Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
The same three searches named at Iti 54 — for sensual pleasures, for a good rebirth, for a spiritual path — are here bound together with “the holding tight to the thought ‘this is the truth’” and “the mass of grounds for views,” and it is only when both the searching and the dogmatism are relinquished that a mendicant is “free of hope and indecision.”
Searching and views, joined
Iti 54 treated searching largely on its own. Iti 55 draws an explicit line from searching to a second problem: fixed views. “The holding tight to the thought ‘this is the truth’” is a recognizable description of dogmatism — not having a view, but gripping it, insisting on it as uniquely correct. The verse pairs this with “the mass of grounds for views,” suggesting that unexamined searching and rigid view-holding are not separate problems but two expressions of the same underlying restlessness. Someone still searching for existence or for a path is exactly the kind of person likely to seize on a view and defend it as settled truth.
What is undone together
The second stanza describes one outcome unfolding in two matched halves: “that searching has been relinquished, and those grounds for views eradicated.” Neither is described as happening without the other. This is a notable structural choice — the discourse does not present ending views as a separate, later achievement after searching ends, but as arising together, for someone “detached from all lusts, freed by the ending of craving.”
A different ending than Iti 54
Iti 54 ended with the mendicant “hungerless, quenched” — the same phrase used for feeling and, later, for defilements. Iti 55 instead ends “free of hope and indecision,” a phrase that speaks directly to the condition of someone who has stopped searching for certainty in a particular thesis. Read side by side, the two Searches discourses suggest that ending the search for a spiritual path does not simply produce quiet contentment; it specifically produces freedom from the anxious back-and-forth of hoping some view is right and doubting whether it is.
Key terms
The text
§1This was said by the Buddha, the Perfected One: that is what I heard.
§2“Mendicants, there are these three searches. What three? The search for sensual pleasures, the search for continued existence, and the search for a spiritual path. These are the three searches.” The Buddha spoke this matter. On this it is said:
§3“The search for sensual pleasures, for a good rebirth,
and the search for a spiritual path;
the holding tight to the thought, ‘this is the truth’,
and the mass of grounds for views—
§4for one detached from all lusts,
freed by the ending of craving,
that searching has been relinquished,
and those grounds for views eradicated.
With the ending of searches, a mendicant
is free of hope and indecision.”
§5This too is a matter that was spoken by the Blessed One: that is what I heard.
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