Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Four positions on self and others, ranked, with practising for both at the top and practising for oneself alone above practising for others alone.
The firebrand
Chavālāta is the brand used to light a funeral pyre — a piece of wood burning at both ends and smeared with dung in the middle. It cannot be used as timber in the village or in the wilderness.
The image is precise about a specific kind of uselessness. The wood is not merely unused; it has been rendered unusable at both ends and fouled in between. There is nothing left of it that anyone could want.
That is the person who practises for neither. Not wicked, not dangerous — useless, in both of the places a thing can be useful. The village and the wilderness in this literature are the lay world and the monastic one.
The ranking, and why it is uncomfortable
The individual who practices to benefit others, but not themselves, is better than that. The individual who practices to benefit themselves, but not others, is better than both of those.
Modern readers commonly find this backwards, and the reaction is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. The instinct that helping others should rank above helping oneself is not foolish.
The discourse’s logic, which it does not state, has to be reconstructed from the next discourse. AN 4.96 defines practising for oneself as removing one’s own greed, hate, and delusion, and practising for others as encouraging others to remove theirs. On those definitions the ranking is less strange: someone who has actually removed greed, hate, and delusion has done something real, and someone who exhorts others while doing nothing themselves has not.
It is still a ranking and it should be stated as one. The collection does not say the two are equal or that the comparison is meaningless. It says that of the two partial cases, the one who has done the work on themselves is the better.
What it does not say
Three things, and each is worth stating because each is regularly attributed to this discourse.
It does not say practising for others is bad. It ranks that person second of four, above the firebrand.
It does not say one should practise for oneself alone. The top position is unambiguously both, and the ghee simile is spent entirely on that fourth person.
And it does not say the two are in tension. Nothing in the discourse suggests that effort spent on others is taken from oneself. The four cells are a description of what occurs, not a budget.
The cream of ghee
From a cow comes milk, from milk curds, from curds butter, from butter ghee, and from ghee sappimaṇḍa, the cream or essence of ghee — said to be the best of these.
The simile is one of the canon’s most-used and it does something specific: it describes a series in which each stage is derived from the one before and the last is the finest. Nothing is discarded; the cream of ghee is what the milk becomes.
Applied here, the person who practises for both is not a different kind of person from the other three but the refinement of what they are partially. That is a gentler picture than the ranking on its own gives, and the discourse puts the two side by side.
The same simile is used elsewhere for the Dhamma among teachings and for the arahant among persons, and it always carries the same claim: a sequence of derivations ending in an essence.
The five superlatives
The fourth individual is called foremost, best, chief, highest, and finest — five terms where one would do.
That piling of superlatives is how this collection marks something it considers settled. AN 4.34 did the same with agga repeated through every clause. The effect in recitation is emphasis; the effect on the page is a slight excess that a reader should recognize as a convention rather than as argument.
The next four discourses — AN 4.96 through AN 4.99 — take these same four individuals and define them four different ways, exactly as AN 4.87 through AN 4.90 did with the four ascetics. This chapter and the last are the collection’s two clearest demonstrations of that method.
Key terms
The text
Four individuals
§1“Mendicants, these four individuals are found in the world. What four? One who practices to benefit neither themselves nor others; one who practices to benefit others, but not themselves; one who practices to benefit themselves, but not others; and one who practices to benefit both themselves and others.
The firebrand
§2Suppose there was a firebrand for lighting a funeral pyre, burning at both ends, and smeared with dung in the middle. It couldn’t be used as timber either in the village or the wilderness. The individual who practices to benefit neither themselves nor others is like this, I say.
The ranking
§3The individual who practices to benefit others, but not themselves, is better than that. The individual who practices to benefit themselves, but not others, is better than both of those. But the individual who practices to benefit both themselves and others is the foremost, best, chief, highest, and finest of the four.
The cream of ghee
§4From a cow comes milk, from milk comes curds, from curds come butter, from butter comes ghee, and from ghee comes cream of ghee. And the cream of ghee is said to be the best of these. In the same way, the individual who practices to benefit both themselves and others is the foremost, best, chief, highest, and finest of the four. These are the four individuals found in the world.”
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