From Darkness to Darkness

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Where a person starts and where they are going are independent, and only conduct decides the second.

What ‘dark’ and ‘light’ mean

The terms are tama and joti, darkness and light or radiance, and the discourse defines them by circumstances rather than by character.

Dark: born in a low family — the discourse names corpse-workers, bamboo-workers, hunters, chariot-makers, and scavengers — poor, with little food or drink, life hard; and ugly, deformed, sickly, without access to food, clothing, transport, adornment, or lighting.

Light: born in an eminent family of aristocrats, brahmins, or householders — rich, with gold, property, and grain; and attractive, of surpassing beauty, with access to all the same goods.

So the two terms cover birth, wealth, health, appearance, and consumption. They are a description of material and social position, and nothing in either description concerns what the person is like.

The descriptions are of their period

It should be said plainly that the specifics are those of a hierarchical society and that the discourse states them without argument. The occupations listed as low are listed as low; disability appears in the same clause as poverty; beauty appears in the same clause as wealth.

A modern reader is right to notice that this is a period description and not a revelation. The canon reflects the social world it was transmitted in, and this passage reflects it more visibly than most.

What can be said in the discourse’s favor is what it does with the material next, and it is not nothing.

The grid’s actual claim

Having built two elaborate descriptions of circumstance, the discourse makes them irrelevant to the outcome. In each of the four cells the only variable that decides the destination is the same sentence: they do bad things by way of body, speech, and mind, or they do good things by way of body, speech, and mind.

The corpse-worker who acts well goes to a heavenly realm. The wealthy brahmin who acts badly goes to hell. The two mixed cells exist precisely to make that point, and the discourse gives each of them the same space as the unmixed ones.

That is the operation being performed. The discourse takes the entire apparatus of birth and class, sets it out at length in the terms its audience would recognize, and then shows it doing no work at all in the thing that matters.

It is a limited kind of progress and it should be described as limited. The discourse does not question the hierarchy, does not suggest the corpse-worker’s poverty is unjust, and treats low birth as the result of past conduct elsewhere in the collection. What it does is deny that position determines destination.

Reading it against AN 4.5

AN 4.5, the stream discourse, also gave four individuals in a scheme. There the variables were internal — how far one had got against the current — and birth did not appear.

The two schemes are worth holding together because they answer different questions. AN 4.5 asked where a person is on the path. This asks whether where they started tells you anything about it, and answers no.

For a reader in difficult circumstances, this is the more useful of the two, and it is presumably why the scheme recurs. It says that the conditions a person did not choose are not the conditions that decide.

The next discourse

AN 4.86 gives the same fourfold structure in different words — sunk low sinking lower, sunk low rising high, risen high sinking low, risen high rising higher — and then abbreviates the definitions away entirely.

That abbreviation is informative. The compilers evidently considered the structure portable enough that a second version needed only new labels, which suggests the shape of the grid was the memorable part rather than the descriptions.

A reader who wants the argument rather than the period detail can take AN 4.86 and lose very little.

Key terms