse adds nothing to them except a superlative.

What agga is doing

Agga is best, foremost, highest, and AN 4.34 used it four times in a much longer discourse: the Buddha best of beings, the eightfold path best of conditioned things, fading away best of all things, the Saṅgha best of communities.

There each superlative had a stated class: best among something. Here none of the four does. It is not said that this ethics is the best of ethics or that this wisdom is the best of wisdoms, only that these four are best.

Two readings are available. On the first, a class is implied — the noble ethics of AN 4.1 is the best kind of ethics, as against ordinary virtue. On the second, the four are being named as the best things there are, full stop, in the way AN 4.34 named fading away.

The Pāli does not settle it and this page will not either. What can be said is that the first reading makes the discourse a repetition of AN 4.1 with emphasis, and the second makes it a claim about value that AN 4.1 did not make.

Why such a discourse exists

It is fair to ask what a four-line discourse consisting of a familiar list plus one adjective is doing in the collection.

The answer is the same as for AN 4.19 and AN 4.59: it is a recitation unit. The Aṅguttara is organized so that a reciter can hold long sequences, and short discourses that state a known list under a new heading are how the material is indexed and retrieved.

The pairing with AN 4.75, which follows immediately with a completely different four under the identical frame, supports that reading. Two four-line discourses, same sentence, different lists — exactly the structure of AN 4.71 and AN 4.72 at the head of this chapter.

Reading it against AN 4.75

AN 4.75 gives: the best form, feeling, perception, and existence. That is a very different kind of list — four of the aggregates plus existence itself, none of which the collection generally treats as good.

Placed side by side the two discourses are strange. This one names the components of the training as best; the next names the components of what the training is for escaping as best. The pair cannot be read as making one point.

The most defensible account is that agga in AN 4.75 means highest of its kind — the finest available form, the finest feeling — which is the sense AN 4.16 gave with paramasokhumma, ultimate subtlety. On that reading AN 4.74 names what is best to have and AN 4.75 names the ceiling of what is available in each domain. They are answering different questions with the same adjective.

Using it

As a teaching text this discourse is a pointer rather than a lesson, and the useful move is to read it as an invitation to go back to AN 4.1 and see the four in their fuller form.

What it adds on its own is small but not nothing: it puts the four in the same vocabulary as the Buddha, the path, and the Saṅgha of AN 4.34. Whatever else that accomplishes, it places the training itself among the things the collection is willing to call best.

Key terms