The Son

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Four grades of practitioner, defined here by attainment and by conditions of life, with the highest claimed by the teacher himself.

The four titles

Samaṇamacala, the unshakable or confirmed ascetic. Samaṇapuṇḍarīka, the white lotus ascetic. Samaṇapaduma, the pink lotus ascetic. Samaṇesu samaṇasukhumāla, the delicate ascetic of ascetics.

The middle two use flower names, and the ranking follows Indian convention: the paduma, the pink or red lotus, ranks above the puṇḍarīka, the white one. A reader working from English alone will not know that the order is not alphabetical or arbitrary.

Sukhumāla, delicate, is the interesting one. It normally describes someone raised in luxury — the Buddha uses it of his own upbringing in the well-known passage about the three palaces — and it is not obviously a compliment. Its use here as the highest of four titles is deliberate and the discourse explains it.

The confirmed ascetic, and the prince

The first is a trainee who lives aspiring to the supreme sanctuary from the yoke, and the simile is the eldest son of an anointed king: not yet anointed himself, but eligible, and confirmed in the succession.

The word doing the work is macala, unshakable or unmoving, and the simile specifies what it means. The prince’s position is not an attainment; it is a settled fact about his future. Nothing further needs to happen for him to be next.

That is a precise image for the trainee. The confirmed ascetic has not arrived, and the arrival is nonetheless not in question. AN 4.71 called such a practice a sure bet; AN 4.76 said the last of five hundred mendicants was a stream-enterer, assured, destined for awakening. This is the same claim in a royal image.

The two lotuses

Both are arahants — both have realized the undefiled freedom of heart and freedom by wisdom in this very life. What separates them is a single clause: whether they have direct meditative experience of the eight liberations.

The eight liberations (vimokkha) are the sequence of formless and cessation attainments. The distinction is therefore between an arahant with the full range of meditative attainments and one without.

That distinction matters for a question students raise often: whether liberation requires the deep absorptions. The discourse’s answer is no — the white lotus is liberated without them — and it is also that the two are not equal, since the pink lotus ranks higher.

Reading it honestly, the collection recognizes both and ranks them, without suggesting the lower one is incomplete in what matters. Freedom is stated in identical words for both.

The delicate ascetic

The fourth definition is not about attainment at all, or not only. It is a description of a life: usually receiving requisites by invitation rather than having to ask; usually treated agreeably by companions in body, speech, and mind; usually given agreeable things; healthy, with the various unpleasant feelings from bile, phlegm, wind, weather, carelessness, overexertion, or past deeds not usually arising; the four absorptions at will; and the ending of defilements.

So the delicate ascetic is an arahant with jhāna whose external circumstances are also easy — well supported, well treated, and in good health. That is why the word for someone raised in luxury is the right one.

It is worth being honest that this is a strange thing to rank highest. Health and agreeable treatment are not attainments and not entirely within anyone’s control. What the discourse appears to be describing is not a higher realization but the most fortunate combination of realization and circumstance.

The list of causes of unpleasant feeling is worth noting on its own. Bile, phlegm, wind, their conjunction, weather, carelessness, overexertion, and past deeds — eight causes, of which past kamma is one among eight. That is a standing list in the canon and it is a useful corrective to the idea that this tradition attributes all illness to past action.

The first-person claim

And if anyone should be rightly called a delicate ascetic of ascetics, it’s me. The Buddha then runs through all five conditions in the first person.

The claim is unusual in its content rather than its manner. He has claimed attainment in the first person before — AN 4.8’s four assurances, AN 4.35 under protest. What is unusual here is claiming to be well fed, well treated, and healthy.

Read against AN 4.35, where he objected to Vassakāra putting such a claim in his mouth and then confirmed it anyway, the difference is that here the claim is volunteered. What he volunteers is not an attainment but a set of conditions, and the effect is to define the fourth title by pointing at himself rather than by describing a type.

The next three discourses will define the same four titles without any of this, which makes this version the outlier of the group and the one worth reading first.

Key terms