Reading guide
A shorter verse, a single question
Hāliddikāni returns to Mahākaccāna with a second brief statement, this time from “The Questions of Sakka”: ascetics and brahmins freed by the ending of craving have reached the ultimate goal, the ultimate sanctuary from the yoke, the ultimate spiritual life, the ultimate end, and are best among gods and humans. Unlike SN 22.3's four separate images, this verse poses one compressed claim, and Mahākaccāna's answer meets it with one compressed gloss.
The mind called "well freed"
Mahākaccāna's answer takes each aggregate in turn: consider any desire, greed, relishing, and craving for the form element, together with any attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendencies toward it. With the ending, fading away, cessation, giving up, and letting go of that whole cluster, the mind is said to be well freed. The same sentence then repeats for feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness — five aggregates, one recurring formula, one recurring verdict.
Two glosses of the same verb, side by side
Read together, SN 22.3 and SN 22.4 gloss two different things the Aṭṭhakavagga and its neighboring verse collections say about the freed mind: SN 22.3's verse described what such a person is not tied to (bastion, abode, town, expectation, argument); SN 22.4's verse describes what such a person has positively reached (the ultimate goal, sanctuary, spiritual life, end). Mahākaccāna's method stays constant across both: locate the aggregates underneath the verse's abstract praise or restraint, and show exactly what ending or absence of craving toward each one amounts to.
A borrowed verse, not an ordinary teaching
Both of Hāliddikāni's questions share a structure worth noticing: he does not ask Mahākaccāna to teach him something new, but to explain something the Buddha already said elsewhere, in a different collection, to a different audience (Māgandiya in one case, Sakka, king of the gods, in the other). This discourse and SN 22.3 together function as a small window onto how verses traveled between collections and got unpacked in prose by name disciples once removed from their original setting.
Key terms
The text
§1So I have heard. At one time Venerable Mahākaccāna was staying in the land of the Avantis near Kuraraghara on Steep Mountain. Then the householder Hāliddikāni went up to Venerable Mahākaccāna … and asked him, “Sir, this was said by the Buddha in ‘The Questions of Sakka’: ‘Those ascetics and brahmins who are freed due to the ending of craving have reached the ultimate goal, the ultimate sanctuary from the yoke, the ultimate spiritual life, the ultimate end, and are best among gods and humans.’ How should we see the detailed meaning of the Buddha’s brief statement?”
§2“Householder, consider any desire, greed, relishing, and craving for the form element; any attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendencies. With the ending, fading away, cessation, giving away, and letting go of that, the mind is said to be ‘well freed’.
§3Consider any desire, greed, relishing, and craving for the feeling element … the perception element … the choices element … the consciousness element; any attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendencies. With the ending, fading away, cessation, giving away, and letting go of that, the mind is said to be ‘well freed’.
§4So, householder, that’s how to understand the detailed meaning of what the Buddha said in brief in ‘The Questions of Sakka’: ‘Those ascetics and brahmins who are freed due to the ending of craving have reached the ultimate goal, the ultimate sanctuary from the yoke, the ultimate spiritual life, the ultimate end, and are best among gods and humans.’”
Self-check quiz
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