Lifestyle

Reading guide

The teaching in one sentence

Living on alms is called “the last of lifestyles” — a station beneath which there is nowhere left to fall — and going forth into it only accomplishes anything if the person genuinely releases sensual craving and ill will along with lay life; a mendicant who keeps the robe but not the renunciation is like a funeral firebrand, too fouled for any ordinary use.

No story, only a warning

Nearly every discourse in the Itivuttaka forgoes the machinery familiar from the longer collections — no location is named, no listener is introduced, no question prompts the teaching. This one is typical of the form: it opens with the Buddha addressing “mendicants” in the abstract, and it closes the same way. Whatever occasion prompted it, if there was one, has not survived in this text; only the saying has. Readers used to the Majjhima or Digha Nikāyas, with their named towns and named interlocutors, should expect something plainer here — a saying meant to stand on its own.

The last of lifestyles

“This is the last of lifestyles, mendicants, namely relying on alms,” the discourse opens. “The world curses you: ‘You beggar, walking bowl in hand!’” There is no attempt to soften this. Alms-mendicancy is presented as the most exposed, least dignified livelihood available — and precisely because of that, the discourse insists, “earnest gentlemen take it up for a good reason.”

Right reasons and wrong reasons for going forth

The text is unusually specific about which motives don’t count: not to escape a summons by a king, not to escape a summons for a bandit, not because of debt, not out of fear, and not simply “in order to make a living.” The genuine motive, instead, is this: “I’m swamped by rebirth, old age, and death; by sorrow, lamentation, pain, sadness, and distress. I’m swamped by suffering, mired in suffering. Hopefully I can make an end to this entire mass of suffering.” Only that reason, the discourse implies, actually justifies taking up “the last of lifestyles.”

The firebrand no one can use

The discourse’s central image describes someone who has gone forth for the right reason but hasn’t followed through: they “covet sensual pleasures,” are “infatuated, full of ill will and malicious intent,” unmindful, with “straying minds and undisciplined faculties.” Such a person, the text says, is “like a firebrand for lighting a funeral pyre, burning at both ends, and smeared with dung in the middle” — unusable as timber whether in the village (that is, for lay purposes) or in the wilderness (for ascetic purposes). They’ve “missed out on the pleasures of the lay life,” the discourse concludes, “and haven’t fulfilled the goal of the ascetic life” — caught, in other words, between two worlds and serving neither.

Three verses, not one

Where many Itivuttaka discourses restate their point in a single closing quatrain, this one adds two further stanzas, extending rather than merely repeating the warning: one on wearers of the ocher cloth who remain “unrestrained and wicked” and are, on that account, “reborn in hell”; and a closing image — that it would be better for an immoral, unrestrained person to swallow a scorching iron ball than to eat alms food they have not, in the discourse’s terms, earned through genuine practice. It is worth being honest that this is a harsher and more extended close than the collection’s usual single-verse restatement, and it reads as a deliberate escalation rather than a gentler summary.

Key terms