Reading guide
The teaching in one sentence
Formless states are more peaceful than states of form, and cessation is more peaceful than formless states — a plain ranking, stated once, with no elaboration in the prose itself.
A companion to the previous discourse
Iti 72 named renunciation, formlessness, and cessation as three separate escapes, each from a different kind of entanglement. This discourse takes two of those same terms — form and formlessness — and cessation, and ranks them instead of listing them: form is peaceful, formlessness is more peaceful, cessation is most peaceful of all. Where the previous discourse asked what each state escapes from, this one asks how settled each state actually is. Read together, the two discourses build a fuller picture of the same territory from two different angles.
Two ways to fall short, named in the verse
The verse describes two kinds of beings who stop short of cessation: “beings in the realm of luminous form,” and “others stuck in the formless.” Both groups, the verse says, return in future lives — not because they have done anything wrong, but because they have not understood cessation itself. Even the formless attainments, peaceful as they are, are not the end of the line. Only those who understand form fully, are not stuck in the formless, and are released in cessation are called, in a striking phrase, “conquerors of death.”
“The sorrowless, stainless state”
The final stanza names who teaches this: “the fully awakened Buddha,” described as having “directly experienced the element free of death” and having “realized relinquishment of attachments.” The verse closes by naming what is taught — “the sorrowless, stainless state” — rather than describing the practice that leads there. As with the rest of this set, no narrative frame surrounds any of it; the discourse simply states its ranking and its consequence.
Key terms
The text
§1This was said by the Buddha, the Perfected One: that is what I heard.
§2“Mendicants, formless states are more peaceful than states of form; cessation is more peaceful than formless states.” The Buddha spoke this matter. On this it is said:
§3“There are beings in the realm of luminous form,
and others stuck in the formless.
Not understanding cessation,
they return in future lives.
§4But the people who completely understand form,
not stuck in the formless,
released in cessation—
they are conquerors of death.
§5Having directly experienced the element free of death,
free of attachments;
having realized relinquishment
of attachments, the undefiled
fully awakened Buddha teaches
the sorrowless, stainless state.”
§6This too is a matter that was spoken by the Blessed One: that is what I heard.
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