Best (2nd)

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four things have a highest available grade, and the discourse names them without saying what the grades are.

Why the list is puzzling

Rūpa, vedanā, saññā, bhava — form, feeling, perception, existence. The first three are aggregates; the fourth is not, and its substitution for choices and consciousness is the first oddity.

The second is the evaluation. AN 4.10 named the yoke of future lives — bhavayoga — as one of four things binding a being to the round, and AN 4.1 said craving for continued existence had been cut off. Calling existence best sits oddly beside both.

It would be easy to resolve this by declaring the discourse corrupt or late. That is not warranted — the text is stable and the parallel structure with AN 4.74 is deliberate. The difficulty is real and belongs to the discourse.

The reading this page adopts

The most defensible account takes agga as ‘highest of its kind’: there is a finest available form, a finest feeling, a finest perception, and a highest available existence, and the discourse names those four ceilings.

On this reading the discourse is a cosmological and meditative observation rather than a recommendation. The formless attainments give the finest perception; the highest existence is the peak of the realms — traditionally the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception, called bhavagga, the summit of existence, in later literature.

That term is the strongest evidence for the reading. Bhavagga is a standing compound meaning the highest point of existence, and this discourse’s fourth item is exactly aggo bhavo. The discourse is naming the top of each scale.

AN 4.16 did the same thing with a different word: ultimate subtlety of form, feeling, perception, and choices, with the criterion that the practitioner sees nothing finer and does not aim for it. The two discourses are close relatives, and reading them together makes both easier.

Why naming the ceilings matters

If the reading is right, the discourse has a function that the bare list conceals. To know the top of a scale is to know that the scale is finite.

The Fours have said this repeatedly in other words. AN 4.15 named the record-holders for size, pleasure, and sovereignty and then declined to put the Buddha on the same scale. AN 4.33 had the long-lived gods discover they were included in sakkāya. AN 4.16 made not aiming for anything finer the mark of an endpoint.

Naming the best form and the best existence performs the same operation: it establishes that even the highest available instance of each is an instance, and therefore belongs to a class that can be seen whole. Nothing in the discourse says this. It is what the surrounding material makes available.

Being honest about the uncertainty

This page has given a reading and it should be clear that it is a reading. The discourse consists of one sentence, defines nothing, and offers no context.

Other accounts are possible. Agga might carry the same sense as in AN 4.74, making this a list of good things — which would require taking existence as good, and the collection does not support that. Or the four might be meant as objects of the analysis AN 4.10 applied to the yokes, in which case ‘best’ would be doing something the Pāli does not obviously say.

Where a text is this short, the responsible move is to give the most defensible reading, say that it is one, and point at the discourses that make it defensible. A study guide that presented a confident interpretation of four words would be misrepresenting how much the text supports.

Reading the pair

AN 4.74 and 4.75 should be read together and take under a minute. What they establish between them is that the collection uses agga for at least two different operations: naming what is most worth having, and naming the top of a scale.

That is a small piece of vocabulary information and it is worth having, because agga occurs throughout the Fours — in AN 4.15, AN 4.34, and both of these — and the two senses are not always signalled.

Key terms