Right View

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

The trainee has the eight path factors; the one who has finished has ten.

The eight and the ten

The confirmed ascetic has right view, purpose, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and immersion — the noble eightfold path.

The white and pink lotus ascetics have those eight plus sammāñāṇa, right knowledge, and sammāvimutti, right freedom.

The tenfold path is standard in the canon but much less familiar than the eightfold, and the two additional factors are not additional practices. They are what the eight arrive at: the knowledge that the work is done, and the freedom itself.

So the difference between the first title and the second two is the difference between having the path and having completed it. The eight are the road; the last two are having got there and knowing it.

Why the tenfold path matters

It resolves a question the eightfold path leaves open, and the question is real: if right view is the first factor, what is the difference between the view of a beginner and the view of an arahant?

The tenfold scheme answers by adding terms rather than by grading the existing ones. Right view stays right view; what the arahant has in addition is knowledge and freedom, which are not on the beginner’s list at all.

The scheme also makes the path a description of a completed thing rather than only a set of instructions. Eight factors are what one does; ten factors are what a finished practitioner has. A reader who has met only the eightfold path has met the instructions and not the description.

The two lotuses again

As in AN 4.87, the two lotuses differ only in whether they have direct meditative experience of the eight liberations. Both have the ten path factors.

That consistency across the group is worth noting. Whatever else changes between the four versions, the distinction between white and pink lotus is the same in AN 4.87, AN 4.89, and AN 4.90: the eight liberations, present or absent, in someone who is otherwise complete.

Only AN 4.88 does something different, making the two lotuses the once-returner and non-returner. That version is the outlier on this point, and a reader comparing the four should notice that three of them agree.

The fourth title, abbreviated

The delicate ascetic is given by pointing: usually uses only what they’ve been invited to accept … And if anyone should be rightly called a delicate ascetic of ascetics, it’s me.

The Pāli abbreviates AN 4.87’s full definition to its first clause and its last, keeping the first-person claim. A reciter supplies the middle.

That the first-person claim survives the abbreviation is informative. Of everything in AN 4.87’s long fourth definition, the part the compilers kept when compressing is the sentence in which the Buddha applies the title to himself. It is evidently what the title is for.

Reading the group so far

Three of the four versions are now in place. The pattern that emerges is that the two lotus titles are stable — two arahants distinguished by the eight liberations — while the first title moves: a trainee in AN 4.87, a stream-enterer in AN 4.88, someone with the eightfold path here.

Those three are compatible. A person with the eight path factors who is aspiring to the goal and has entered the stream is one person described three ways.

What AN 4.90 will add is a fourth description of the same, and its distinctive contribution is to define the lotuses by what they are actually doing rather than by what they have attained.

Key terms