Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Four combinations of where a person is and where they are going, with the two independent of each other.
The change of metaphor
AN 4.85 used tama and joti, darkness and light. This uses oṇata and uṇṇata — bent down and raised up, sunk and elevated.
The height metaphor is the better of the two for the argument being made, and it is worth saying why. Light and dark are qualities a thing has; high and low are positions a thing is in. The second is more obviously changeable, and the scheme is entirely about change of position.
The verbs reinforce it. Not ‘is low and becomes low’ but oṇatoṇata, sunk-and-sinking — the second term is a movement rather than a state. Each of the four labels is a position plus a direction.
What the abbreviation leaves
The Pāli gives the four labels and then …, expecting the reciter to supply AN 4.85’s definitions with the new terms substituted. Sujato preserves the gap.
The effect on a reader working from the page is accidental but real. Stripped of the descriptions of corpse-workers, deformity, gold, and beauty, what remains is a bare claim: a person’s current position does not determine their direction, and all four combinations occur.
That is the argument of AN 4.85 without the period material it was originally carried in. A teacher who wants the point rather than the social detail can use this discourse and lose nothing of the reasoning.
Where the labels can be applied
Because the definitions are absent, the four labels are not tied to birth and wealth here. Nothing in the discourse as it stands specifies what ‘sunk low’ means.
It is worth being honest that this is a consequence of abbreviation rather than a decision by the compilers. The intended content is AN 4.85’s, and a reader should know that.
But the grid does transfer, and its transferability is why it recurs. Any situation with a current position and a direction of travel has these four cells, and the observation that the two are independent is not specific to birth. It applies to a practice, a community, an institution, or a life.
The four as a set of expectations
The useful thing about a four-cell grid of this kind is that it names the cells people tend not to expect.
Sunk low and sinking lower, and risen high and rising higher, are the outcomes intuition predicts — things continue as they are going. The other two are the ones that surprise, and the discourse gives them equal standing.
Both AN 4.85 and this discourse spend their structure insisting on the mixed cases. That is the same move AN 4.53 made about marriages and AN 4.78 about gifts: refuse to let a situation have one character, and name the combinations.
Closing the first half
This discourse ends the Macalavagga’s first half. What follows — AN 4.87 through AN 4.90 — is a single set of four titles given four different definitions, which is the largest exercise of that kind in the Fours so far.
The chapter is named after the first of those titles: samaṇamacala, the confirmed ascetic. So the Macalavagga takes its name from its second half, and the four hell-and-heaven discourses and the two grids are what precedes it.
That is a normal way for these chapters to be assembled. The name comes from a distinctive term somewhere in the chapter, not from a theme running through it.
Key terms
The text
Four individuals
§1“These four individuals are found in the world. What four? One sunk low who sinks lower, one sunk low who rises high, one risen high who sinks low, and one risen high who rises higher. … These are the four individuals found in the world.”
Self-check quiz
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