Reading guide
Three faculties, three stages
The prose names three indriya (“faculties,” in the sense of a governing capacity, not a physical sense organ) with names built almost entirely from grammar rather than everyday vocabulary: anaññātaññassāmītindriya, roughly “the faculty of [knowing] ‘I shall come to know the unknown’”; aññindriya, “the faculty of enlightenment” or final knowledge; and aññātāvindriya, “the faculty of one who has known.” Traditionally these three are explained as marking three positions along a single path: a trainee still working toward realization, a trainee who has arrived at it, and one for whom the work is entirely finished.
A trainee’s confidence: “my freedom is unshakable”
The verse traces this arc in miniature. “As a trainee trains, following the straight road,” it begins — matching the first faculty’s forward-looking resolve — “first they know about ending; enlightenment follows without delay.” Then comes a shift in tense and certainty: knowledge comes “to such a one, freed through enlightenment,” who can say “my freedom is unshakable,” with the ending of the fetters that bind one to further existence. That phrase, “unshakable freedom,” echoes a formula used elsewhere in the canon to describe the settled certainty of full awakening — not a hope or a belief, but something the verse presents as simply known.
Final body, Māra vanquished
The closing stanza describes the condition that follows: “accomplished in the faculties, peaceful, in love with the state of peace, they bear their final body, having vanquished Māra with his legions.” “Final body” is a plain, physical way of saying there will be no further rebirth — this life’s body is the last one this person will ever have — and “vanquished Māra” casts that accomplishment as a kind of victory, the tempter’s forces defeated rather than merely outlasted.
The form itself
As with every discourse in this collection, Faculties opens with “This was said by the Buddha, the Perfected One: that is what I heard,” gives its teaching once in prose, restates and develops it across three verse stanzas, and closes with a near-mirror of its opening line. No place, occasion, or listener is named beyond the standing address “mendicants” — the discourse is content to let the teaching itself do all the work.
Key terms
The text
§1This was said by the Buddha, the Perfected One: that is what I heard.
The teaching
§2“Mendicants, there are these three faculties. What three? The faculty of understanding that enlightenment is imminent. The faculty of enlightenment. The faculty of one who is enlightened. These are the three faculties.” The Buddha spoke this matter. On this it is said:
The verse
§3“As a trainee trains, following the straight road, first they know about ending; enlightenment follows without delay.
§4Then the knowledge comes to such a one, freed through enlightenment, with the end of the fetters of continued existence: ‘My freedom is unshakable.’
§5Accomplished in the faculties, peaceful, in love with the state of peace, they bear their final body, having vanquished Māra with his legions.”
§6This too is a matter that was spoken by the Blessed One: that is what I heard.
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