It's Not Yours

Reading guide

An instruction stated before its justification

The discourse opens with the bare instruction: give up what isn't yours, and doing so will be for your welfare and happiness. This is stated for each aggregate in turn before any explanation is offered — the listener is told what to do first, and only then shown why.

A simile drawn from the immediate surroundings

Rather than reaching for an abstract comparison, the Buddha points directly at the physical setting: suppose someone carried off, burned, or otherwise did as they pleased with the grass, sticks, branches, and leaves scattered through Jeta's Grove — the very place where this teaching is being given. Would the mendicants think “this person is carrying us off, burning us”? The question is rhetorical, and the mendicants' own answer supplies the reasoning: no, because that material is “neither self nor belonging to self.”

The same logic applied directly to the aggregates

The discourse closes by mapping the simile back onto its target with no remaining gap: “in the same way, mendicants, form isn't yours: give it up.” The aggregates are placed in precisely the same category as the fallen leaves — something present, usable, and even valuable in its own way, but not something whose handling by outside forces constitutes an assault on a self.

A vagga named for its opening instruction, not its simile

Despite the vividness of the Jeta's Grove image, Natumhākavagga takes its name from the discourse's plainer opening phrase — “it's not yours” — rather than from the simile itself. This pattern (vagga named after a discourse's core claim rather than its most memorable illustration) recurs elsewhere in this saṃyutta, and is worth noting alongside Bhāravagga's own naming after SN 22.22's central image.

Key terms