Sāmaññavagga — the tenth chapter of the Eights, closing with an entire chapter's teaching reduced to a list of names
Setting
None stated in the source
Speakers
The Buddha alone, addressing the mendicants
Form
A single peyyāla-compressed line naming twenty-seven laywomen in turn, each receiving (by implication) the identical eight-factored sabbath teaching already spelled out in full earlier in this book
Length
a few seconds to read the compressed text; the underlying teaching it stands for takes several minutes, as at AN 8.42
An entire chapter reduced to a name list
This chapter's own name, Sāmaññavagga (“the Chapter on Similarity”), names exactly what's happening structurally: twenty-seven otherwise separate discourses, similar enough in content to be compressed into one
Difficulty
★☆☆☆☆ — the compressed text itself is trivial to read; its significance lies entirely in what it stands for
Why this discourse
AN 8.91–117 compresses twenty-seven separate discourses — each one, by implication, an instance of the eight-factored sabbath teaching already given in full at AN 8.41–45 and 47–49 — into a single line naming twenty-seven laywomen in turn, from Bojjhā through Nakula's mother, several of them well known elsewhere in this tradition.
Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The same eight-factored sabbath already taught in full to Visākhā, Bojjhā, and others earlier in this book was, according to this peyyāla, taught identically to twenty-seven named laywomen in all, the source compressing all twenty-seven repetitions into a single chain of names rather than restating the teaching twenty-seven times over.
A chapter named for what it does structurally
This chapter's own title, Sāmaññavagga, means “the Chapter on Similarity” — and that title describes its own compression method as much as its content: twenty-seven discourses similar enough to each other that bilara-data's source itself holds them as a single merged file, the entire content peyyāla-compressed to nothing but the addressee list.
Twenty-seven names, some famous, most otherwise unrecorded
The list moves from largely unknown figures — Sirīmā, Padumā, Sutanā, Manujā, and many more — to several names this tradition remembers well: Visākhā, Migāra's mother, already met repeatedly earlier in this book; Khujjuttarā, celebrated elsewhere as a formerly enslaved woman who became a renowned Dhamma teacher; Sāmāvatī, a queen; Suppavāsā the Koliyan, known elsewhere for an unusually long pregnancy; and Nakula's mother, already met at AN 8.48.
A colophon that closes the Second Fifty here, not after the Rāgapeyyāla that follows
The source's own closing line after this chapter reads “the Second Fifty is finished” — even though AN 8.118–627, the Rāgapeyyāla, still follows numerically. This is worth noting honestly rather than smoothed over: it suggests the traditional “Second Fifty” label applies specifically to AN 8.51–117, with the enormous Rāgapeyyāla appended afterward as its own closing section — a different structural pattern than AN 6 and AN 7, where the Rāgapeyyāla's own colophon closed the entire nipāta directly.
Key terms
sāmaññavaggo — “the Chapter on Similarity” — this chapter's own title, naming its structural method as much as any shared content.
bojjhā upāsikā ... nakulamātā gahapatānī — the compressed chain of twenty-seven names opening with the laywoman Bojjhā, whose own sabbath teaching was already given in full at AN 8.45, and closing with the housewife Nakula's mother, already met earlier in this book at AN 8.48 (a different teaching, on the eight wifely qualities leading to rebirth among the Agreeable Gods).
khujjuttarā upāsikā — the laywoman Khujjuttarā, remembered elsewhere in this tradition as a formerly enslaved woman who became a celebrated Dhamma teacher in her own right.
suppavāsā koliyadhītā — “Suppavāsā the Koliyan” — remembered elsewhere for an unusually extended pregnancy, one of several named figures in this list with a fuller story told in other discourses.
dutiyo paṇṇāsako samatto — “the Second Fifty is finished” — the source's own closing colophon after this chapter, despite the Rāgapeyyāla still following at AN 8.118–627.
The text
The discourse in full: the compressed chain of twenty-seven laywomen's names, standing for twenty-seven repetitions of the eight-factored sabbath teaching given in full earlier in this book. Translation: Bhikkhu Sujato (CC0, SuttaCentral).
Twenty-seven laywomen, compressed to a single line
